Linguistic Culture
The Thai language, or Phasa Thai, basically consists of monosyllable words, whose meanings are complete by themselves. Its alphabet was created by King Ramkhamhaeng the Great in 1283 by modelling it on the ancient Indian alphabets of Sanskrit and Pali through the medium of the old Khmer characters. After a history of over 700 years, the Thai alphabet today comprises 44 letters (including 2 obsolete ones), representing 20 consonant phonemes, and 15 vowel signs, denoting 22 vowels, diphthongs and triphthongs.
As Thai is a tonal language with five different tones, it often confuses foreigners who are unused to this kind of language. For example, they have difficulty in distinguishing these 3 words from each other : "suea" with a rising tone, "suea" low tone and "suea" falling tone which means a tiger, a mat and clothes respectively.
Like most languages of the world, the Thai language is a complicated mixture of several sources. Many Thai words used today were derived from Pali, Sanskrit, Khmer, Malay, English and Chinese. wat or Buddhist temple and monastery combined. After Buddhism had been spread throughout Thailand for hundreds of years, the primitive animist belief of the Thai people was assimilated by the Buddhist one. The wat became the centre of the village. It was the place where people received education, attended rites and ceremonies, and observed feasts and festivals all the year round.
Nowadays, due to the rapid advancement of technology, the traditional Thai way of living, especially in the big cities, has inevitably changed. However, it is still preserved to a large extent in the faraway rural areas where modern civilization has failed to penetrate.