Morev scheme (Cyrillic)¶

The morev scheme implements the Cyrillic transliteration system used in L. N. Morev, Yu. Ya. Plam, and M. F. Fomicheva's 1964 Большой тайско-русский словарь (Big Thai-Russian Dictionary) and in subsequent Russian-language Thai teaching materials. It is intended for audiences who read Cyrillic.

from thaiphon import transcribe

transcribe("น้ำ", scheme="morev", format="html")
# 'на̄мˇ'

transcribe("สวัสดี", scheme="morev", format="html")
# 'саˆ-ватˆ-дӣ'

transcribe("ภาษาไทย", scheme="morev", format="html")
# 'п<sup>х</sup>а̄-са̄´-т<sup>х</sup>ай'

Format conventions¶

Tone notation¶

Tone marks are spacing characters written at the end of the syllable, after any coda consonant. They are not placed on the vowel letter.

So เด็ก (dead syllable, low tone) renders as декˆ, not де̂к — the mark sits at the end of the whole syllable string.

The HIGH↔RISING correspondence is worth noting. Morev's "third (rising-falling)" tone describes what modern phonological notation labels HIGH (a characteristically high-pitched syllable with a rise-then-fall contour in citation speech). His "fourth (rising)" describes what modern notation labels RISING (a low-to-high contour). The renderer maps HIGH → ˇ and RISING → ´ accordingly.

Onset map (IPA → Cyrillic)¶

Aspiration: The three plain stops gain a second letter х to mark aspiration — /kʰ/ → кх, /tʰ/ → тх, /pʰ/ → пх. In HTML mode the second element becomes a superscript (к<sup>х</sup>, т<sup>х</sup>, п<sup>х</sup>). The aspirated palatal /tɕʰ/ is written as bare ч in both modes — the alphabet table in the dictionary lists ฉ, ช, and ฌ all as ч without an aspiration mark.

Velar nasal: /ŋ/ is the two-letter string нг, not a single Cyrillic character. This applies in both onset and coda positions.

CC onset clusters: When ว fills the second slot of a true onset cluster (e.g. /kw/, /kʰw/), it surfaces as у rather than в. กวาง (gaur) renders as куа̄нг. As a bare initial onset ว is still в.

Vowel map (IPA → Cyrillic)¶

Note on /o/ and /ɔ/: Both render as Cyrillic о/о̄. The source dictionary uses these as its default for both modern Thai /oː/ and /ɔː/ in long open syllables; the Latin glyphs ɔ/ɔ̄ appear only sporadically in the dictionary body without a derivable phonological pattern, so the renderer emits о/о̄ for both vowels.

Mid-central /ɤ/: Uses the schwa ə (U+0259), which is intentionally non-Cyrillic and reproduces the dictionary's typesetting convention for this vowel.

Long diphthongs: The macron sits on the first element only — ӣа, ы̄а, ӯа.

Coda map (IPA → Cyrillic)¶

Foreign codas that no native Thai syllable supports collapse to the nearest native segment. This matches the dictionary's treatment of loanwords: ก๊าซ → ка̄тˇ, ฟุตบอล → футˇ-бо̄н, ปรู๊ฟ → прӯпˇ.

HTML mode¶

Pass format="html" to receive aspirated stop onsets with superscript markup. All other output is identical to text mode.

transcribe("ขอ", scheme="morev", format="text")
# 'кхо̄´'

transcribe("ขอ", scheme="morev", format="html")
# 'к<sup>х</sup>о̄´'

Schemes without per-format differences return the same string for both values of format. IPA and TLC are in that category; Morev provides an HTML overlay only for the four aspirated onsets.

Examples¶

All outputs are verified against the engine.