SEALTEACH Thai romanization question (fwd)

[Doug Cooper]

At 07:43 12/6/01 -0600, John Grima wrote:
>It will be worth your time to hunt up the right stuff;
>otherwise, everything you do today will have to be redone when it is
>time to get it right.

Of course, there's always hope that the Library of Congress et al
will eventually try to 'get it right', and upgrade their software systems
to meet the programming standards of the 1980's.  Or am I the only
person who thinks that an indexing system that can't be trivially
understood by a native speaker has something wrong with it?

  As a practical matter, there is no reason not to index by Thai
orthography (to allow exact lookup) and/or any consistent phonetic
transcription system (to allow phonetic searches).  Thai has had a
stable interchange standard (TIS 620) since 1986.  And despite the
proliferation of transcription systems, just about all academics use a
Haas-style system with only surface variations (see, for example, the
on-line IPA transcription engine at http://www.arts.chula.ac.th/~ling/tts/ ),
and have done so since the early 1960's.

  Thai transliteration systems, while convenient for librarians, are part
of the problem set from the _user's_ point of view.  Basically, they're
kludges based on outdated assumptions, eg. that:

 -- only 7-bit ASCII characters (ie. alphanumerics) are available,
 -- interchange standards for non-Roman systems don't exist,
 -- hardware is physically incapable of displaying non-Roman
    characters, or allowing non-Roman character input.

None of these are true.  Worse, the transliterations systems are:

 -- 'lossy'; ie. you can't go from transliteration back to native
    orthography automatically;
 -- non-transparent; ie. transliteration requires both the native
    orthography, and somebody who can read it and follow a
    set of transliteration rules.  Note that a fluent _speaker_ can't
    produce reliable transcription.

  Ultimately, the only justification for using such systems is that
abandoning them will break existing software.  While this may
be a reasonable argument for orthographies whose needs are
served - ie. English - it isn't very persuasive for Thai.

  Hope this adds more light than heat ;-),
  Doug Cooper

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