Modern Tai Tham materials from northern Thailand show what appear to be borrowed Thai punctuation. The following characters may need some UTC action:
U+002E FULL STOP, U+002C COMMA: As a matter of style, these may be placed on either the Roman baseline (used by Thai) or the hanging baseline (used by Tai Tham). The style where they are always placed on the Roman baseline raises no issues at all. In the other case, is the distinction between the two positions a matter of font design and script-indicating mark-up? If not, I believe I have evidence of new characters. Some of the complexity arises from a list of Tai Tham words embedded in a Thai sentence being separated by commas on the Roman baseline, while a list of Tai Tham words not so embedded is separated by commas on the hanging baseline. (These characters seem to be being used in accordance with Thai practice, which is why I am treating them as borrowed from the Thai script. In particular, the full stop is not being used to terminate sentences.) U+0E4F THAI CHARACTER FONGMAN: How many examples do I need to collect to add Tai Tham to the script extensions property for this character? U+0E5B THAI CHARACTER KHOMUT: The character khomut and the matching opening form are occasionally used in Thai to bracket titles of books and sections of text. Has what we might call REVERSED KHOMUT ever been proposed for encoding? It might have been rejected as decoration rather than text. As an end of topic marker, I can see it alternating with what might just be a very restrained version of U+1AAC TAI THAM SIGN HANG. How many examples do I need to collect of either of these uses to add Tai Tham to the script extensions property for U+0E5B? Richard.
