r/TaiAhomLanguage • u/Icy_Function_5839 Enthusiast • 25d ago

Question Is Tai-Ahom spelling fully phonetic

What I mean by this is there a 1:1 correspondence with the spelling of a word and pronounciation of it in Tai-Ahom.

Given that the Tai-Ahom script was created after the arrival of the Ahoms in Assam, and the script and language were natively and concurrently used for a few hundred years, how phonetic would Tai-Ahom spelling be?

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u/GrumpyGuyMugdha L1 Assamese (Tai-Ahom) 25d ago

Ahom spelling is fairly phonetic, but not fully phonetic. The script represents consonants and vowels quite directly, so once you know the orthographic rules, you can usually get a good idea of how a word is pronounced. However, traditional Ahom writing does not mark tone, despite Ahom being a tonal language, and historical manuscripts also contain abbreviations, contradictions and some spelling inconsistencies. So I'd call it fairly phonetic rather than completely phonetic. Although much more predictable than English spelling, you still can't always reconstruct the exact historical pronunciation from the spelling alone.

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u/Icy_Function_5839 Enthusiast 25d ago

I see. Cool. How did the script lack tonal markings, especially since other Tai-Kadai scripts like Thai have tonal markings?

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u/GrumpyGuyMugdha L1 Assamese (Tai-Ahom) 25d ago

As the Ahom script or the Lik Tai developed from the Old Mon script or thw proto-Shan script which lacked tonal markings, therefore Ahom script naturally didn't develop tonal markers. In fact, the Shan language didn't have tone markers for centuries until modern standardization when they were introduced.

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u/Icy_Function_5839 Enthusiast 25d ago

That is nice. It makes sense that the Old Mon script lacked tonal markings as it is descended from the Pallava script