Northern Thai variants

Northern Thai variants

I'm trying to add translations for Northern Thai and I'm having problems putting them in the right place. The root of the problem is that there are three groups of writing systems:

  1. nod-Lana: The Tai Tham script writing system. The language name may be written ᨣᩤᩴᨾᩬᩥᨦ in this group.
  2. One variant of nod-Thai, which is a transliteration of nod-Lana, though it does not faithfully represent mere spelling variations within nod-Lana. In this scheme, the language name may be written คำเมือง.
  3. The other variant of nod-Thai, where stop consonants have their Siamese values rather than the Northern Thai values as in the previous scheme. In these schemes, the language name may be written กำเมือง, as seen in the longer form กำเมืองล้านนา used by the 2017 New Testament.

The Northern Thai wikipedia, currently only in the incubator, is primarily in Scheme 1, with Scheme 2 desired as an alternative orthography. Most users of the language can't read scheme 1. Most users of the language should be able to read standard Thai, and therefore be able to read scheme 2, where words are often the same as in Standard Thai. Scheme 3 is the natural one for sounding words out, and is the Thai script scheme chosen for the New Testament. It also seems to be the one with the greatest informal use. Most of the Northern Thai Wikipedia 'community' seem to turn their noses up at it. I argue that 'nod' ought to imply 'nod-Thai'; I further believe that it should imply Scheme 3 rather than Scheme 2.

As far as I can make out from the nod portal, translatewiki is set up to support schemes 1 and 2, and they appear to be nod and nod-Thai. When I choose the language to translate to, the names available for selecting a language are nod and คำเมือง. As the name is in the Thai script, I assumed I would have selected a Thai script orthography, and from the first letter, scheme 2 above. However, the entries I have added (all in the Thai script) by selecting the language คำเมือง are all stored in the "nod" language variant, which appears to be intended for the Tai Tham script version (Scheme 1).

Note that translations to Scheme 2 can naturally fall back to standard Thai.

My immediate request is to be able to select Scheme 2 for entering translations; that is the more useful scheme with fairly obvious spellings. (Scheme 3 seems to have several subschemes, some based on dialect areas - Chiang Rai v. Chiang Mai.) So, how do I select Scheme 2 for data entry? Scheme 2 translations can be converted to Scheme 1 translations fairly easily, though full automation is not possible.

RichardW57 (talk)03:07, 9 January 2019