Characteristics of Thai script
There are usually no spaces between words. Only between coherent sense-units such as phrases or sentences is a space. What an unit of meaning is will be decided by the writer himself. Names of places or persons will also be separated with spaces from the rest of the sentence. This is necessary because they often come from Pali or Sanskrit and therefore do not always meet the Thai syllable structure that is taken into account for the comprehension of words in the sentence.
แต่ละเดือนๆ ครอบครัวเรามีรายได้สุทธิ 30,000 บาท
Ifitsoundsunusually, you can get used to it as soon as we know some of the syllables and words, as we see at the beginning of this sentence. Since the syllable structure follows fixed rules, one learns the localization of the components very quickly. The syllable boundary is indicated by the position of the vowel, the tone symbols and / or the final consonant.
Actually, there is no official rule to write all the words together. Therefore, it is not wrong if we do in our exercises, mark the word boundaries by white space.
Different characters for uppercase and lowercase letters are not available in thai, there is only one version of each character (apart from those that change for other reasons, i.e. depending on the position in the word).
Punctuation marks are also not in use, except for abbreviations and decimals. Words from special languages such as computer may have other signs like hyphen or slashes.
ก. | [gô:--] | abbr. Gram abbr. gram. Verb abbr. pol. Ministry; |
คค. | [khô:-- khô:--] | n. abbr. Ministry for Transport and Communication |
หน่วยรับเข้า/ส่งออก | [nu:ai\ rap/ khau/\ / song\ ô:k\] | n. comp. Input/Output-Unit |
กฎยอร์ก-แอนต์เวิร์ป | [got\ jô:k/\ ä:n-- wö:p/\] | n. ins. York-Antwerp-Rules |
Unusual for our concepts is that vowels are not necessarily at positions where we would expect. They can occur in front of (ไป [bpai] = go, run, fly), after (ปา [bpa:] = throw), in front and after (เกา [gao] = scrape), on top (ปี [bpee:] = Year) or below (ปู [bpu:] = crab) or arranged around (เปีย [bpi:a] = plait) af a consonant. Nevertheless, the rule is that each syllable begins with a consonant. Therefore, preceding vowels are spoken after the consonant.