{"id":1099,"date":"2003-10-24T22:51:48","date_gmt":"2003-10-25T06:51:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ogre.nu\/wp\/?p=1099"},"modified":"2009-03-30T14:07:06","modified_gmt":"2009-03-30T22:07:06","slug":"transliterating-candy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/?p=1099","title":{"rendered":"transliterating candy"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The other day I brought home from a Thai restaurant a wrapped piece of hard candy, looking forward with pleasure to the prospect of opening <a href=http:\/\/www.oup.co.uk\/isbn\/0-19-507993-0>a swell book that Dad gave me<\/a> a few years ago, to see whether AMIRA (in small type) is a fair transliteration of what appears to be the name of the candy or its maker.<\/p>\n<p>My reference treats Thai and Lao scripts together, and to my initial surprise two of the letters (corresponding to &lsquo;m&rsquo; and &lsquo;r&rsquo;) look more like Lao.  The small print is like the Thai type in the book.  I&#8217;m guessing that there is an informal mode of Thai script that retains more of the look of the common ancestor than is in the formal style.<\/p>\n<p>The trouble with books of this sort, of course, is that they usually show only a formal style.  Imagine that you are literate in Arabic and getting your first exposure to the Latin alphabet.  You have a reference table showing the letters in Times Roman, and from it you have to decipher handwriting.  How sure can you be what features are essential and which are decorative?<\/p>\n<p>I do have <a href=\"https:\/\/peripluspublishinggroup.com\/tuttle\/shopping\/product_details.php?id=9780804816540\">one book<\/a> that overcomes the problem somewhat by illustrating each of the major living scripts with a page of a newspaper, showing body type, headlines and a few decorative titles.<\/p>\n<p>More concise is the excellent Omniglot: <a href=http:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/writing\/lao.htm>Lao<\/a>; <a href=http:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/writing\/thai.htm>Thai<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The other day I brought home from a Thai restaurant a wrapped piece of hard candy, looking forward with pleasure to the prospect of opening a swell book that Dad gave me a few years ago, to see whether AMIRA &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/?p=1099\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1099","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-language"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1099","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1099"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1099\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2267,"href":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1099\/revisions\/2267"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1099"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1099"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1099"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}