ศาลาชุมนุม

[Rick Bradford]

Thai handwriting can be as bad as English handwriting (to outsiders, of course). Here is a bill of materials for part of a construction project.



ไวร์เมช ลวด 3.4 มิล ตา 20x20 cm

หน้า กว้าง 2 เมตร ยาว 25 เมตร = 50 (ตร.ม)

หน้า กว้าง 2 เมตร ยาว 50 เมตร = 100 (ตร.ม)

ราคา ตร.ม. ละ 24 บาท

ของนี้เลย ไม่ต้องรอผลิต

[daฟาน]

truly tough to read... thx for sharing

[simonbournemouth]

The last sentence should be:

ของมีเลยไม่ต้องรอผลิต

"In stock, so don't need to wait for production".

[Rick Bradford]

^^
Thanks, Simon.

I was extrapolating from the second tranche...



รายการนี้ ต้อง สั่ง ผลิต ประมาณ 10 วัน

This guy is very harsh on ย ยักษ์, don't you think? -- interesting that he spaces his words so well....

[Richard Wordingham]

Thai children space words (or syllables) when they learn to read and write. The schools don't always succeed in suppressing this habit, which conflicts with the traditional lack of punctuation.

[David and Bui]

Why do you think it is that Thai has not developed an "official" cursive script to make handwriting faster. Now, of course, it is too late because typing has to a significant extent replaced handwriting and voice input is likely to soon to overtake the keyboard.

I have seen lots of student "experiments" in cursive handwriting, but have seen no standard emerge. One trend we can see in cursive script is in words like สั้น นั่ง and similar words where the initial consonant, upper vowel, and tone mark are written without lifting pen off paper.

Are there other Asian alphabet- or abugida-based languages where cursive scripts have been developed beyond individual letter printing? (I suppose by definition abugida based languages where vowels and consonants are sometimes combined by a ligature are a step in this direction already.)

Any thoughts?

[Richard Wordingham]

I suspect the general reason for the limiting is that Indic scripts are not linear, but have superscript and subscript characters. These encourage the limiting of ligatures to the askhara. The nearest we get to multi-akshara ligaturing is the incorporation of syllable-final consonants into the preceding askhara, which we see in Khmer, Tham and some Tibetan-derived scripts.

Arabic is different because the vowel marks are an optional extra.