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The special characters page of my English keyboard on Android contains what appears to be a Thai character (ฯ). I've so far found that it is used as a kind of punctuation or phrase-shortening particle in Thai orthography, but haven't had any success figuring out why it's on my keyboard. I can only assume that it has some broader significance. What (if any) usage does this character have outside of Thai that justifies its presence on a standard issue phone keyboard?

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    Can I get a downvote explanation? If the question is considered off topic, I'll overhaul it to be more relevant.
    – Alex Clough
    May 26, 2017 at 17:54
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    Language and character identification questions are generally off-topic here. I have a guess what it is, nevertheless.
    – Sir Cornflakes
    May 26, 2017 at 17:58
  • @jknappen any suggestions as to where I should take questions of this sort in the future?
    – Alex Clough
    May 26, 2017 at 18:06
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    Where did you get your phone, Alex? Perhaps in Thailand? Can it be a bug in the localization of some Chinese branded phone?
    – Artemij Keidan
    May 27, 2017 at 1:09
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    The normal English keyboard wouldn't have the upside down ? or !, or any of those Greek letters. I doubt you are actually looking at an English keyboard.
    – curiousdannii ♦
    May 28, 2017 at 2:45

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@Alex Clough: this symbol (ฯ) is a Thai symbol that demonstrates that the word(s) before it has been abbreviated; for whatever reason, the lexicologists/orthographers working with the text recognition software and the decision of what characters to include in the creation of the keyboard for their product decided that this character was recognizable enough and used by enough people to warrant inclusion.

The first website explains it very concisely, the second one isn't quite as clear but gives several examples of how it isn't necessarily restricted to just the previous word, but also the phrase (to some degree, I can't be entirely sure, I don't speak Thai).

https://www.thai2english.com/dictionary/1264953.html

https://www.thai2english.com/dictionary/1458563.html

I hope this was helpful!!

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    See also en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ฯ. Unicode U+0E2F, ฯ THAI CHARACTER PAIYANNOI. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_11940: "ISO 11940:1998 distinguishes the abbreviation symbol paiyannoi (ฯ) from the sentence terminator angkhandiao (ฯ), even though neither the national character standard TIS 620-2533 nor Unicode Version 5.0 distinguishes them." (cont)
    – Nick Nicholas
    Jul 21, 2018 at 7:20
  • thailandqa.com/forum/…: "Paiyan Noi (ฯ) is an abbreviation sign, representing omitted text. Its function is like elipsis, although the more correspondent Thai punctuation mark for elipsis is Paiyan Yai (ฯลฯ).". nectec.or.th/it-standards/thaistd.pdf: "Paiyan Noi (7) or omission sign, and Mai Yamok (8) or repetition sign, are contemporary punctuation marks generally used in documents."
    – Nick Nicholas
    Jul 21, 2018 at 7:20
  • Is this symbol used in combination with text in the Latin Script (e.g., English text or Thai transcribed into Latin Script)?
    – Sir Cornflakes
    Jul 22, 2018 at 12:57
  • This is a better answer since it addresses the usage of the character I actually have rather than conjecturing that it was supposed to be a Tironian note (a codepoint lookup confirms that it really is encoded as a Thai character on my keyboard).
    – Alex Clough
    Jul 22, 2018 at 20:40

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