The other day I brought home from a Thai restaurant a wrapped piece of hard candy, looking forward with pleasure to the prospect of opening a swell book that Dad gave me a few years ago, to see whether AMIRA (in small type) is a fair transliteration of what appears to be the name of the candy or its maker.
My reference treats Thai and Lao scripts together, and to my initial surprise two of the letters (corresponding to ‘m’ and ‘r’) look more like Lao. The small print is like the Thai type in the book. I’m guessing that there is an informal mode of Thai script that retains more of the look of the common ancestor than is in the formal style.
The trouble with books of this sort, of course, is that they usually show only a formal style. Imagine that you are literate in Arabic and getting your first exposure to the Latin alphabet. You have a reference table showing the letters in Times Roman, and from it you have to decipher handwriting. How sure can you be what features are essential and which are decorative?
I do have one book that overcomes the problem somewhat by illustrating each of the major living scripts with a page of a newspaper, showing body type, headlines and a few decorative titles.