[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > Another interesting point is that two of these four letters are now > considered obsolete: kho khuat and kho khon. I have heard an explanation -- > but don't know if it is true -- that the King decided to deprecate them > when typewriters were being adapted for Thai because there were two too > many characters that could be fit onto the limitations of the imported > mechanisms.
I heard that before, from a source that is related to Thai IT standardization. But I've just found recently that this may not be true. A book on the history of Thai characters says that 29-May-1942, the prime-minister Por. Pi-Boon-Song-Kalm removed 13 consonants and 5 vowels. After his government, people got back to the own system but the two characters kho khuat and kho khon never came back again. IMO, this is more likely what actually happended because the Thai typewriters have some keys available and they're assigned to other things such as the combination of a tone mark and a vowel. So I think that at the time the typewriters were being adapted to Thai, they may actually lost that two letters already. The current keyboard standard adds that two letters and more by removing keys that're considered redundant. -- Samphan Raruenrom Information Research and Development Division, National Electronics and Computer Technology Center, Thailand. http://www.nectec.or.th/home/index.html
