Muak Sa-aak: Challenges of an Extensive Phoneme Inventory for a Contained Latin-Based Orthography

Abstract

Many Asian languages have extensive phoneme inventories and distinguish suprasegmental features like tone, voice quality, or vowel length. These features are well represented in extensive alphasyllabaries such as Burmese, Khmer or Thai. Apart from challenges of socio- or psycholinguistic nature regarding the need for diacritics, digraphs, or special characters when the language needs more symbols than are available in the contained Latin alphabet, considerable technical challenges may result when new orthographies for minority languages in Asia are based on the Latin alphabet. Several of these challenges were faced when developing a Latin-based orthography for Muak Sa-aak, a Palaungic tonal language of Shan State, Myanmar. This paper will give an overview of the design and features of Latin-based Muak Sa-aak orthography and illustrate computer-technical implications of the choices made.