Thai Punctuation

[Richard W]

My intended route was to use Magazines / Newspapers to pick out words and then sentences. I wish someone in Thailand would invent punctuation though and spaces........between.............words

Clever hard spaces! (They've been implemented as white full stops.)

Thai's got plenty of punctuation. Flicking through the Cheewitrak magazine (their spelling, not mine), I see question marks, ellipses (triple dot), exclamation marks and quotes (66..99). The only native punctuation I see are space and, stretching a point, mai yamok. Fongman, angkhandeaw (horrible spelling! - the mark's the same shape as paiyannoi, which is used) and angkhankhu are conspicuous by their absence. I don't know whether to count the magazine's end of article mark (an elephant's head) as a fancy khomut. Full stops and hyphens are used, but chiefly within lexical items.

Inter-word spaces seem to be largely restricted to handwriting - I suspect Thais are taught to suppress these gaps. I thought I'd seen some when googling, but I think they must have been zero-width spaces (ZWSP) inserted to tell line-breaking software where the word breaks are.

Have you gone through a phase of marking the syllable divisions in Thai text? The obvious rules help a lot:

• Before preposed vowels (i.e. เ แ โ ใ ไ)
  
• After sara a (ะ)
  
• After karan (อ์), except on ร ล in loans from English.
  
• Not after a consonant with maitiakhu (อ็) except for the word ก็
  

Don't split what you recognise to be single words.