This page brings together basic information about the Tai Le script and its use for the Tai Nüa language. It aims to provide a brief, descriptive summary of the modern, printed orthography and typographic features, and to advise how to write Tai Nüa using Unicode.
Sample
The two paragraphs show the same text, except that the first uses spacing characters for tone marks, and second shows the older combining-character orthography.
Select part of this sample text to show a list of characters, with links to more details. Source
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The Tai Le script, or Dehong Dai script, is used to write the Tai Nüa language of south-central Yunnan, China. (The language is also known as Tai Nüa, Dehong Dai, Tai Mau, Tai Kong, and Chinese Shan.)
The script is currently widely used in China for government documents, public notice boards and signage, in advertising, education and publishing. There are 6 publishing houses in China which publish over 45,000 book copies per year in the script. It is estimated that speakers of Tai Le in Dehong are about 95% literate in the Tai Le script.s
ᥖᥭᥰᥘᥫᥴtai˦.lə˧˥
Several orthographic conventions have been used over the 700-800 years of the script's use. Between 1952 and 1988, the script went through four reforms. The reform of 1954 rationalised the old system, to reduce the redundancy of symbols to represent sounds, to represent tones more accurately, and to standardise the handwritten cursive forms. That of 1963/4 standardised combining marks used to represent tones. The reform of 1988 replaced the tone diacritics with today's spacing characters.
The Tai Le script is an abugida, ie. consonants carry an inherent vowel sound that is overridden using vowel signs. In Tai Le, consonants carry an inherent vowel a. See the table to the right for a brief overview of features for the modern Tai Nüa orthography.
Tai Le text runs left to right in horizontal lines.
Words are not separated by spaces.
The key distinguishing feature of Tai Le is its regularity and simplicity compared to other Tai scripts. The sequence of characters is C(V)(C)(T). Tones always go after any other characters in the syllable.
Tai Le's 19 consonants are straightforward. There is no duplication for tone support, no stacking or other conjunct behaviour, etc.
The Tai Le orthography has an inherent vowel, and represents other vowels using 11 vowel-signs. All vowel-signs are ordinary spacing characters (no combining marks), and are stored after the base character.
Syllable-final consonant sounds use ordinary code points without an inherent vowel. Parsing syllables is usually straightforward because each syllable-final consonant is folllowed by a tone mark.
Tones are written using 5 spacing characters after the final character in a syllable, however they were written using 5 combining characters until 1988.
Tai Nüa numbers use ASCII digits, but may also use Myanmar digits with some shape changes.
Character index
Letters
Show
Consonants
ᥙ␣ᥚ␣ᥖ␣ᥗ␣ᥐ␣ᥠ␣ᥟ␣ᥓ␣ᥡ␣ᥜ␣ᥔ␣ᥑ␣ᥞ␣ᥛ␣ᥢ␣ᥒ␣ᥝ␣ᥘ␣ᥕ
Vowels
ᥤ␣ᥪ␣ᥧ␣ᥥ␣ᥨ␣ᥫ␣ᥦ␣ᥩ␣ᥣ␣ᥬ␣ᥭ
Tones
ᥰ␣ᥱ␣ᥲ␣ᥳ␣ᥴ
Combining marks
Show
Tones
̈␣̌␣̀␣̇␣́
Numbers
Show၀␣၁␣၂␣၃␣၄␣၅␣၆␣၇␣၈␣၉
Punctuation
Show〈␣〉␣《␣》␣（␣）␣！␣？␣：␣；␣。␣、␣，␣．
Items to show in lists
Structure
The script is syllable-based.
A syllable's phonetic and orthographic structure is very simple; C(V)(C)(T).
There are no medial consonant letters. Single characters are available for the onset sequences.
Syllable-final consonants are the same characters used for onset.
There are 6 tone marks, which may be represented by spacing characters or in older orthographies by combining marks, but which always come at the end of the syllable..
Phonology
These sounds are for the Tai Nüa language.
Click on the sounds to reveal locations in this document where they are mentioned.
Phones in a lighter colour are non-native or allophones. Source Wikipedia.
Vowel sounds
Plain vowels
Diphthongs
Consonant sounds
labial
dental
alveolar
post-
alveolar
palatal
velar
glottal
stops
p
t
k
ʔ
aspirated
pʰ
tʰ
kʰ
affricates
t͡s
aspirated
t͡sʰ
fricatives
f
s
x
h
nasals
m
n
ŋ
approximants
w
l
j
Syllable-final
labial
dental
alveolar
post-
alveolar
palatal
velar
glottal
stop
p
t
k
nasal
m
n
ŋ
Vowels
Click on the characters in the lists for detailed information.
Inherent vowel
a following a consonant is not written, but is seen as an inherent part of the consonant letter, so ka is written by simply using the consonant letter ᥐ [U+1950 TAI LE LETTER KA].
All vowel signs in Tai Le are ordinary spacing characters, rather than combining characters, and appear after the base.
ᥤ␣ᥪ␣ᥧ␣ᥥ␣ᥨ␣ᥫ␣ᥦ␣ᥩ␣ᥣ␣ ␣ᥬ␣ᥭ
Tones
The current orthography for Tai Le uses spacing characters to represent tone marks.
ᥰ␣ᥱ␣ᥲ␣ᥳ␣ᥴ
Tone marks were introduced in 1963, and until 1988 were written using the following combining characters.
̈␣̌␣̀␣̇␣́
When a diacritic is used with a tall vowel letter it is displayed to the side, eg. compare ᥑᥥᥢ́xen⁶ᥙᥥ̀pe⁴
Whether spacing character or combining characters are used, Tai Le tone marks always appear at the very end of a syllable (ie. after any final consonant).
The following tones are represented.
Mark
Description
ᥰ or ◌̈
high-level
ᥱ or ◌̌
low-level
ᥲ or ◌̀
mid-fall
ᥳ or ◌̇
high-fall
ᥴ or ◌́
mid-rise
Consonants
Click on the characters in the lists for detailed information.
Consonant letters
Stops
ᥙ␣ᥚ␣ᥖ␣ᥗ␣ᥐ␣ᥠ␣ᥟ
Affricates
ᥓ␣ᥡ
Fricatives
ᥜ␣ᥔ␣ᥑ␣ᥞ
Nasals
ᥛ␣ᥢ␣ᥒ
Other sonorants
ᥝ␣ᥘ␣ᥕ
Onset consonants
Tai Nüa has no syllable-initial clusters. Check this.
Final consonants
Consonants do appear in syllable-final position, but Tai Le has no dedicated characters for this. Standard consonant characters are used. It is usually easy to tell that a character is used in final consonant position, because of the position of tone marks, however it seems possible that an open syllable with no tone mark followed by an open syllable using the inherent vowel would create some ambiguity.
In China, European digits are used, in the main, although Myanmar digits (U+1040..U+1049) are also used with slight glyph variants.
These are the Myanmar digits. Unfortunately, the default font for this page doesn't show the typical differences in glyph shape, in particular, for the digits 2, 6, 8, and 9. u
This section brings together information about the following topics:
writing styles;
cursive text;
context-based shaping;
context-based positioning;
baselines, line height, etc.;
font styles;
case & other character transforms.
Vowels all follow the initial consonant and are spacing characters with no special joining behaviour. Therefore, the Tai Le script has no need for special shaping, other than when diacritics are used for tone marks alongside tall characters, as described above. Nor is printed text cursive.
Tai Le has no special requirements for baseline alignment between mixed scripts or in general.
The orthography has no case distinction, and no special transforms are needed to convert between characters.
Font styles
tbd
Text segmentation
Grapheme boundaries
tbd
Word boundaries
Words are not separated by spaces.
Punctuation & inline features
Phrase & section boundaries
,␣、␣:␣;␣.␣。␣?␣!
Tai Le uses western and fullwidth Chinese punctuationu650, which may include the following (needs to be checked).
This section is for any features that are specific to Tai Le and that relate to the following topics:
general page layout & progression;
grids & tables;
notes, footnotes, etc;
forms & user interaction;
page numbering, running headers, etc.
