> I learnt to speak then read and write a bit of Thai nearly 20 years ago.
> Thai has alphabetical characters - 70 odd of them - not the Japanese picture
> representations of ideas.  

Actually, Japanese has two different syllabic alphabets with about 50
characters, plus thousands of "kanji" (the really complicated
Chinese-like ones).  

> However Thai doesn't have much of a concept of a
> word.  It is written as a long sequence of letters with gaps for the breaks
> between sentences.  I don't remember there being any punctuation at all in
> my beginner's reader, nor on things I saw while I was there.  I might have
> missed something like quotation marks though.

That's very interesting.  Even though it doesn't use spaces, Japanese does 
have a pretty clear concept of a word - or maybe they just made it up to
teach to foreigners ;-)

Weronika

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