Counter-styles in Thai, Khmer & Burmese

[ohbendy]

In my manuscript studies, I've come across a couple of unusual possibilities for lists. In addition to simple numbered or alphabetic lists, it's also fairly common to see numbered symbols as bullets. A couple of examples:

Fongman (U+0E4F) with superscript numerals.

Angkhankhu (U+0E5A) with superscript numerals.

I don't think any text engines have this kind of intelligence yet (?), and am still collecting examples, in Thai and perhaps for other scripts.

[r12a]

Interesting. The CSS Counter Styles Level 3 spec allows you to define your own counters for lists, but i'm not clear how you would construct the counters you show above from ordinary characters. (Btw, here are a couple of counter styles we currently know about.)

[ohbendy]

I'm not sure how relevant this is today, but Thai manuscript page numbering also has some differing schemes.

This is telling us how to number the pages with the 33 Pali consonants; the system is duodecimal as each consonant is combined with a sequence of vowels before moving onto the next consonant. I'm told if we run out of combinations we then move onto CยV so starting with กยะ, up to a max of 792 pages. I don't know what happens after that in this scheme.

I've also seen กก กข กค กง กจ กฉ กช...ขก ขข ขค... as an alternative page numbering scheme. These aren't really in current use, as far as I can tell. However, I have seen a Burmese equivalent in use for lists:

[andjc]

@r12a @ohbendy

The biggest barrier to using counters is lack of a polysilicon for @counter-style since only Firefox has implemented it.

Regrading Burmese: in common usage for counters:

• numeric counters within parenthesis
• numeric counters with section mark
• alphabetic (consonant) within parenthesis
• alphabetic (consonant) with section marker

Nsted alphabetic lists may use doubled consonants

[r12a]

I changed the title of this thread to include Burmese, though really we should probably have started a new thread for that, rather than mix the two.

[thep]

Related to the numbered Fongman is Fongman with short text above indicating the kind of the following poem.

An example from Lilit Phra Lor (ลิลิตพระลอ):

Source: Vajirayana Digital Library

[ohbendy]

I also found a couple of other weird use cases, I'm not sure if these kind of observations are useful here.

The first seems to use numbers above or below angkhankhu to indicate the waxing or waning moon in date notation*:

I can't understand what the Thai text is explaining in this image, but the Mai Hanakat (or เฉียงครืน?) is positioned below the Angkhankhu in some ending markers:

It could perhaps be a variant form of what we see here, with the Mai Hanakat crossing through the Angkhankhu?

Either way, it seems there's an occasional requirement for most kinds of characters to appear above or below Angkhankhu and Fongman.

First two images from หลักเกณฑ์การใช้เครื่องหมายวรรคตอน และเครื่องหมายอื่น ๆ หลักเกณฑ์การเว้นวรรค หลักเกณฑ์การเขียนคำย่อ
Third image from กฎหมายตราสามดวง ฉบับราชบัณฑิตยสถาน เล่ม 1

* In Khmer, the equivalent lunar dates are encoded atomically from u+19E0 to 19FF : ᧠ ᧡ ᧢ ᧣ ᧤ ᧥ ᧦ ᧧ ᧨ ᧩ ᧪ ᧫ ᧬ ᧭ ᧮ ᧯ ᧰ ᧱ ᧲ ᧳ ᧴ ᧵ ᧶ ᧷ ᧸ ᧹ ᧺ ᧻ ᧼ ᧽ ᧾ ᧿.

[ohbendy]

I just came across the duodecimal system in Burmese for page numbering, while studying a manuscript (IO Man Pali 20) in the British Libary. It matches with the Thai system noted above:

Thai: ก กา กิ กี กุ กู เก ไก โก เกา กํ กะ
Burmese: က ကာ ကိ ကီ ကု ကူ ကေ ကဲ ကော ကော် ကံ ကး

[ohbendy]

I just found an example of these counter styles in Khmer. This is a Pali text, and the separators are definitely not lunar dates, since the numbers keep increasing beyond the 15 waxing and 15 waning possibilities.


These are from https://archive.org/details/rasburmese30/page/n27

It seems the component parts are encoded already in Thai and Khmer, so it's a matter of figuring out how to implement the correct layout for counters.