Beowulf

11 hours ago, surfdog said:

 

so in English we imperative use implies a command to the listener, however in Thai it would be almost always contextual and dependent on the things we hear and say everday?

So for example my original example นอนดีๆนะครับ would never be construed as "I am sleeping so good" but always as "I hope you sleep well."? Beccause this meaning is attached to this phrase?

But then "นอนดีครับ" can be a reply to a question. Just wondering about reduplication (doubling of ดี) or the particle นะ, if these signal the imperative, e.g. listener knows it is imperative because that is what "people usually say"

Which brings to op's original question:

มีวันดีครับ - in trying to say the English phrase "(I hope you) Have a good day

Could it be changed to

มีวันดีๆนะครับ - and listener then understands it is the imperative? Although foreign sounding and outside normal registar.

And finally has anybody actually heard a Thai native speaker wish another "ขอให้มีวันดีครับ" just because I havn't doesn't mean it isn't a thing somewhere, and would solve the op's dillema of wishing other people a good day just like he would back home.

I'm not sure we can say that Thai has an imperative mood. You can say that in English the imperative is formed by dropping the subject/pronoun and using the bare infinitive, and that its basic use is for giving commands but it can also be used for expressing wishes or making invitations. What is there that is like that in Thai? Nothing, I would say. We can tell that sleep well is an imperative because the pronoun is missing and we can't use it with a subject other than you. In other words, we can contrast it with the indicative form, where - leaving aside a few special cases - the pronoun has to be stated and can be anything that makes sense with the particular verb. The Thai equivalent of sleep well that I hear is ฝันดี, but can you really contrast that with the indicative form, and if not, what is the point of saying that one is imperative and one is indicative?

The one thing that makes me doubt this is that อย่า and ห้าม look like negative imperatives. I had a teacher tell me that the subject of อย่า could be we, but with respect to her I am not sure.

Anyway, whether or not you want to call ฝันดี an imperative, the question is why you don't need a formula like ขอให้ in that case, when you do in the case we discussed before (it's always hard to be 100% sure what you have and haven't heard, but I can see I have had ขอให้มีวันที่ดีสำหรับคุณ on WhatsApp).

I think the answer is to do with stative and dynamic verbs. If the verb you need is stative in Thai, like มี, then what you are wishing for is seen as a state - something that happens to the person, rather than something they do themselves. On the other hand, if the verb is dynamic, like ฝัน, it is seen as their own action. That is so even if the action is one you can't really control, like dreaming - it's more of a grammatical thing than a practical one. Logically enough, if whatever you are wishing for is not viewed as something that the person would do themselves, Thai doesn't let you tell them to do it, so you can't use the ฝันดี construction. Where you can use it, although you are literally telling them to do something, we understand it as a wish because we know it is something they would want for themselves.

If what you are wishing for is expressed with a noun, like happiness or love, you will again need the ขอให้ because these are states and are not expressed using a dynamic verb.

11 hours ago, surfdog said:

Except for ไป, ขอให้ definitely not needed to use ไป as imperative but still definitely contextual. Go wash the car, go away, go to school, etc.

Yes, it's not that ขอให้ makes something an imperative or corresponds to the imperative in English - it's a formula for expressing a wish so wouldn't be used in commands like go wash the car etc.

On 1/3/2019 at 2:36 PM, surfdog said:

figured it out, "have a good day" is a saying, thus not held to grammar rules.

Not sure about that - some sayings are so old that the grammar rules don't really fit today's English - but this one is just fine IMO. It's a use of the imperative to express a wish or invitation. If it was really a saying / fixed expression it wouldn't generalize, but you can say 'have a nice life', 'have a fun night', 'have a fantastic trip', 'show em how it's done' etc. etc. If the grammar rules couldn't accommodate that, there would be something wrong.

Not counting cases where the pronoun is in a question and is just not repeated in the answer (What are you going to do now? Have a nap), English only lets you drop it in the imperative, and in the imperative the subject is always 'you'. So if I say 'have another coffee' or 'don't go in there', you instinctively know I mean 'you', and if I say 'have a great time tonight' you know I am not coming with. If I want to include myself, I have to use another construction like 'let's have another coffee'. As English speakers we do this without thinking, but really it's quite complicated. If you grow up speaking a language like Thai, one that lets you drop the pronoun all the time, it's quite a leap to even notice that it has been dropped, let alone realize that that means a) it's an imperative so must be a command, wish or invitation and b) the subject has to be 'you'.

On 1/3/2019 at 2:36 PM, surfdog said:

"ขอให้...

1:1 translation, you must add the verb hope but subject and pronoun can be deleted because Thai grammar allows that in converstion.

In English, if you drop the pronoun you have already signaled that it is an imperative - which can only be a wish in this context - but in Thai you can drop the pronoun any old time, so the fact that it's missing doesn't tell you anything, and you need ขอให้.

On 12/23/2018 at 8:50 PM, Richard W said:

The answer is that the Thais seem to have got the letters from other SE Asians who only had plain /h/.  Moreover, ฮ seems to be a late addition to the alphabet, added after the number of Thai tones had doubled (in a simple model).  Khmer shows a similar pattern, where the letter matching ห also patterns with the Indic voiceless characters rather than the Indic voiced characters.

 

Thai words beginning with ฮ seem to fall into three groups - modifications of words beginning with ร (e.g. ฮัก from รัก), onomatopoeic words, and loanwords.  The neighbours of Southern and Central Thai replaced initial /r/ with /h/, and some of this change seeped into Central Thai.  Posh words in the neighbouring dialects resisted the change by turning /r/ to /l/.

Thanks, very interesting. Onomatopeic words are in a category of their own, I'd say, and leaving those aside it sounds as though Thai may not have needed a low-class /h/ at the time. The need may only have arisen later - if you are going to replace /r/ with something it has to be a low class consonant really, and then there are loanwords with tones that don't fit the Thai system.

On 12/23/2018 at 8:50 PM, Richard W said:

ฬ does not correspond to a double letter in Sanskrit.  It serves as a letter for Pali, which between vowels has ฬ where Sanskrit has ฑ, e.g. the Thai words for sport, namely กีฬา from Pali and กรีฑา from Sanskrit.

I got that from a website somewhere, although there was nothing to back it up. It seems incredibly meticulous to use a different letter to reflect that historical twist - but then the system is incredibly meticulous so I shouldn't really be surprised.

On 12/15/2018 at 3:59 AM, tgeezer said:

I understand what you mean, this sort of thing is what linguists discuss but of limited value to most people.

Well, everyone learns in a different way. When I first came across the tone rules and consonant classes I thought you just had to memorise the consonant classes, and I hate memorising things. After I found out (thanks to thai-language.com) that the liquids are always low, the stops are always mid and the fricatives can be either high or low, I progressed a lot faster - plus, for me it's way more interesting to learn by understanding things than by rote. This new insight into way the alphabet is put together completes the picture by telling me which of the fricatives are high and which are low. For some reason I always had a mental block about ภ - now it's gone. Same for ศ. Also, I won't forget alphabetical order again. So for me there's quite a bit of practical value in this knowledge - but each to their own, of course.

I've just found out that the order of the Thai alphabet is based on the Sanskrit, and that the Sanskrit order has a logic to it that is not too hard to work out if you are looking at the Sanskrit consonants, but near enough impossible if you are looking at the Thai.

The handful of letters that do not seem to represent Sanskrit consonants have their own logic. What the historical sequence of events was I don't know, but you can look at them as having been created by modifiying one of the Sanskrit characters. If the new character is simpler (as in the case of ด, seen as a simplified ต) it goes in just before. If it is more complex (as in the case of ฝ, seen as ผ with a tail) it goes in just after. These are the only departures from the Sanskrit order.

I'm pleased with this little discovery - it makes it easy to remember alphabetical order and tells you the consonant class of the rarely-used letters. It clears up a few other puzzles too, like why the consonant T has more variants than any of the others, and why some similar sounds are far apart when others are clustered together.

There are still a few questions though. The set of high class consonants in Thai is nearly a perfect match with the set of unvoiced aspirated consonants from Sanskrit, but there are two exceptions. One is easy to explain - khaw khuat was just a duplication of khaw khai (which explains where it appears in the alphabet and also why it became obsolete), but the other one isn't. The Sanskrit h was apparently voiced, which means that ห ought to have been a low consonant, and the Thai creation (ฮ, derived from อ by making it more complex, so inserted just afterwards) should have been the high class h.

Also, while Sanskrit had any number of conjuncts for combinations of letters, only one (ฬ, representing a double l) appears in the Thai alphabet. It appears after the simple consonants but before the null consonant, which makes sense - but why did Thai need a letter for this conjunct, and none of the others?

If anyone else is interested in this stuff, I'd be grateful for any thoughts  - especially on those last two issues. I found out that the Sanskrit word for a Bengal kite was jilla, which contains the double l and may be the reason for the ฬ in จุฬา, but that's about as far as I have got so far.

The Sanskrit order I am talking about is:

Consonant types are ordered from most occlusive to least occlusive (so plosives first, h second last, null consonant last)

Within each type, sets of consonants are ordered according to the point of articulation (from the back of the mouth to the lips)

Within each set (e.g. plosives having the point of articulation at the back of the mouth, so gs and ks), individual consonants are ordered according to voicing and aspiration, as follows: unvoiced unaspirated (becoming mid class in Thai), unvoiced aspirated (becoming high), voiced unaspirated (low) voiced aspirated (low) nasal (low).

This has to be put together with the fact that Sanskrit did not all of those varieties for every type of consonant - and some are just impossible e.g. you can't have an unaspirated h.

When I was in the middle of this I came across an interesting article by Richard Wordingham on the Thai Language site (the forum there doesn't seem to be active ATM). He has put it together in a slightly different way - quite possibly more historically informed - but says that the liquids (ย ร ล ว) are just a list, whereas they follow the same order as the plosives (point of articulation moving forward) and there is a reason why they appear between the plosives (which are more occlusive) and the sibilants (which are less occlusive). BTW the Sanskrit logic says that the character after ฌ (i.e ญ) would originally have represented ñ as in España - this explains why (unlike ย) it says n when it is a final consonant, and also why the y sounds are so far apart in the alphabet.