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ohbendy / Phake-Ramayana

The Phake Ramayana font is a traditional design based on manuscript forms. It supports Tai Phake, Tai Aiton, Tai Khamyang, Tai Turung and Tai Khamti languages.
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Unknown Aiton glyphs #11

Closed ohbendy closed 3 years ago

ohbendy commented 3 years ago

I had another look through the manuscript images Stephen had previously sent me — Creation of the World, History of Chaw Tai Lung to Sukapha and Treaty between the Aitons and Turungs — and found a few things I'm not sure of:

  1. Two crescent shapes followed by long -aa, perhaps a stylistic variation of AA78 ꩸?

Screenshot 2021-07-18 at 16 46 44 Screenshot 2021-07-18 at 16 47 15 Screenshot 2021-07-18 at 16 47 42 Screenshot 2021-07-18 at 16 46 19 Screenshot 2021-07-18 at 16 46 22

  1. Two crescent shapes wrapped inside what might be medial Ra:

Screenshot 2021-07-18 at 16 49 19 Screenshot 2021-07-18 at 16 50 22

  1. A letter which looks a bit like Burmese NA န:

Screenshot 2021-07-18 at 16 45 54 Screenshot 2021-07-18 at 16 59 10 Screenshot 2021-07-18 at 16 59 58

  1. Not sure what the final letter with two marks here could be, maybe doubled AU or AU + sat?

Screenshot 2021-07-18 at 16 44 55

  1. Interesting variation in shape of letter NA:

Screenshot 2021-07-18 at 17 00 37 Screenshot 2021-07-18 at 17 00 59 Screenshot 2021-07-18 at 17 00 15

StephenMorey commented 3 years ago

(1) Yes, these are AA78; (2) These are a variant of AA78 (the number '1'), (3) & (4), I don't know. Do you by chance know which page of the manuscript they come from? We will need to some asking of questions about this. (5) Yes, these are variants of na.

ChowKensan commented 3 years ago

(3) could be a variant of AA79 (numeral 2). I have seen this in Late Chow Sa Myat’s manuscript of Lik Khue Khun.

ohbendy commented 3 years ago

Thanks! For number 3, I found those in the Treaty between the Aitons and Turungs (the jpegs are numbered 1 and 2 on my hard drive, not sure if those are page numbers from the original manuscript)

4th line:

Treaty between the Aitons and the Turungs 1

2nd line here:

Treaty between the Aitons and the Turungs 2

Also from Creation of the World (2nd leaf 6th line)

Creation of the World 10

ChowKensan commented 3 years ago

Yes, I have checked it out. It should be read as 'saung' or number 2. In the first pic, line number 4, it is written as Nuen Sipsaung or the twelve month.

ohbendy commented 3 years ago

Thank you! So could we say this is an Aiton-specific form of AA79? Or would it also be recognisable to Khamyang, Phake, Turung people?

ChowKensan commented 3 years ago

Not only Aiton, this can be also found in Khamyang manuscript.

ohbendy commented 3 years ago

It sounds like we have a choice then, for Aiton and Khamyang, between these two forms:

Screenshot 2021-07-18 at 09 19 54 Screenshot 2021-07-19 at 08 26 21

Do you think the first one is generally preferable for all the languages?

ChowKensan commented 3 years ago

Yes, the first one is a better choice. The second one was confusing for me too.

StephenMorey commented 3 years ago

Correct that these are forms of the numeral '2'. I have checked the translation of the text of the 2nd page of the 'Treaty' line four: image

ohbendy commented 3 years ago

Not a priority but we could perhaps propose the န symbol to Unicode as an alternate/archaic shape for 2. Using the Burmese န is a good workaround but not quite a perfect solution :-)

At any rate, I plan to create a chart showing the full character set in different handwritings so we have a sense of the similarities and differences in letterforms. I did that for Arakanese and it's really handy:

Screenshot 2021-07-19 at 08 42 18

ohbendy commented 3 years ago

Closing this thread for now. We can find it in the archive later if we decide to include any of these variant forms.