Linguistics of Thailand — roots, borrowings, and the sound carried between scripts
Thai writes English in Thai letters, constantly, and the result cannot be read back by rule. Hand a romanizer the shopfront ไนท์บาร์ซาร์ and it returns Naibasa — correctly, by its own rules, because it is sounding out letters that do not spell a Thai word. The sign says Night Bazaar.
Thai has its own word-family for what is going on, and it is a better map than any English scheme: ศัพท์ (sap) is a word, and the compounds name the three questions this section keeps asking.
Not what a word means but why it means that. Most of Thai's abstract vocabulary is Pali and Sanskrit layered on a Tai core; the lexicon orders each word's senses from core to figurative and files every compound under the sense that motivates it.
English written in Thai letters, which Thailand does constantly and no romanizer can read back. A catalogue of the words, each with what the letter rules make of it and what it actually says.
Romanisation — RTGS, the Royal Society's rules, which follow the sound and drop the tones on purpose. It is the machinery underneath the other two, and the place where both of them break.
Those three ask about a word's history. This one asks where it is said — and the register can answer it, because 43,855 Thai temple names are almost entirely landscape vocabulary: what the ground does here, in the words the people who named it used.
Asked what its temples call a hill, the country divides along lines nobody drew for it. ดอย or ม่อน leads in all eight provinces of the old Lanna kingdom, and เขา — the standard Central Thai word — leads in none of them. โนน leads in twenty provinces; Isan has twenty. ควน leads in four, all southern.