ISO 11940

ISO 11940 is an ISO standard for the romanization of the Thai alphabet, published in 1998 (updated September 2003).

Consonants

Note that yamakkan is represented by a spacing tilde, not a superscript tilde.

Punctuation and Digits

ISO 11940:1998 distinguishes the abbreviation symbol paiyannoi from the sentence terminator angkhandiao, even though neither the national character standard TIS 620-2533 nor Unicode Version 5.0 distinguishes them. Paiyannoi is transliterated as "ǂ" and angkhandiao is transliterated as "ǀ". Note that paiyannoi, angkhandiao and angkhankhu are transliterated by the letters used for click consonants, not by double dagger, vertical bars or dandas.

Character Sequencing

In general characters are transliterated from left to right and, where characters have the same horizontal position, from top to bottom. The vertical sequencing is in fact simply specified as tone marks and thanthakhat preceding any other marks above or below the consonant. The standard denies at the end of Section 4.2 that the combination of sara u and nikkhahit can occur and then gives an example of it when specifying the transliteration of nikkhahit, but does not show the transliteration of the combination. The effect of these rules is that, except for nikkhahit, all the non-vowel marks attached to a consonant in Thai are attached to the consonant in the Roman transliteration.

The standard concedes that "attempting" to transpose preposed vowels and consonants may be comforting to those used to the Roman alphabet, but recommends that preposed vowels not be transposed.

For example, and _th. เชียงใหม่ to ISOtranslit|cheīyngh̄ım̀|th.

Finally, this implementation generates transliterations in Unicode Normalisation Form C (NFC).

ee also

*List of ISO transliterations
*Royal Thai General System of Transcription

External links

* [http://www.iso.org/iso/en/CatalogueDetailPage.CatalogueDetail?CSNUMBER=20574&ICS1=1&ICS2=140&ICS3=10 official site]
* [http://unicode.org/cldr/data/common/transforms/ThaiLogical-Latin.xml transliteration rules on unicode.org]
* [http://www.eki.ee/knab/lat/kblth2.pdf Romanisation of Thai placenames in the KNAB Database of the Institute of the Estonian Language]