16 Facts About Thai alphabet

1.

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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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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11.

The vowels used in Thai alphabet are identical to Sanskrit, with the exception of ?, ??, ?, and ??, which are read using their Thai alphabet values, not their Sanskrit values.

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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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