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| ![]() Special Symbols
The following special symbols are used in Thai writing.
æ RepetitionThe repetition character indicates a repetition of the previous word. Repeated words are often used to add emphasis or intensify the meaning.
The repetition character itself is called ÂÁ¡ /yaH mohkH/.
Ï AbbreviationThis appears most famously in the Thai name of the capitol city which Westerners call Bangkok. The actual name of the city, the longest place name in the world, is:Using the abbreviation symbol, the name is commonly abbreviated as follows: ¡ÃØ§à·¾Ï /groongM thaehpF/. This symbol is called à»ÂÂÒŹéÍ /bpeeuyM yaanM naawyH/.
ÏÅÏ Et ceteraThis symbol is called à»ÂÂÒÅãËè /bpeeuyM yaanM yaiL/.
-ì SilenceThe silence character is placed over a consonant which is not pronounced. It is frequently used in loanwords (words borrowed from another language and spelled phonemically with the Thai alphabet) to indicate that the original word had a letter which the Thai do not pronounce. In the following example, each consonant à carries the silence marker since there is no final /-r/ phoneme in Thai:
The silence mark itself is called ¡ÒÃѹµì /gaaM ran[d]M/. There are also a Thai few words in which the final consonant or vowel (or occasionally even a non final consonant) is silent although not marked with the gaaran; for example, ¨Ñ¡Ã /jak[r]L/ does not have a gaaran for the final consonant Ã. The vowel -Ô in ÒµÔ /yaatF/ is silent, so the the word should be pronounced as shown, not "yaadti." This word also does not contain the gaaran to indicate that the final vowel is silent. There are other special cases. For example, the consonant cluster ·Ã is often treated as a single consonant, thus in the word ¨Ñ¹·Ãì /janM/ the gaaran indicates that the last two consonants are both silent. ฿ BahtThe Thai currency symbol, used as a prefix on numeric ºÒ· amounts.
๏ ParagraphKnown as ¿Í§Áѹ , or informally the "bird's eye" µÒä¡è , this symbol can be used to indicate the beginning
of paragraphs, but is now used only for special poetic or artistic effect.
-Ú Phinthu (¾Ô¹·Ø)This archaic orthography is nowadays mostly used in dictionaries to disambiguate pronunciation. In our online dictionary, the symbol, if used, only appears in a word at the top of its main definition page. The symbol can be used in two ways:
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