Thai, also known as Siamese is the national . Over half of the words in Thai are borrowed from Pali, Sanskrit and Old Khmer. It is a tonal and analytic language. Thai also has a complex orthography and relational markers.[citation needed] Spoken Thai is mutually intelligible with Lao; the two languages are written with slightly different scripts, but linguistically similar.
Thai alphabet (ตัวอักษรไทย)
The Thai alphabet was probably derived from, or at least influenced by, the Old Khmer alphabet. According to tradition it was created in 1283 by King Ramkhamhaeng (พ่อขุนรามคำแหงมหาราช).
The Thai alphabet is used to write Thai, Sanskrit, Pali, and a number of minority languages spoken in Thailand.
Notable features
Type of writing system: syllabic alphabet consisting of 44 basic consonants, each with an inherent vowel: [o] in medial position and [a] in final position. The [a] is usually found in words of Sanskrit, Pali or Khmer origin while the [o] is found native Thai words. The 18 other vowels and 6 diphthongs are indicated using diacritics which appear in front of, above, below of after the consonants they modify.
Direction of writing: left to right in horizontal lines.
8 of the letters are used only for writing words of Pali and Sanskrit origin.
For some consonants there are multiple letters. Originally they represented separate sounds, but over the years the distinction between those sounds was lost and the letters were used instead to indicate tones.
Thai is a tonal language with 5 tones. The tone of a syllable is determined by a combination of the class of consonant, the type of syllable (open or closed), the tone marker and the length of the vowel. More details.
There are no spaces between words, instead spaces in a Thai text indicate the end of a clause or sentence.