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THE ALPHABET
18 are vowels and 23 are consonants. The vowel inherent in every consonant is the long a. The Ahom character does not contain the letters y and w.
SIAMESE CHARACTER
Siam is nowadays the one independent Thai state in existence; its area is over 200,000 sq. miles and its population numbers about 12,000,000 people. The Siamese are without doubt the most civilized and advanced Shan people. Siamese is spoken by several million people in southern and central Siam and increasingly in northern Siam, as also in French Indo-China and in the Amherst and Mergui districts of Burma. Siamese possesses, like some Chinese dialects five or six tones (see p. 98f.); it has no prefixes whatever.
Origin
The origin of the Siamese script is still not quite clear. The earliest known Siamese inscription, discovered at Sukhotai or Sukhodaya and now in the National Library of Bangkok, is a curious and unique document. It is a stumpy stone obelisk containing exactly 1,500 words; it bears the date of 1214 Saka era (A.D. 1292/3), and it tells that its author, King Ram Khamheng, was writing the Siamese language for the first time. If Ram Khamheng did actually invent the Siamese script, he probably based it on the Khmer character. C. B. Bradley has recently invalidated both the generally accepted theory which considered the Siamese character as being of Sinhalese Pali origin, and the rival theory which derived it from the Burmese script, on the grounds that Siamese writing contains all the letters of the Grantha character which are not found in Pali or Burmese, and that the single letters of the Sukhotai inscription have no internal resemblance to the signs of the Sinhalese Pali texts or of the Burmese script, although the Siamese letters, being four-square, give externally an impression similar to that of the Pali script. Indeed, there is no doubt that the Buddhist monks had greatly influenced the spread of the knowledge of writing amongst the Siamese, and that the Buddhist Siamese monks knew and also used the Pali language and script.
The script of the Sukhotai inscription "is singularly bold, erect, foursquare, with gently rounded corners, beautifully aligned and singularly clear" (C. B. Bradley). In it, all the letters, consonants and vowels alike, are written on the same line, but shortly afterwards a change was introduced, and many of the vowels were written either above or below the consonants.
Development
There are no written documents extant of the two centuries following the Sukhotai period, but there is no doubt that the modern Siamese writing is a descendant of the Sukhotai script. On the whole, it may be said that the later development of the script does not present great changes;
