ISO 20674-1 is the first part of the ISO 20674 series of standards that discusses the conversion of systems of writing. The aim of ISO 20674-1 and others in the series is to provide a means for international communication of written messages in a form that permits the automatic transmission and reconstitution of these by men or machines.
ISO 20674-1 describes the orthographic system of the Akson-Thai-Noi script using Romanized
characters. The words in a language, which are written according to a given script (the converted system), sometimes have to be rendered according to a different system (the conversion system) normally used for a different language. The procedure is often used for historical or geographical texts, cartographical documents, and in particular bibliographical work where characters shall be converted from different writing systems into a single alphabet to allow for alphabetical intercalation in bibliographies, catalogues, indexes, toponymic lists, etc.
Note: ISO 20674-1 can be used by anyone who has a clear understanding of the system and is certain that it can be applied without ambiguity.
ISO 20674-1 on the transliteration of Akson-Thai-Noi is useful for:
The Akson-Thai-Noi characters of ISO 20674-1 have been developed as modern representations
of scripts found in inscriptions and palm leaf religious texts which have been adapted by the Royal Institute of Thailand. The selection of Romanized characters follows, to the extent possible, the phonemic/phonetic representations used in the transliteration of Standard Thai as described in ISO 11940, thus enabling consistency of system and economy of codes. In this system, transliteration principles are applied stringently to enable complete unambiguous reversibility in the conversion of characters. Although accurate pronunciation may not always result in the application of this system, because the original Akson-Thai-Noi characters can be regenerated automatically from the Romanized representation, those with knowledge of the languages can correctly pronounce the Romanized graphemes.
While the result obtained does not give the correct pronunciation of the original text in a person's own language, it can serve as a means of finding automatically the original graphism and thus allow anyone who has a knowledge of the original language to pronounce it correctly.
The adoption of ISO 20674-1 for international communication leaves every country free to adopt for its own use a national standard which may be different, on the condition that it be compatible with ISO 20674-1. The system proposed herein should make this possible and be acceptable to international use if the graphisms it creates are such that they may be converted automatically into the graphisms used in any strict national system.ISO 20674-1