More specifically, Central or Standard Thai, probably the most prominent and widely spoken among the family of Tai languages, which are in turn a part of the overarching Tai-Kadai family. Central Thai is strongly related to a number of other languages/dialects, chief among them Southern Thai (Pak Dtai), Northern Thai (Thai Yuan), and Isan, which is considered a hybrid of Thai and Lao, being spoken in the Thai province Isan that intervenes between the two countries. Standard Thai is the language taught in schools, and many share it with their regional dialect.

* It has been heard by (if not confirmed by) the principal author that Central Thai and Lao share 85% of their words in common, especially at the conversational level. The distance between the two is possibly even less than in Hindi and Urdu, because both draw on the same source for technical vocabulary, SanskritLanguage and PaliLanguage, where Urdu relies mainly on FarsiLanguage (or, more appropriately, Persian? difference being...?) and ArabicLanguage. He can attest, however, that many of these words are indeed very similar, the only difference being relatively small phonetic changes (e.g., Lao 'sok dee', good karma and Thai 'chok dee', same meaning).

The earliest Tai languages ostensibly developed in southern China, and Thai shares a number of general features in common with other Sinitic languages. Namely:

* an essentially monosyllabic nature, discounting loan words

* a diverse set of phonemes (basic sounds), including aspirated consonants and several tripthongs (three vowels munged together, such as 'aeo', or perhaps 'ieu' in FrenchLanguage)

* tonality; most would agree that Central Thai has five tones: middle, low, falling, rising, and high... these can be delightfully challenging or maybe maddening for someone who grew up without speaking a tonal language at L1 stage, during the earliest years of life

* status as an AnalyticLanguage; in short, all words, including aspects of grammar, are encoded as separate morphemes (the smallest words that can convey meaning), much as Chinese languages are well known for this quality. Because expressions and whole programs in LispLanguage or SmalltalkLanguage tend to be composed in similar manner, the main author likes to call Thai 'Lisp with Tones'. The language is insanely logical in this respect. Verbs like khit (think) and rak (love) become the nouns thought and love with the prefix 'kwam'. Think of it like a call to Proc.new.

* noun classifiers, which are the natural language equivalent of a NameSpace.

** Example use of the word 'luk' (child):
*** luk sao: daughter (child young-woman, roughly)
*** luk thung: literally, 'child of the field', a genre of music from rural Isan
*** luk kreung: child half (one of Thai heritage mixed with other races)

** Even better, example use of the word 'cay' (heart, compare Mandarin xin):
*** cay dee: heart good (kind)
*** cay dam: heart black (unkind)
*** sia cay: lost heart (sad, don't know language well enough to account for preposition of sia :?)

* cultural importance of honorifics: the system of addressing became particularly complex during sophistication and growth in the Thai kingdom, but in general, everyday usage, it's not too different from other Sinitic languages with honorifics.

The same principal author was on Gmail chat with a friend earlier and decided to test some conjecture he heard about the similarities between Cantonese and Thai natural numbers. It kind-of, sort-of held up, enough to lead him to believe such a link intuitively, if he could not prove it anthropologically/linguistically:

* Cantonese: yut, yee, som, say, mmm, loke, chut, bock, gow, sup
* Thai: neung, song, sam, see, ham, hok, jet, phet, gao, sip

(He even greets me on the phone with 'wai' in a rising tone, which is Fujianese. The Thai name for the gesture of anjali is 'wai' albeit with a falling tone. Isn't that interesting?)

[Long standing error corrected by a friend. Shame on me -- tp]

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Since the divergence of the Tai people from southern China (how Thai got the aspirant 't' is another article and a terribly good pun), a number of foreign languages have enriched the vocabulary of Thai. This diversity can be attributable chiefly to ancient historical ties with IndiaCountry and a generally tolerant, sometimes even enthusiastic attitude towards foreigners and foreign culture (which has admittedly been punctuated by bouts of xenophobia, not entirely without reason).

The prevailing first influence is of the liturgical languages of northern India, PaliLanguage and SanskritLanguage, with such words as:

* boran: purana, old
* nakorn: nagar, city
* songkran: sankranti, seasonal festival
* soon: sunya, in a mathematical context: zero, in a philosophical or religious context, void or nothingness
* phasa: bhasha, language
* thevi: devi, goddess
* Ayutthaya: 'indestructible', the name of the ancient Thai capital and a nod to Ayodhya in modern-day Uttar Pradesh, the seat of the legendary Kosala kingdom ruled by Dasaratha (Tosrot) and Rama (Phra Lam)

...among many others. This practice is so deeply insinuated, it is difficult to give a full account of it; even the founder of the original Sukhothai kingdom, Sri Indraditya, derived his royal moniker from a Sanskrit honorific and the names of two Hindu gods, and named his son, Ramkhamhaeng, after Rama, the seventh avatar of Vishnu. In general, these Indic languages supply complex vocabulary, such as technical and religious terms, a relationship comparable to that between English and Latin. You can even find Sanskrit and Pali in little details like the numbering of the tone marks, which are mai ek, mai tho, mai tree, and mai jatawa, where each second word represents a Sanskrit numeral from one to four. Persian, Khmer, and Chinese have also played a significant role, but most recently, IIRC, the global lingua franca, English, has become the source of most loan words in Thai.

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The Thai script, an almost-but-not-quite phonetic alphasyllabary, strengthens the language's duality as both cosmopolitan and independent at once. King Ramkhamhaeng I, the third king of the Sukhothai Kingdom, developed the Thai script from that of Old Khmer in 1283 C.E. As such, it is a member of the family of Mon scripts, which are in turn derived primarily from the Grantha scripts of southern India, but appear to include a number of Devanagari-based characters. The consonants 'mor maa' and 'jor jing' in Thai alphabet are particularly good examples of this, as well as some vowels, such as 'sara u'. The Thai script therefore inherits the essential qualities of these other Brahmic scripts, such as unusual arrangement of characters with respect to eachother (e.g., diacritic vowels) and alphasyllabic pronunciation, where each consonant carries an implicit schwa sound which is pronounced along with the consonant unless overridden by an explicit vowel. Imagine the long 'uhhhh' sound you make when beginning to study number theory... now shorten it just to 'uh'. Often times, this schwa is informally elided at the end of the word. For instance: Singha beer brand goes to Singh... and yes, that does mean 'lion', as the astute reader may have suspected.

* Actually, this alphasyllabic effect described by the principal author is not the whole story. In between consonants with no intervening vowel, the implicit sound is a short 'oh' as, in 'oh, sh--' after you get your first paper on number theory back from the professor. But this behavior is clearly derived from the Indic alphasyllabaries, just slightly elaborated.

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'''The Origin of Farang'''

It seems nobody ever gets this right. The popular belief is that the word 'farang', a word meaning European foreigner, is derived from 'française'; this is a specious claim, although it is likely that 'farangset', which actually means French, relates to 'française'. The story of the word began when Persian traders applied the word farangg to the Franks with whom they traded. This has since become a general term for foreigners in a number of languages, as well as a race in Star Trek, and it is likely that Thai received the word indirectly through the Indians, who use a word 'Firang' to refer to a foreigner.  Which is primarily derived from two separate HindiLanguage words 'Fika' meaning pale and 'Rang' meaning color, Together 'Firang' meaning pale coloured, or perhaps through the Persians themselves, given the contact that occurred esp. during the Ayutthaya period.

Remember: Frank, not française.

-- TheerasakPhotha , PankajDoharey

Is there any significance to the fact that farang also means guava?  I've always been curious about that one.

* Both words are spelled the same when rendered in the native script, and therefore have the exact same phonetic and tonal signature; both syllables have low tone. You got me wondering about that now, too. I looked on WikiPedia for the locales that natively bear guava, and none of them are in South East Asia, meaning (I suppose) that the cultivation of farang plants followed foreign introduction by the same people! I believe there is a Tamil word for a certain New World crop that has 'pirangi' in its name; I just can't recall it offhand, and can't read Tamil either. Something similar may have happened with 'farang'. In any case, as you might have already guessed, this becomes an easy target for puns. (Ask someone who knows more than I. LOL. :)) -- TheerasakPhotha

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