Reading Modern Fonts 4:

Additional Notes

It may initially seem strange to have such extreme variations of character forms. However, in English we have (and normally don't even notice) radically different forms of letters such as "a" and "g".

In time, and with practice, reading modern Thai fonts will become as easy as reading traditional ones.

Modern Thai typography has been heavily influenced by the West. Note the following characters' resemblance to a, s, w, u, and n.

 

The fonts used in these Notes are:

Font 0

Noto Sans Thai

Font 1

JS Thannaporn Regular

Font 2

Sawasdee Regular

Font 3

Serithai Regular

Font 4

Mitr Regular

For further practice reading on this site there's

1. Thai Language Alphabet Cards where in "options" one can select a modern font.
2. Thai Reader where the text can be displayed a modern font.

Additional recommended reading:

Cooper, D. 1996, "How do Thais tell letters apart?"

in The Fourth International Symposium on Language and Linguistics, Thailand, pp. 1163-1176. Institute of Language and Culture for Rural Development, Mahidol University. Explains differences in character form in a range of different styles of typeface. Can be downloaded from http://www.sealang.net/sala/archives/pdf8/cooper1996how.pdf. The paper also discusses Thai OCR (Optical Character recognition).

AUA Language Center Thai Course, Reading and Writing: Mostly Reading

ISBN 0-87727-511-4. Covers (amongst other things) different styles of Thai handwriting.