LMT scheme (Cyrillic — Lipilina-Muzychenko-Thapanosoth)¶

The lmt scheme implements the Cyrillic transliteration of Thai used in the MSU/ISAA 2018 learner textbook: И. Н. Липилина, Ю. Ф. Музыченко, П. Тхапаносотх, Учебник тайского языка: вводный курс (Москва: ИД ВКН, 2018, ISBN 978-5-907086-16-6). The scheme sits in the same Russian-academic tradition as morev — onset and coda inventories are identical — but uses a different surface presentation suited to a learner textbook: length marked with an ASCII colon, tones as superscript digits, and a space as the syllable separator.

from thaiphon import transcribe

transcribe("น้ำ", scheme="lmt")
# 'на:³'

transcribe("สวัสดี", scheme="lmt")
# 'са¹ ват¹ ди:⁰'

transcribe("กรุงเทพ", scheme="lmt")
# 'крунг⁰ тхе:п²'

Format conventions¶

Tone notation¶

Tone is appended as a single character after the full syllable, including any coda. Text mode uses Unicode superscript digits (U+2070, U+00B9, U+00B2, U+00B3, U+2074). HTML mode uses ordinary ASCII digits wrapped in <sup>…</sup> — using a Unicode superscript character inside a <sup> tag would produce a redundant superscript-within-superscript rendering, so the plain digit is preferred there.

transcribe("กา",  scheme="lmt")   # 'ка:⁰'  — mid tone
transcribe("ก่า", scheme="lmt")   # 'ка:¹'  — low
transcribe("ก้า", scheme="lmt")   # 'ка:²'  — falling
transcribe("ก๊า", scheme="lmt")   # 'ка:³'  — high
transcribe("ก๋า", scheme="lmt")   # 'ка:⁴'  — rising

# HTML mode — digits in <sup> instead of Unicode superscripts.
transcribe("น้ำ", scheme="lmt", format="html")
# 'на:<sup>3</sup>'

Onset map (IPA → LMT Cyrillic)¶

The onset inventory is identical to the Morev scheme — both derive from the same Russian-academic transliteration tradition.

Onset clusters: In a true two-consonant onset cluster (/kw/, /kʰw/, etc.), the second-slot ว surfaces as the back vowel у rather than the consonant в. This matches the natural Russian phonetic reading of the glide.

transcribe("กวาง", scheme="lmt")   # 'куа:нг⁰'
transcribe("ปลา",  scheme="lmt")   # 'пла:⁰'

Vowel map (IPA → LMT)¶

Long vowels are marked with a colon placed immediately after the vowel letter. The scheme uses three non-Cyrillic letters to cover phonemes that have no single-character Cyrillic equivalent: Latin ɔ (U+0254, LATIN SMALL LETTER OPEN O) for /ɔ/ and Latin ə (U+0259, LATIN SMALL LETTER SCHWA) for /ɤ/ and centring-diphthong off-glides. This mix of Cyrillic and Latin IPA characters mirrors the printed textbook's own typography.

Centring diphthongs¶

The length colon is placed on the nucleus only; the off-glide а stays bare at both lengths.

transcribe("เรือ", scheme="lmt")   # 'ры:а⁰'  — long /ɯə/
transcribe("เมีย", scheme="lmt")   # 'ми:а⁰'  — long /iə/

Coda map (IPA → LMT)¶

Native Thai codas map directly to Cyrillic. Foreign-origin coda phonemes that Thai phonotactics does not natively support collapse unconditionally to the nearest native segment — the textbook makes no exception for modern loanwords. Callers that want preserved foreign /f/ in output should use rtl, paiboon, or paiboon_plus.

transcribe("ลิฟต์",  scheme="lmt")   # 'лип³'  — /f/ collapses to п
transcribe("ข้าว",   scheme="lmt")   # 'кха:у²' — /w/ offglide → у
transcribe("ภาษาไทย", scheme="lmt")  # 'пха:⁰ са:⁴ тхай⁰'

Comparison with Morev¶

LMT and Morev share every onset and coda letter. Their surface presentations differ in three ways:

Use morev when your audience expects the dictionary-citation style. Use lmt when they are working from the 2018 MSU textbook, or when you prefer ASCII-colon length and numeric tone markers.

Examples¶

All outputs are verified against the engine.