After being in Thailand for a month, I have finally been introduced to the Thai writing system. Unlike Chinese, Thai has an alphabet, albeit some 50 letters more than ours. This past weekend I had Oat, a 14-year-old kid, teach me the various Thai vowels and proudly show off his reading and writing skills. The lesson was more than an insight into the language, it was absolutely fun to learn something from a real Thai! As I mentioned before, I lived in Bangkok for six years when I was in elementary school. Rather than experience Thai culture, however, I lived in an American gated community, when to an international school and simply experience Thailand through the school bus windows every day. This time, however, things were different. I was staying with Ten, a Thai who speaks English wonderfully and who invited me to stay the night with his family. Anyway, back to the Thai alphabet.
Oat showed me that the Thai alphabet has three important parts. Like the English counterpart, there are vowels and consonants. The new “secret weapon” are the tonal markers that are placed about certain syllables. When reading, for instance, you can immediately know which syllables should be pronounced high, low, middle, rising or falling. While this might not mean much to the average reader, these tonal markers are an absolute boon. In Chinese, on the other hand, there is not a single tone marker; you simply have to memorize the tone of each character—and sometimes a single character can have multiple tones or pronunciations that vary according to context!
The other interesting aspect of the Thai alphabet is that spacing is quite different. While tones are usually placed above the syllables, vowels can either be in front, behind, above or below the letters. Apparently whoever invented the Thai alphabet was not restricted with the simply placing one letter after another. Placing vowels above and below the letters makes it more interesting to look at and MUCH more difficult for a foreigner to comprehend! The last let’s-confuse-the-foreigner trick is that Thai writing has no spaces. Words are placed next to one another and spaces mark the end of sentences. Next time you complain about learning a Romance, Germanic or Slavic language, just be thankful that at least the words are separated!
Oat showed me that the Thai alphabet has three important parts. Like the English counterpart, there are vowels and consonants. The new “secret weapon” are the tonal markers that are placed about certain syllables. When reading, for instance, you can immediately know which syllables should be pronounced high, low, middle, rising or falling. While this might not mean much to the average reader, these tonal markers are an absolute boon. In Chinese, on the other hand, there is not a single tone marker; you simply have to memorize the tone of each character—and sometimes a single character can have multiple tones or pronunciations that vary according to context!The other interesting aspect of the Thai alphabet is that spacing is quite different. While tones are usually placed above the syllables, vowels can either be in front, behind, above or below the letters. Apparently whoever invented the Thai alphabet was not restricted with the simply placing one letter after another. Placing vowels above and below the letters makes it more interesting to look at and MUCH more difficult for a foreigner to comprehend! The last let’s-confuse-the-foreigner trick is that Thai writing has no spaces. Words are placed next to one another and spaces mark the end of sentences. Next time you complain about learning a Romance, Germanic or Slavic language, just be thankful that at least the words are separated!
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