THAI TRANSLATION

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ABOUT THAI
From the 12th to the 20th century, Thailand was known as Siam and the language as Siamese. Today the language is called Thai and is spoken in the central plains of Thailand and in its capital city of Bangkok. Small populations use the language in the United States, the United Arab Emirates, and Singapore. As the official language in Thailand, it is used in education, the media, and government administration and bureaucracy. Thai is spoken by 65 million people throughout the world.

Thai is a member of the Southwestern subgroup of the Tai (or Dai) family of languages, which includes Lao (or Laotian) of Laos, Shan in Burma, and Southern Thai in Thailand's southern peninsula. These languages were once thought to be a branch of the Sino-Tibetan family and thus related to Chinese, but this relationship has now been rejected by most linguists.

The Thai alphabet dates from the 13th century and uses a script that is basically alphabetic in nature, with some elements of a syllabic system. The origin of the alphabet was an Indic script (Sanskrit and Pali), which was first adapted by the Khmer and then the Thai (by the King of Thailand). To this script he added a number of new symbols.

Thai is a tonal language where words can be distinguished by five contrastive tones. The vowels are not represented by individual letters but by marks written above, below, before, or after the consonants with which they are pronounced. Words are not separated from each other, and the letters generally flow uninterruptedly until the idea changes.

Nouns are not marked for number, gender, or case; verbs likewise are not inflected for person, number, tense, or other distinctions. In counting, Thai uses a system of classifiers where a classifier follows the noun and precedes the numeral. There are separate classifiers for nouns designating ordinary human beings, royalty, monks, and sacred objects and others for hermits and giants — basically, particles that indicate respect or deference towards the addressee or that convey the speaker's attitude toward the event or situation about which he is talking.