To start with, I don't speak Thai, but when I was there recently I was told that the written language has 44 consonants, 22 vowels, the vowels are placed in and around the consonants in non-linear fashion, and to top it all off, many of the characters look, to my perhaps ignorant foreign eye to be nearly identical. If this characterization is in fact accurate, how did it come about? How much of the script was invented natively? Did the script inherit these quirks from somewhere else? And when, historically, did all this happen?