Talk:Ba (Indic)

Consonant Splits

@Vanisaac:: How much should the family tree handle consonant splits? TA split into Thai TO TAO and DO DEK. You've handled that, but it's actually difficult to say which of the two is the primary continuation of Brahmi TA. Thai has other splits, particularly for forming letters for fricatives. Do you want them to be handled in the same way? For this letter, the 'split' is that Brahmi BA is continued (sort of) by PHO PHAN, which was modified (about 740 years ago) to yield FO FAN. A complication is that most of these splits were later copied by Tai Tham, which influence your tree doesn't show. (The Tai Lue results are U+1997 NEW TAI LUE LETTER LOW PA and U+199D NEW TAI LUE LETTER LOW FA.)

Complications you may choose to ignore are that Thai PHO PHAN seems to have been massively redesigned (Cham influence has been suggested!) and that NEW TAI LETTER LOW PA appears to be the double letter ('bb').

The other fricative generations were:

1. KHA evolves to KHO KHAI, modified to KHO KHUAT.
2. GA evolves to KHO KHWAI, modified to KHO KHON.
3. JA evolves to CHO CHANG, modified to SO SO.
4. PHA evolves to PHO PHUNG, modified to FO FA.

The other other generations were:

1. PA splits into PO PLA and BO BAIMAI.
2. TTA (to speak Unicodese) splits into TO PATAK and DO CHADA.

There was a similar split on the way to Lao, which was also laterally borrowed into Tai Tham:

• YA evolves to LAO LETTER NYO, which is modified to yield LAO LETTER YO. More recently, for Khmu, the former Lao letter has been modified yet again to yield LAO LETTER KHMU NYO.

There is also a recent modification of the descendant of KA, modifying LAO LETTER KO to add LAO LETTER KHMU GO.

There've been some rather complicated goings on within the Myanmar script, which may merit separate treatment. --RichardW57m (talk) 13:07, 25 October 2021 (UTC)

• Well, that really is the question, isn't it. I've been admittedly been playing a bit fast and loose with putting anything too definite around those matters as I've been building this content, largely because I don't know enough about how the lao/tai/khmer scripts really got to where they are to be able to write anything coherent and definite about them. But my gut would say that phylogeny is more intrinsic than phonology. You can always put a hatnote at the Thai "Kho" section on Kha (Indic) that points to Kho Khwai and Kho Khon content at Ga (Indic), likewise with Cho Chang / So So content from "Cha" and "Sa" to "Ja", and To Patak / Do Chada content from "Ta" and "Da" to their place at "Ṭa". That feels like the most coherent and meaningful approach to those questions. VanIsaac, MPLL ^cont_WpWS 03:02, 26 October 2021 (UTC)

On further examination, I saw that the old Thai velar fricatives had already been handled in the tree in the same way as TO TAO/DO DEK. I will put LAO LETTER PALI JHA on the JA page, as it clearly derives from Thai SO SO. One can see signs of SO SO at the JHA position in some Northern Thai abecedaries - TAI THAM LETTER LOW SA and TAI THAM LETTER LOW CHA are generally pronounced the same. I'll make a note on the JHA page that the functionally equivalent Lao letter is a modification of JA.

One could argue that phonology links are fewer than one might think, as 'the tone is in the consonant', or at least, the tone series is. --RichardW57m (talk) 08:38, 26 October 2021 (UTC)

@Vanisaac: There are some issues arising from MA and U+AAA2 TAI VIET LETTER LOW MO, which is clearly related to U+0EDD LAO HO MO. (The common origin may lie in the unencoded Fakkham script.) In origin, it is a ligature of Indic HA and MA. I'm happy with the Tai Viet letter's place in the phylogeny as a descendant of Indic MA, but I wonder whether we should therefore include the Lao ligature HO MO in the tree. If we count it as a letter (as I think some abecedaries do), where do we draw the line? Do we draw it on the basis of Unicode codepoints? Of indecomposable codepoints? --RichardW57m (talk) 10:46, 26 October 2021 (UTC)

I think putting it in the tree would probably be a good idea, and then if you were willing to build the Tai Viet section (the headers are already pre-made and commented out in the lower parts of the page) you could go into detail about that relationship and link to any other pages that might have supporting context. VanIsaac, MPLL ^cont_WpWS 21:11, 26 October 2021 (UTC)