The burden of proof here is on who claims, not who disputes. WHY would interleaving Thai and Lao make sense? Do all Thai read Lao, and vice versa?
Good questions.
Because the Lao letters derive from the Thai letters, AND both are basically ordered the same way.
What? The same can be said for Latin and Greek and Etruscan and Gothic and Coptic.
(Sorry for taking that as being generally known.)
Thais and Laos are NOT universally literate in each other's scripts. A telephone book interfiling the two scripts would be a hopeless and illegible mess.
It astonishes me that simple things like this are missed by some of you people, who are far too clever for your own good. ;-)
NOT interfiling them is a bit like not interfiling, e.g., all the math A-Z with the ASCII A-Z. (Ok, that may be pushing the parallel a bit far.)
Not at all. It's pure and utter nonsense, that's all.
(The Thai letters in turn derive from the Khmer letters...
That's not correct.
Though the apparent distance is a bit larger, so interfiling that one too would not be a good idea.)
They all derive from Brahmi, which derives from Aramaic, so why don't we just interfile all of them?
Sheesh.
I'm saying that the interfiling does not matter for those that use only one of the scripts. For those that use multiple very closely related (both in letter set and internal ordering) scripts, interfiling makes sense.
I disagree 100%. Nothing could be farther from the truth. -- Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
