To those of you who have learnt the alphabet, you will have come across the objects each consonant is associated with. Most of the objects are pretty reasonable such as ศ ศาลา, but then you get the slightly out there ones like ษ ฤๅษี (h for hermit?!) ... and ฮ นกฮูก (how many of you have ever seen an owl in Thailand?) so I wonder if there's an official link of significance between each object and Thai history and culture or if it is 'just so'.

Owl's obviously native to Thailand... There used to be a lot of them in the past, Nowadays, they're quite rare,... you can only see it sometimes in the countryside and the forests...

There're at least 19 varieties of นกฮูก according the the bird guide... the popular ones include.... นกเค้าแมว Nok Kao Maew (cat look-alike bird), นกแสก (Nok Sak, a symbol of bad luck) etc...

As for ษ ฤาษี, it makes sense, since this alphabet's only used with the Sanskrit imported words... and those hermits are known to Thais through Indian literatures.

Yes, this is the kind of stuff I'm after...

There definitely is a link. Some letters are characters from the Ramakian, some are associated with religious rituals, some with agriculture and everyday Thai life in the past, some with Buddhism, and others are animals native to Thailand.

There isn't a lot of choice for the word for ฮ either. It can't occur in regularly developed native words, regularly developed Khmer words, or in P/S loans. Most of the words fall into one of the following categories:

• Onomatopoeic (e.g. นกฮูก) or expressive words - a lot of laughter and grunting!
  
• Dialect doublets of words in ร, e.g. ฮัก and รัก.
  
• Chinese loans
  
• English loans
  

What is the origin of the letter itself? I used to think it was a deliberate modification of อ, but now I suspect it may be a very curly ร that happened to loop back on itself.

The words for the retroflex (in Pali/Sanskrit, not Thai) letters are a fairly desperate set as well:

• ฏ ปฏัก - the preferred spelling is ประตัก.
  
• ฑ มณโฑ - but the correct form of the name would be transcribed as มันโททรี (Mandodari).
  
• ฒ ผู้เฒ่า - but the etymologically correct spelling is เถ้า.
  

On the topic of seeing owls in Thailand, a small flock (if that's the term?) of owls frequents the trees just outside my bedroom window in Chiang Mai. They tend to visit this spot just after a short downpour. During heavy rains I don't see them very often, and during long dry spells even less frequently. But after a hard rain in the middle of a dry spell, almost always.

After watching them numerous times I got on the Internet to view pictures of owls and their common habitats and I'm pretty sure the ones I'm seeing are tawny owls. Don't know what the Thais call them. My wife just uses the generic - it's the only time in her life she has seen them in the wild, she says, but she's from Bangkok.

They are curious creatures to watch. There's one that roosts alone, always on the same branch and in the same spot, and when I stare at him through the window, he stares right back, unflinching.

They sit there all day until just after sunset, then start swooping throught the trees making hooting sounds, which I assume means they're either mating or hunting.