Tai Viet

"Mr. Countless Warts", recorded 1969-70 by B.Q., transcribed by Jay and Dorothy Fippinger.

Script details

See all script details: code, region, status and more


Code	Tavt
Script type	abugida
Region	Mainland Southeast Asian
Status	Current
Direction	LTR
Baseline	bottom
Case	no
White space	discretionary
Complex behaviors	diacritics, contextual forms, complex positioning, reordering, split graphs, required ligatures
OpenType code	tavt
ISO 15924 Number	359 (alphasyllabic)

Explanation of script details

Script description

The Tai Viet script is used for writing the Tai Dam, Tai Dón, Tai Daeng, Thai Song and Tày Tac languages spoken in Vietnam, Laos, China and Thailand.

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Speakers of these languages are also found in the United States, Australia and France. There is significant variation in the orthographic conventions of the Tai languages, as well as in their phonologies, which in turn impacts the orthography. However, a unified, standardized version of the script, with an agreed upon core set of characters, was developed at a UNESCO-sponsored workshop in 2006, and subsequently accepted for encoding in The Unicode Standard.

The script is an abugida. Consonants do not contain an inherent vowel; vowels must be written explicitly. Vowel marks may appear above, below, before or after a syllable’s initial consonant. A written syllable therefore consists minimally of a consonant and a vowel. Optionally it may also contain a final consonant. There are two series of consonants, indicating high and low tone class. The Tai Viet script employs Latin punctuation as well as three non-alphabetic signs to indicate word repetition or a section break. It also uses two ligatures which may serve to disambiguate between homophonous words.

Traditionally, tone was only partially marked in the orthography. As in other Tai languages, tones were divided into two sets of three, and the appropriate selection of consonants from the high or low series indicated which set of tones the syllable belonged to. The reader had to determine the exact tone from context. However, around the 1970s, two different tone marking systems developed simultaneously in Vietnam and the United States; the concurrent use of both these systems is seen to be disadvantageous but, for the time being, unavoidable. There is no standard order for sorting characters. Some users have modified the order employed by the Lao script, others, the Vietnamese.

Little is known about the origin of the Tai Viet script. It appears to have been derived from the Thai script around the 16th century, which is in turn of Khmer, and ultimately Brahmic, origin.

Please note that, although the Tai Viet script does exhibit reordering behaviour, that reordering is not typically reflected in software implementations. See Syllable Structure and Reordering in Tai Viet or Reordering and Data Storage Order for more details.

Languages that use this script

Language	Writing System Code	Writing System Status	SLDR/CLDR locale	Regional variants
Tai Daeng	tyr-Tavt	in use		tyr-Tavt-VN (Viet Nam)
Tai Dam	blt-Tavt	in use	blt (CLDR)	blt-Tavt-VN (Viet Nam)
Tai Dón	twh-Tavt	in use		twh-Tavt-VN (Viet Nam)
Thai Song	soa-Tavt	in use		soa-Tavt-TH (Thailand)
Tày Tac	tyt-Tavt	in use		tyt-Tavt-VN (Viet Nam)

Unicode status

In The Unicode Standard, Tai Viet script implementation is discussed in Chapter 16: Southeast Asia-I — Thailand, Laos, Myanmar, Cambodia, Vietnam.

Full Unicode status for Tai Viet

Resources

Grapheme and phoneme data

Data indicating how characters are used to represent sounds is available for the following language as written with Tai Viet script:

Tai Dam

External links

Tai Viet script (Wikipedia)
Ishida: List of terms to find letter combinations (r12a.io)
Ishida: Notes on Scripts, Orthographies and Characters, Lists of Terms (r12a.io)
Script comparison table (r12a.io)
Unicode character pickers (r12a.io)

Bibliography

Don, Baccam, et al. Tai Dam-English English-Tai Dam Vocabulary Book. The Anundsen Publishing Company , 1989 .