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Understanding the relative chronology of implosivization in Thai and Khmer, and how it interacted with the development of the scripts, is difficult (at least for me). In this answer it is suggested that the less complex letter developed from the more complex. This seems odd prima facie, and out of step with the other extra letters developed in Thai which all added material rather than taking away (e.g. ฟ from พ). Am I missing something here?

Malady
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legatrix
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  • Isn't บ an extra letter, and isn't it derived from ป by taking material away? – rchivers Mar 28 '20 at 17:44
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    What strikes me is that the extra character is simpler when comes before the Sanskrit character (so to speak), and more complex when it comes afterwards. That's quite elegant and would go quite a long way to explaining why the Sanskrit characters were simplified in some cases, if you assume that there was a logic to where they were inserted (seems to me there was). What is puzzling is why some of the Sanskrit characters were that complex in the first place e.g. why have the dip in ต if you don't need to distinguish it from ด? – rchivers Mar 28 '20 at 17:55
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    Maybe what really happened was that ด initially had the value of ต and the shape was changed to free ด up, i.e. to create a slot for the native /d/ sound. – rchivers Mar 28 '20 at 17:57
  • Your first comment: At least the answer that I cited claims that, yes. (And it seems similarly odd.) I don't quite understand your second comment, although I agree that there was certainly logic to where these characters were inserted (assuming alphabetic order has stayed the same down the years). As for why they were that complex in the first place, yes, that's another way of asking my initial question…maybe it's because it was modelled closely on the Khmer character, but I don't know. – legatrix Mar 28 '20 at 20:53
  • What I meant was: if you start with an alphabet consisting only of those letters that correspond to Devanagari, and then posit a need to insert some additional characters to cater for native sounds, you already have ป and you need another character for the voiced bilabial implosive. It makes sense for this character to go before the set of 5 corresponding to the Devanagari bilabials, because that way you don't break up the set, and anyway the set of 5 goes from (normally) voiced to unvoiced, so the natural place for an implosive is before it rather than within or after it... – rchivers Mar 29 '20 at 09:51
  • ... so you are looking for a simplified version of ป, hence บ. Same for ด and ฎ. What seems implausible about this is only the idea that you would have a character set that included ป but not บ in the first place. – rchivers Mar 29 '20 at 09:54
  • I see your logic, although the Brahmic (including Devanagari) order is unvoiced first (p > ph > b > bh). Having said that, the point stands because implosives seem to pattern more like unvoiced than voiced explosives (for example in Vietnamese they developed from unvoiced plosives, and in Thai the implosives patterned with unvoiced plosives in two out of three tones, when the tones split.) – legatrix Mar 29 '20 at 10:02
  • …having read up a bit more, yes, it does seem that both characters would have been needed from the start, as there was a four-way distinction in bilabials and dentals. It is also possible that the writing system imperfectly reflected the phonology for a time, as happened with Old Khmer, with some letters doing double duty. The sad truth is that I could probably work this out from papers I already have, but it would take hours of reading!

    ฎ is even more of a mystery to me – why was an extra character created on its basis (or vice-versa), given that Thai never had retroflexes. For symmetry?

     – legatrix Mar 29 '20 at 10:07
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    I think so, or in more practical terms so that you have a 1:1 transliteration. The same philosophy gives you the ษ in อังกฤษ or the double ต at the end of แมตต์ = Matt - i.e. it should be possible to recover the original orthography even though the pronunciation changes. I must have misremembered the Brahmic order (should have been obvious from the A you linked to). I'm not sold on the idea that alphabetical order would have been decided on the basis that implosives counted as unvoiced - we may be able to see a connection in hindsight, but it's a lot of foresight to ascribe to whoever it was. – rchivers Mar 29 '20 at 10:25
  • Yes, it seems more likely that it was just put next to the character from which it was derived, without breaking the order (as you said earlier) of the Brahmic originals – which leads back to my original question!

    Actually, I was not referring to the retroflexes in general, but to the specific presence of both ฎ and ฏ in the alphabet, for a total of 5 retroflex plosives. Given that Indic had no need for a fifth retroflex plosive symbol, the question is why the Thai script felt one necessary. As I mentioned, symmetry could be a reason, or perhaps historical sound changes in Indic words.

     – legatrix Mar 29 '20 at 10:34
  • Let us continue this discussion in chat. – legatrix Mar 29 '20 at 10:34
  • Missed that yesterday. Yes good point, it's difficult to make sense of ฎ. Maybe a good way in would be to look at the etymology of words spelt with that character. I see for example that เจษฎา is said (RI dictionary) to come from Sanskrit เจษฺฏา (with ฏ rather than ฎ), so if that is a general pattern, maybe what happened was that some loan words took the sound ด rather than ต, and the character ฎ was a way of reflecting the Indic spelling while keeping the Thai spelling phonetically accurate. – rchivers Mar 30 '20 at 11:13
  • Yes, that sounds very plausible (and also fascinating!) …I will do a little more research and report back if I find anything. – legatrix Mar 30 '20 at 22:06
  • In Thai's old script, Khom, the letter looks identical to the modern Khmer letter ត from which both ด and ต are derived. The wavy line above the Khmer letter is an essential part of the letter but in both Khom and Khmer there were subscript letters used in consonant clusters and in that form the wavy line disappears. If you compare to related scripts such as Lanna and Burmese the equivalent to the wavy line is a second full-sized arch to the right of the main loop: တ. Alternatively, perhaps the large left loop became the tiny centre loop of ต. Features were open to reinterpretation over time. – hippietrail May 31 '22 at 11:08

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The Thai letter ด would not have been derived from the Thai letter ต. Both letters were introduced at the same time when the Thai alphabet was constructed (in the 1200s in Sukhotai).

When the Thai alphabet was devised, it served two main purposes. One was to be able to write Thai words and the other was to be able to write Sanskrit (or Pali) words. The Thai alphabet has one consonant symbol for every Sanskrit consonant sound and a few extra symbols, presumably for Thai sounds which did not occur in Sanskrit. Many of the spoken sounds produced by the consonant symbols have changed over time (the shapes of many Thai letters have also changed over time, but the particular letters ด and ต have not changed much since the 1200s).

The symbol ด (which is now pronounced like the English d) was not one of the symbols which corresponded to a Sanskrit sound. The symbol ต corresponded to the Sanskrit sound t (an unvoiced, unaspirated stop, with no English equivalent) and it is still pronounced that way today. I do not think anyone knows for certain how the symbol ด was originally pronounced, but the most plausible guess (in my opinion) is that it was pronounced as a glottal stop followed by an unaspirated t or d.

The Thai letter ท corresponded to the Sanskrit sound d (a voiced, anaspirated stop), and it was probably originally pronounced like the Sanskrit d (which is the same as the English d), but it is now pronounced like the Sanskrit th (an unvoiced aspirated stop, which sounds like the English t).

snew
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  • Well yes, but by that logic ฟ was not created from พ either, and the Q does not make sense. I think the Q does make sense and you have to interpret it as asking whether ด came from the precursor of ต, even though it does not follow the same pattern as most of the other added letters (where detail has been added rather than taken away). It might be worth noting that Tai Tham has no ด (it co-opts ฑ) but the equivalent of ต (ᨲ) seems to have something corresponding to the notch. For me that supports the idea that ด did come from (the precursor of) ต. – rchivers Jan 08 '21 at 06:05
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    Yes, ฟ was not created from พ either, but both were inspired by the same precursor (from the old Khmer script, which corresponded to the Sanskrit consonant sound b). The scripts (such as the old Khmer script) which inspired the original Thai script (in the Sukhotai era) had one consonant symbol for each Sanskrit consonant sound. The Thai script added additional symbols (presumably for additional sounds which did not occur in Sanskrit). – snew Jan 08 '21 at 17:57
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    There are a number of pairs of Thai symbols, such as ข,ฃ and ค,ฅ and ช,ซ and ด,ต and บ,ป in which both symbols were introduced at the same time and both derived from the same precursor (in old khmer, and other scripts). In each pair, one of the two symbols corresponded with a Sanskrit consonant and the other corresponded to a presumably related Thai spoken sound. – snew Jan 08 '21 at 17:58
  • I agree with you that it is difficult to explain the consonant pair ฎ,ฏ (these letters looked different in the original Thai script). The letter ฏ was used to represent the Sanskrit retroflex unaspirated T, but as far as I know the retroflex letters were never used in spoken Thai, so I cannot guess what sound the letter ฎ would have been needed for. Unlike the other pairs which I listed above, where each pair of Thai letters corresponded to a single letter in the old Khmer script, this pair of Thai letters corresponds to a pair of old Khmer letters. – snew Jan 08 '21 at 19:15
  • I think there are a lot more twists and turns than you are allowing for there. The fact that ซ was created from ช suggests if anything that สศษ were pronounced more like ฉ at the time (unless you think that there were native words beginning with a plain /s/ but none of them had low or rising tone). The oddity of ฎ has been pointed out a few times but I think the reason for it is lost in the mists of time. Also there are several words of S/P origin that are spelt with ด, which complicates the picture even more. – rchivers Jan 09 '21 at 03:33
  • Anyway, it seems to me that the common precursor of ต and ด has to be equated with ต, because that is the sound it represented and seems to be closer to the shape it had. It's ด that's the new branch. I don't think you can really say both popped into existence at exactly the same moment because the evolution of these scripts is more gradual than that, but even if you do, it seems to me that ต is directly descended from an earlier character and ด has been formed by analogy to it. ด is therefore derived from ต in the same sense that ฟ is derived from พ, and I think that's what the Q is asking. – rchivers Jan 09 '21 at 03:44
  • The old Khmer (or khom) script had more or or less one symbol for each Sanskrit consonant sound. The old Thai script appears to have been closely modelled on the old Khmer script (many letters are similar in shape), but the Thai script has several additional symbols. It appears quite possible to me that these additional symbols were all created at the same time (in order to write Thai sounds). Many of the old Thai letters have since evolved and changed shape. – snew Jan 09 '21 at 17:10
  • The letters ศ, ษ, and ส were used to represent the three Sanskrit fricatives (palatal sh, retroflex S, and dental s). I do not know how they were pronounced in old Thai (I would guess they all sounded like s). Old Khmer had one symbol which corresponded to the Sanskrit j. Old Thai replaced that one symbol by two (similar) symbols, which evolved into the symbols ช,​ซ. The first is used to represent Sanskrit j and the other may have been used to represent a different Thai consonant sound (maybe like s in measure). – snew Jan 09 '21 at 17:31
  • I wouldn't have thought it would be controversial to say that the script evolved gradually from related scripts used elsewhere in the region. idk if you believe that the Ram Khamhaeng inscription is genuine, but it's clearly some way from modern Thai script. Also, would there have been a need to write Thai in the very beginning, or was written language Sanskrit / Pali / Khmer? – rchivers Jan 10 '21 at 03:26
  • It would appear that the old Thai script (as used on the Ramkhamhaeng iscription) did not evolve gradually but began to be used all at once in the late 1200's. Many of the letters were similar to letters used in the existing Khmer (khom) script. Both the Thai script and the Khmer script were used to transcribe Pali and Sanskrit scriptures, so it is clear which letters in each alphabet corresponded to which Sanskrit consonants (although it is not known how the consonants were pronounced). Many of the letters used in the old Thai script have changed over time into the modern Thai letters. – snew Jan 10 '21 at 12:15
  • My guess is that there was no satisfactory script for writing the spoken language that was being used in the Sukhotai region. The old Khmer script and the old Thai script included a letter for each Sanskrit sound, but the old Thai script added more letters, presumably to represent consonant sounds which were not represented in old Khmer. Each added letter was similar in shape to a letter used for Sanskrit. For example, ด is an additional letter, similar in shape to ต, which is used for Sanskrit t. They booth look similar to the old Khmer letter which was used for Sanskrit t.@rchivers – snew Jan 10 '21 at 12:27