Tai Le

Tai Le (Simplified Chinese: {ṣ}; Traditional Chinese: {ṭ}; pinyin: {}) is the name of a language and the script used to write that language in parts of the Yunnan Province of China, Myanmar (Burma), Laos, and possibly other countries. Tai Le is the native designation; both the language and the script are known by many other names including Tai Nüa, Tai Neua, Tai Mau, Tai Kong, Tai Dehong, Shan, and perhaps most commonly, the Chinese designation Dehong Dai. It should not be confused with Tai Lu/Thai Lue.

The Tai Le script, sometimes called Liek, supposedly has existed since the 1300's, although it is undocumented. It is an alphabet. The Tai Le script has been reformed at least once in the 1900's, although some texts may still be printed using an older orthographic convention for marking the 6 tones used in the language, using Latin diacritical marks over the final letter of the syllable.

The modern Tai Le alphabet contains 35 letters, including 5 tone letters (tone-1 is left unmarked). Tai Le is encoded in the Basic Multilingual Plane of Unicode at u1950-u1974.

The transcription for the above image is:

ka xa nga tsa sa ya ta tha la pa

pha ma fa va ha qa kha tsha na

a i ee eh u oo o ue e aue ai

2 3 4 5 6

The Tai Le numerals are similar to Myanmar numerals; they are in fact unified with Myanmar's numerals in Unicode (u1040-u1049) despite some glyph variations.

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