The Thai "Alphabet"

[MrDK]

I have a need to learn a bit about the Thai "alphabet" or character set. Our company is going to introduce a new product in the next 3 months or so and one of the advantages we hope to gain in the ability for the device to display messages in many languages. I have taken a personal interest in adding Thai to the language many for two reasons; one of them is money.

Unlike computers where you have near endless possibilities of combining characters and tones/accents; for the small devise that we are developing we need to have a fixed character map. That means that any combination has to be accessible as a single character. To use examples in the roman alphabet letters such as "à", "á", "â", "ã", "ä", "å" all have to be mapped separately even thought it could be one letter with 6 accents.

I have read that the Thai language consists of 44 consonants and fifteen vowel symbols that combine into at least twenty-eight vowel forms, and four tone marks.
The question is how many character/tone combinations are there?
If there are 15 vowels can the all have 4 tones (or none) does that make a total of 75 characters vowel character combinations. Can the consonants have tones too (another 220 combinations).

My objective number one is to try to gauge how many characters (any combination) that I will need.

[oneday]

There are many more people on this forum more expert than me, but since I have recently taken an interest in trying to learn I will throw something out here.

Yes, there are 44 consonants and 32 vowel, diphthong, and triphthong combinations. Here is a link to one site I just pulled that statement from.

Vowels
thai-language.com
Consonants
thai-language.com

These were both found off the "reference" tab at the top.

and here is another site I believe to be almost as good.

Learning Thai the Easy Way

These two sites together have an incredible amount of information on them. I believe from these two sights alone someone can learn Thai.

[MrDK]

Here is an example of what looks to me like 7 different incidences of one "letter" each with a different tone (or none). The way they are typed or edited by MS Windows is that there are 2 key strokes per character / tone combination. To the operating system there are 7 different key stokes (a total of 13); to me there are 7 different characters.
ก ก่ ก้ ก๊ ก๋ ก็ ก์
The question is: Can any tone potentially appear with any of the 44 + 32 "letters"; which in turn will make 532 (character) combinations (including the combinations with no tones).

[oneday]

I got you MrDK.

That is beyond me to provide an unequivocal answer, but I believe you are in the ballpark and it could be higher. Once I got the little stickers that go on my keys and installed the Thai script on my computer I started typing Thai and I remember one character I typed had three modifications or tone/vowels added to it; two above and one below for a total of four keystrokes to make one character so to speak.

This task you have taken on could be very daunting. Obviously, what you need to know; are there certain tones and vowels that would never be used in combination with certain consonants; are there rules. In other words, what is every possible combination? So far I have not run into anything that addresses this or speaks about it.

Come on, where are all you Thai speakers and learners with years of experience.

[MrDK]

Oneday, Thanks for your help so far.

The odd part is that I have no need (for this purpose) to learn a single word in Thai. I need to have our engineers create a graphic illustration of each and every character / tone combination that will be used in the product. I will have a consultant do the actual translations.

I hope this will not prove too hard. The total potential for incremental business if we offer our product in Thai is somewhat limited. If, however, we do it will create more chances for me to go to Thailand to promote it (that is reason number 2).

[oneday]

Well damm, that reason alone is worth the effort. Let us know if this project proceeds. I would be interested in the final product.

[Dodger]

Cannot seem to find your definitive answer, so will ask my teacher for you on Friday, however I do know that in your example above only 4 of them go with gor gai, not all 7. I also know that there are tonal marks below the letter and in fornt of and also behind the letter none of which you illustrate above.

[MrDK]

Originally Posted by Dodger

Cannot seem to find your definitive answer, so will ask my teacher for you on Friday, however I do know that in your example above only 4 of them go with gor gai, not all 7. I also know that there are tonal marks below the letter and in fornt of and also behind the letter none of which you illustrate above.

I would really appreaciate that.
I have a feeling that the number of theoretical combinations are much greater than the actual number required.

[MrDK]

Originally Posted by oneday

Well damm, that reason alone is worth the effort. Let us know if this project proceeds. I would be interested in the final product.

Be careful what you say; a typical configuration of this little handheld device (detecting atmospheric hazards) will set you back $2,000.

[oneday]

Originally Posted by Dodger

Cannot seem to find your definitive answer, so will ask my teacher for you on Friday, however I do know that in your example above only 4 of them go with gor gai, not all 7. I also know that there are tonal marks below the letter and in fornt of and also behind the letter none of which you illustrate above.

Any tonal marks or vowels in front of or behind the consonant would not be a problem for what MrDK needs. In that case, they would be individual letters. Only those that are above or below the consonant would require a specific character map in his project.

[MrDK]

In searching for information related to this topic I found an external link on Wikipedia for a virtual Thai keyboard. I installed it and it works quite well as an "Always On Top" application sending the characters to the keyboard buffer, which sends them to the current application so it will work with any software capable of displaying Thai characters.

Virtual Thai Keyboard

This may be of interest to BM's who have some knowledge of the Thai language, but do not have a Thai keyboard.

[nacha]

if you still need it here you can find a nice chart of the Thai alphabet.
also great for printing...

edit:
i`m also using the Thai keyboard which MrDK postet - it is really a recommendation for everybody who doesn`t have a real Thai keyboard ;-)

[JayBee]

Originally Posted by MrDK;

Here is an example of what looks to me like 7 different incidences of one "letter" each with a different tone (or none). The way they are typed or edited by MS Windows is that there are 2 key strokes per character / tone combination. To the operating system there are 7 different key stokes (a total of 13); to me there are 7 different characters.
ก ก่ ก้ ก๊ ก๋ ก็ ก์
The question is: Can any tone potentially appear with any of the 44 + 32 "letters"; which in turn will make 532 (character) combinations (including the combinations with no tones).

First of all, tone marks do not appear on vowels. Tone marks only appear on consonants. The first five that you display above(5 counting no tone mark as one possibility as you illustrate above), are the 5 tones. The sixth mark is actually indicates a vowel contraction, i.e., it is placed above the letter to save you from making another "letter" following the consonant to complete the vowel short "e"(part of which appears before the consonant). The seventh mark is called garang and is place above a consonant to indicate that the consonant is silent. There are a lot of silent consonants in written Thai, especially in words and names that are adapted from English. Unlike Englsih, there are no silent vowels in Thai.

Secondly, the way vowels appear is that they encircle the consonant. One vowel can be composed of as many as three "letters," with one appearing in front of the consonant, one above and one behind it. Those 3 "letters" are really only one letter, and there are a number of vowels that take that form, for example, the eeya in beeya(beer).

If you treat vowels in the manner indicated in the following quote(Oneday):
"Any tonal marks or vowels in front of or behind the consonant would not be a problem for what MrDK needs. In that case, they would be individual letters. Only those that are above or below the consonant would require a specific character map in his project." , then you will have far, far in excess of 32 vowel letters.

In addition to the 7 marks shown above is also a vowel marker which appears above consonants called a mahanigat. A mahanigat(sp?) is another contracted form of vowel, in this case, the vowel is short "a". Since there are tons of short "a"s in Thai, the mahanigat is used a lot. Additionally, this is one of many instances where you may have two marks above a consonant, one being the mahanigat, and then on top of the mahanigat you may still have a tone marker.

Then in the case of the letters, long "u" and short "u", these are written below the consonant, so in words featuring these vowels, you may have the vowel appearing below the consonant, and a tone marker above the consonant.

One other thing to consider is that there are a few consonants which appear in the Thai alphabet, but are obsolete and no longer used in Thai.

So, as you can see, the number of possibilities goes way beyond what you have indicated, particularly when you start breaking down vowels in)to parts and counting each of these parts as letters. The whole concept of some vowels surrounding a consonant is quite different from anything we have in English.

[Dodger]

Mr DK, sorry forgot, I asked my teacher Friday and only after reading JB's epostle did I remember, to precis his reply and hers, there are too many options she got to 7060 and still had a load more permutations.

So in conclusion, you would need to set it up similar to the Thai keyboard you have already put a link to, it works by upper & lower case and then when a tone mark etc is required it automatically goes above or below the letter is should, thereby only needing 76 buttons and a few more for some extra jo's which I just can't be bothered to tell you what they are without loking in my book which is all of 5 feet away!!!

Feck, wait till I have to leave my chair if you need this extra number then I'll let you know then. If this sounds harsh, then I should explain, just been to the gym for the second time in three days and legs are not functioning as they once did before they were so fit!!

[MrDK]

Thank you, JB and Dodger. I am overwhelmed ... both with respect to the project and the thought that someday I would like to start learning Thai.

I showed your comments to the engineer in charge of the project. Initially he started pull out his hair. Then he suggested that we have the words used in the project translated, then make a character map based on the "looks" of each character (with tone/vowel) used throughout. With a bit of luck the total map will be limited to a few hundred characters.

Thanks again...