termKhom, and the scripts it is not

อักษรขอม · akson khom

Central Thailand's sacred alphabet is Khmer. The north's is not.

What it is

The Khmer-derived script used in central Thailand for Pali, Sanskrit and anything sacred — including yant done there. It is not the only script a yant is written in, and in the north it is not the usual one.

The long version

Thai took the old Khmer script as its official script around the tenth century, because Thai had no writing system yet. Around the fifteenth century letters were added so it could write Thai, and the result was called khom — which is simply the Thai word for Khmer.

From then the two scripts divided the work: Thai script for everything secular, Khom for religious text. Its letterforms have barely changed since Sukhothai.

And in the north it is a different alphabet. A yant written in Lanna uses northern Thai — tua mueang, the Tham script — or Shan or Tai Lu, and in Laos the Lao Tham script. Lanna kept a writing system of its own for exactly the same job, and the yant done there are in it. A yant tells you where its lineage is from before it tells you what it does.

Root

Thai ขอม khom — Khmer, Cambodia; the modern word is เขมร khamen

the script is named after the people it was taken from

Connected to

• Sak yant What it writes.
• Lanna Where a different alphabet is used.

Named here by

• Sak yant The central Thai script for it. The north uses its own.

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