The Thai alphabet itself has 44 consonant symbols, 16 vowel symbols that combine into at least 32 vowel forms and four tone diacritics to create characters mostly representing syllables.
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16 Facts About Thai alphabet
1.
2.
Thai alphabet is derived from the Old Khmer script, which is a southern Brahmic style of writing derived from the south Indian Pallava alphabet.
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3.
The earliest attestation of the Thai alphabet script is the Ram Khamhaeng Inscription dated to 1292, however some scholars question its authenticity.
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4.
Thai alphabet is considered to be the first script in the world that invented tone markers to indicate distinctive tones, which are lacking in the Mon-Khmer and Indo-Aryan languages from which its script is derived.
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5.
Thai alphabet letters do not have upper- and lower-case forms like Latin letters do.
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6.
Thai alphabet writing uses quotation marks and parentheses, but not square brackets or braces.
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7.
Thai alphabet vowel sounds and diphthongs are written using a mixture of vowel symbols on a consonant base.
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8.
Thai alphabet is a tonal language, and the script gives full information on the tones.
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9.
When Southern Thai alphabet is written in Thai alphabet script, there are different rules for indicating spoken tone.
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10.
Thai alphabet script uses a number of modifications to write Sanskrit and related languages.
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12.
None of the Sanskrit plosives are pronounced as the Thai alphabet voiced plosives, so these are not represented in the table.
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13.
Likewise, the Thai alphabet phonemes do not differentiate between the retroflex and dental classes, because Thai alphabet has no retroflex consonants.
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14.
In Thai alphabet this is written as an open circle above the consonant, known as nikkhahit, from Pali niggahita.
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15.
Thai alphabet script is an abugida, a symbol needs to be added to indicate that the implied vowel is not to be pronounced.
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16.
Thai alphabet script was added to the Unicode Standard in October 1991 with the release of version 1.
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