Sentences, Words, and Syllables

A Thai sentence is a single unit, words are not separated from each other  by blanks.
To divide Thai sentences into words is not fundamentally different from hyphenating European words into syllables.

An English sentence written as a Thai-like sentence would appear as:

"theflowersofthefinestgreenhousesarenotwasted"

When this sentence is divided into individual words the context will be the decisive factor. A "green house" (i.e. a house painted green) is quite different from a "greenhouse" (i.e. a glass building for growing vegetables or flowers), but the context makes clear that this sentence is about greenhouses.
Other sentences could be rather conflicting: "Godisnowhere" could be divided into "God is nowhere" or "God is now here".
This phenomenon is not very different compared to what happens to European languages,  e.g. the English language:  a "rec-ord" (i.e. report, document) or a "re-cord" (i.e. maximum achievement)!

The Thai people read words in context.

A last example of a transcribed Thai sentence and a word-by-word translation (actually the Thai write sentences without spaces):


    mi: sa:mi:       phanraja:   ramruaj   khu:      nung  maj   mi:     lu:k
    is   husband   wife          rich         couple  one    not    have  child

If the word ramruaj ร่ำรวย is divided into 'ram' ร่ำ and 'ruaj' รวย the word  'ram' could be placed at the end of the sentence:
    mi: sa:mi:       phanraja:   ram
However, that would change the meaning of the sentence. 'Ram' means "to scent" (spraying perfume), so the meaning of this text line would be changed to: "is husband wife spraying perfume".
This is absolutely not allowed.


Newspapers require narrow columns. Therefore newspapers do wish to hyphenate Thai words, but only at boundaries that can not be misintepreted. The Thai Hyphenator consists of two layers, the first layer divides sentences into words, the second layer divides words into syllables. The segmentation of words is distinguishable from the division in syllables.
The Thai word for "chairman", a compound with the Sanskrit prefix pra, can be divided as: ประ^ธานี.
The word date (day of the month or year) วันที่ can not be split into วัน and ที่, because the meaning would become day followed by ¹) place, ²) in , ³) those, that, plus the other words in the sentence.
Despite this limitation a high density of  hyphenation can be realized thanks to *TALŌ's two-layer technology of the Thai language model.