Sukhothai language

Punctuation

Minor pauses in sentences may be marked by a comma (Thai: จุลภาค or ลูกน้ำ, chunlaphak or luk nam), and major pauses by a period (Thai: มหัพภาค or จุด, mahap phak or chut), but most often are marked by a blank space (Thai: วรรค, wak). Thai writing also uses quotation marks (Thai: อัญประกาศ, anyaprakat) and parentheses (round brackets) (Thai: วงเล็บ, wong lep or Thai: นขลิขิต, nakha likhit), but not square brackets or braces.

A paiyan noi ฯ (Thai: ไปยาลน้อย) is used for abbreviation. A paiyan yai ฯลฯ (Thai: ไปยาลใหญ่) is the same as "etc." in English.

Several obsolete characters indicated the beginning or ending of sections. A bird's eye ๏ (Thai: ตาไก่, ta kai, officially called ฟองมัน, fong man) formerly indicated paragraphs. An angkhan kuu ๚ (Thai: อังคั่นคู่) was formerly used to mark the end of a chapter. A kho mut ๛ (Thai: โคมูตร) was formerly used to mark the end of a document, but is now obsolete.

Consonants

There are 44 consonant letters representing 21 distinct consonant sounds. Duplicate consonants either correspond to sounds that existed in Old Thai at the time the alphabet was created but no longer exist (in particular, voiced obstruents such as b d g v z), or different Sanskrit and Pali consonants pronounced identically in Thai. There are in addition four consonant-vowel combination characters not included in the tally of 44.

Consonants are divided into three classes — in alphabetical order these are middle (กลาง, klang), high (สูง, sung), and low (ต่ำ, tam) class — as shown in the table below. These class designations reflect phonetic qualities of the sounds to which the letters originally corresponded in Old Thai. In particular, "middle" sounds were voiceless unaspirated stops; "high" sounds, voiceless aspirated stops or voiceless fricatives; "low" sounds, voiced. Subsequent sound changes have obscured the phonetic nature of these classes.^{[nb 1]} Today, the class of a consonant without a tone mark, along with the short or long length of the accompanying vowel, determine the base accent (พื้นเสียง, phuen siang). Middle class consonants with a long vowel spell an additional four tones with one of four tone marks over the controlling consonant: mai ek, mai tho, mai tri, and mai chattawa. High and low class consonants are limited to mai ek and mai tho, as shown in the Tone table. Differing interpretations of the two marks or their absence allow low class consonants to spell tones not allowed for the corresponding high class consonant. In the case of digraphs where a low class follows a higher class consonant, often the higher class rules apply, but the marker, if used, goes over the low class one; accordingly, ห นำ ho nam and อ นำ o nam may be considered to be digraphs as such, as explained below the Tone table.^{[nb 2]}

Notes

To aid learning, each consonant is traditionally associated with an acrophonic Thai word that either starts with the same sound, or features it prominently. For example, the name of the letter ข is kho khai (ข ไข่), in which kho is the sound it represents, and khai (ไข่) is a word which starts with the same sound and means "egg".

Two of the consonants, ฃ (kho khuat) and ฅ (kho khon), are no longer used in written Thai, but still appear on many keyboards and in character sets. When the first Thai typewriter was developed by Edwin Hunter McFarland in 1892, there was simply no space for all characters, thus two had to be left out.^[5] Also, neither of these two letters correspond to a Sanskrit or Pali letter, and each of them, being a modified form of the letter that precedes it (compare ข and ค), has the same pronunciation and the same consonant class as the preceding letter, thus making them redundant. They used to represent the sound /x/ in Old Thai, but it has merged with /kʰ/ in Modern Thai.

Equivalents for romanisation are shown in the table below. Many consonants are pronounced differently at the beginning and at the end of a syllable. The entries in columns initial and final indicate the pronunciation for that consonant in the corresponding positions in a syllable. Where the entry is '-', the consonant may not be used to close a syllable. Where a combination of consonants ends a written syllable, only the first is pronounced; possible closing consonant sounds are limited to 'k', 'm', 'n', 'ng', 'p' and 't'.

Although official standards for romanisation are the Royal Thai General System of Transcription (RTGS) defined by the Royal Thai Institute, and the almost identical ISO 11940-2 defined by the International Organization for Standardization, many publications use different romanisation systems. In daily practice, a bewildering variety of romanisations are used, making it difficult to know how to pronounce a word, or to judge if two words (e.g. on a map and a street sign) are actually the same. For more precise information, an equivalent from the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is given as well.

Vowels

Thai vowel sounds and diphthongs are written using a mixture of vowel symbols on a consonant base. Each vowel is shown in its correct position relative to a base consonant and sometimes a final consonant as well. Vowels can go above, below, left of or right of the consonant, or combinations of these places. If a vowel has parts before and after the initial consonant, and the syllable starts with a consonant cluster, the split will go around the whole cluster.

Twenty-one vowel symbol elements are traditionally named, which may appear alone or in combination to form compound symbols.

The inherent vowels are /a/ in open syllables (CV) and /o/ in closed syllables (CVC). For example, ถนน transcribes /tʰànǒn/ "road". There are a few exceptions in Pali loanwords, where the inherent vowel of an open syllable is /o/. The circumfix vowels, such as เ–าะ /ɔʔ/, encompass a preceding consonant with an inherent vowel. For example, /pʰɔʔ/ is written เพาะ, and /tɕʰapʰɔʔ/ "only" is written เฉพาะ.

The characters ฤ ฤๅ (plus ฦ ฦๅ, which are obsolete) are usually considered as vowels, the first being a short vowel sound, and the latter, long. The letters are based on vocalic consonants used in Sanskrit, given the one-to-one letter correspondence of Thai to Sanskrit, although the last two letters are quite rare, as their equivalent Sanskrit sounds only occur in a few, ancient words and thus are functionally obsolete in Thai. The first symbol 'ฤ' is common in many Sanskrit and Pali words and 'ฤๅ' less so, but does occur as the primary spelling for the Thai adaptation of Sanskrit 'rishi' and treu (Thai: ตฤๅ /trɯ̄ː/ or /trīː/), a very rare Khmer loan word for 'fish' only found in ancient poetry. As alphabetical entries, ฤ ฤๅ follow ร, and themselves can be read as a combination of consonant and vowel, equivalent to รึ (short), and รือ (long) (and the obsolete pair as ลึ, ลือ), respectively. Moreover, ฤ can act as ริ as an integral part in many words mostly borrowed from Sanskrit such as กฤษณะ (kritsana, not kruetsana), ฤทธิ์ (rit, not ruet), and กฤษดา (kritsada, not kruetsada), for example. It is also used to spell อังกฤษ angkrit England/English. The word ฤกษ์ (roek) is a unique case where ฤ is pronounced like เรอ. In the past, prior to the turn of the twentieth century, it was common for writers to substitute these letters in native vocabulary that contained similar sounds as a shorthand that was acceptable in writing at the time. For example, the conjunction 'or' (Thai: หรือ /rɯ̌ː/ rue, cf. Lao: ຫຼຶ/ຫລື /lɯ̌ː/ lu) was often written Thai: ฤ. This practice has become obsolete, but can still be seen in Thai literature.

The pronunciation below is indicated by the International Phonetic Alphabet^[6] and the Romanisation according to the Royal Thai Institute as well as several variant Romanisations often encountered. A very approximate equivalent is given for various regions of English speakers and surrounding areas. Dotted circles represent the positions of consonants or consonant clusters. The first one represents the initial consonant and the latter (if it exists) represents the final.

Ro han (ร หัน) is not usually considered a vowel and is not included in the following table. It represents the sara a /a/ vowel in certain Sanskrit loanwords and appears as ◌รร◌. When used without a final consonant (◌รร), /n/ is implied as the final consonant, giving /an/.

Tone

Central Thai

Thai is a tonal language, and the script gives full information on the tones. Tones are realised in the vowels, but indicated in the script by a combination of the class of the initial consonant (high, mid or low), vowel length (long or short), closing consonant (plosive or sonorant, called dead or live) and, if present, one of four tone marks, whose names derive from the names of the digits 1–4 borrowed from Pali or Sanskrit. The rules for denoting tones are shown in the following chart:

Tone type top to bottom: high, rising, mid, falling, low. Initial consonant class left to right: low (blue), middle (green), high (red). Syllable type: live (empty circle), dead (full circle), dead short (narrow ellipse), dead long (wide ellipse).

Symbol	Name		Syllable composition and initial consonant class
	Thai	RTGS	Vowel and final	Low	Mid	High
	(ไม่มี)	(none)	live long vowel or vowel plus sonorant	mid	mid	rising
	(ไม่มี)	(none)	dead short short vowel at end or plus plosive	high	low	low
	(ไม่มี)	(none)	dead long long vowel plus plosive	falling	low	low
่	ไม้เอก	mai ek	any	falling	low	low
้	ไม้โท	mai tho	any	high	falling	falling
๊	ไม้ตรี	mai tri	any	-	high	-
๋	ไม้จัตวา	mai chattawa	any	-	rising	-

Thai language tone chart

Flowchart for determining the tone of a Thai syllable. Click to enlarge

"None", that is, no tone marker, is used with the base accent (พื้นเสียง, phuen siang). Mai tri and mai chattawa are only used with mid-class consonants.

Two consonant characters (not diacritics) are used to modify the tone:

• ห นำ ho nam, leading ho. A silent, high-class ห "leads" low-class nasal stops (ง, ญ, น and ม) and non-plosives (ว, ย, ร and ล), which have no corresponding high-class phonetic match, into the tone properties of a high-class consonant. In polysyllabic words, an initial mid- or high-class consonant with an implicit vowel similarly "leads" these same low-class consonants into the higher class tone rules, with the tone marker borne by the low-class consonant.
• อ นำ o nam, leading o. In four words only, a silent, mid-class อ "leads" low-class ย into mid-class tone rules: อย่า (ya, don't) อยาก (yak, desire) อย่าง (yang, kind, sort, type) อยู่ (yu, stay). All four have long-vowel, low-tone siang ek; อยาก, a dead syllable, needs no tone marker, but the three live syllables all take mai ek.

Low consonant	High consonant	IPA
ง	หง	[ŋ]
ญ	หญ	[j]
น	หน	[n]
ม	หม	[m]
ย	หย	[j]
ร	หร	[r]
ล	หล	[l]
ว	หว	[w]
Low consonant	Middle consonant	IPA
ย	อย	[j]

In some dialects where words are spelled with one tone but pronounced with another often occur in informal conversation (notably the pronouns ฉัน chan and เขา khao, which are both pronounced with a high tone rather than the rising tone indicated by the script). Generally, when such words are recited or read in public, they are pronounced as spelled.

Diacritics

Other diacritics are used to indicate short vowels and silent letters:

• Mai taikhu means "climbing stick". It is a miniature Thai numeral 8 ๘. Mai taikhu is often used with sara e (เ) and sara ae (แ) in closed syllables.
• Thanthakhat is an archaic word for "capital punishment"

Fan nu means "rat teeth" and is thought as being placed in combination with short sara i and fong man to form other characters.

Numerals

For numerals, mostly the standard Hindu-Arabic numerals (Thai: เลขฮินดูอารบิก, lek hindu arabik) are used, but Thai also has its own set of Thai numerals that are based on the Hindu-Arabic numeral system (Thai: เลขไทย, lek thai), which are mostly limited to government documents, election posters, license plates of military vehicles, and special entry prices for Thai nationals.

Other symbols

Pai-yan noi and angkhan diao share the same character. Sara a (–ะ) used in combination with other characters is called wisanchani.

Some of the characters can mark the beginning or end of a sentence, chapter, or episode of a story or of a stanza in a poem. These have changed use over time and are becoming uncommon.

Plosives (vargaḥ)

Plosives (also called stops) are listed in their traditional Sanskrit order, which corresponds to Thai alphabetical order from ก to ม with three exceptions: in Thai, high-class ข is followed by two obsolete characters with no Sanskrit equivalent, high-class ฃ and low-class ฅ; low-class ช is followed by sibilant ซ (low-class equivalent of high-class sibilant ส that follows ศ and ษ.) The table gives the Thai value first, and then the IAST (International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration) value in square brackets.

None of the Sanskrit plosives are pronounced as the Thai voiced plosives, so these are not represented in the table. While letters are listed here according to their class in Sanskrit, Thai has lost the distinction between many of the consonants. So, while there is a clear distinction between ช and ฌ in Sanskrit, in Thai these two consonants are pronounced identically (including tone). Likewise, the Thai phonemes do not differentiate between the retroflex and dental classes, because Thai has no retroflex consonants. The equivalents of all the retroflex consonants are pronounced identically to their dental counterparts: thus ฎ is pronounced like ด, ฐ is pronounced like ถ, ฑ is pronounced like ท, ฒ is pronounced like ธ, and ณ is pronounced like น.

The Sanskrit unaspirated unvoiced plosives are pronounced as unaspirated unvoiced, whereas Sanskrit aspirated voiced plosives are pronounced as aspirated unvoiced.

Non-plosives (avargaḥ)

Semivowels (กึ่งสระ kueng sara) and liquids come in Thai alphabetical order after ม, the last of the plosives. The term อวรรค awak means "without a break"; that is, without a plosive.

Vowels

All consonants have an inherent 'a' sound, and therefore there is no need to use the ะ symbol when writing Sanskrit. The Thai vowels อื, ไอ, ใอ, and so forth, are not used in Sanskrit. The zero consonant, อ, is unique to the Indic alphabets descended from Khmer. When it occurs in Sanskrit, it is always the zero consonant and never the vowel o [ɔː]. Its use in Sanskrit is therefore to write vowels that cannot be otherwise written alone: e.g., อา or อี. When อ is written on its own, then it is a carrier for the implied vowel, a [a] (equivalent to อะ in Thai).

The vowel sign อำ occurs in Sanskrit, but only as the combination of the pure vowels sara a อา with nikkhahit อํ.

Other non-Thai symbols

There are a number of additional symbols only used to write Sanskrit or Pali, and not used in writing Thai.