Characteristics of Thai language and its orthography
Thai has 44 basic consonants plus 4 archaic consonants for 21 consonant sounds.
Thai initial consonants are listed in Table 1. Thai has a high degree of grapheme–
phoneme correspondences but has multiple phoneme to grapheme correspondences.
Thai is predominantly monosyllabic but it also has polysyllabic words, which have
been borrowed mainly from Khmer, Pali or Sanskrit. There are no spaces between
words; instead spaces in a Thai text may indicate the end of a clause or sentence.
For consonants there is an inherent vowel: an (a) is usually found in words of
Sanskrit, Pali or Khmer origin while an (o) is found in native Thai words.
Spoken Thai has clearly defined syllable boundaries (Hudak, 1990). In addition,
an initial consonant, a final consonant or an initial and final consonant may or may
not occur. Possible syllable structures are V, VC, CV, CCV, CVC and CCVC. Thai