JHicks

I can't see it being a hard limit, I'm sure it just means you need to change up your training if you want to do more than 20 reps. I would think the one handed pushup might be too hard at this point but there is a variant where you put one hand on something a few inches off the floor (like a basketball, or sometimes you can use the edge of the sofa). That might make it manageable. I don't really get the "how many reps..." thing anyway - it should be "how hard can you make it and still do 8 reps x 3".

1 minute ago, Nout said:

Nobody is blaming migrants. That is [Thaiwrath's] inference.

They went so far out of their way on the news to say that they weren't blaming the migrants, and that the priority was to make sure they get the treatment they need whether they're here legally or illegally, that there must be an undercurrent of blame that they're trying to counter.

2 minutes ago, ballpoint said:

Hotels, shopping centres, large shops and restaurants were closed.  Supermarkets remained open, but some goods were cordoned off.  Road blocks were set up in a number of provinces, though only on one occasion did I see them stopping all traffic and asking where you were going.  However, life pretty much carried on as normal in rural areas.

Thanks for that info. What about air travel between provinces? I get out of ASQ in Bangkok shortly and am supposed to be meeting someone I haven't seen for over a year down in Hat Yai. As another poster rightly said the lockdown decision is not about tourists or expats, but having come this far it'll be a blow not to be able to make the final leg of the journey.

There's a difference in register between the rising tone version and the high tone version, but they mean the same thing. Essentially, the high tone version is used in everyday speech and rising tone version is used in (very) careful speech.

This difference doesn't quite map onto the spelling difference though, because although the ไหม spelling does indicate a rising tone, it's often read with a high tone. It's the same with เขา, which is sometimes written เค้า but can be read with a high tone even when written เขา.

When reading this type of word, I find it extremely difficult to know whether the spelling is supposed to indicate the tone. Sometimes the same document will use both, which ought to make it easy, but I've certainly seen manga that use ชั้น in some places and ฉัน in others, with no obvious difference in the level of formality or the status of the protagonists. Therefore, I think there's probably more to it than the careful/casual thing. It could well be to do with stress and prosody but I haven't figured out what just what yet. If you have examples of ไหม and มั้ย in the same document it'd be interesting to see them.

2 hours ago, DavisH said:

Thailand was the first country to receive infections outside of China. More than just luck was involved Perhaps you forgot the country-wide lockdown, curfew, alcohol ban and many businesses and government shut down for 6 weeks or so. Plus 1M+ health volunteers doing contact tracing.

I basically agree with you on that but it's hard to compare things as they are now with things as they were back then. Certainly there were a lot of people coming from China around CNY, but although the outbreak was under way in Wuhan at that time, the numbers there were relatively low compared to what has been since. Also, Wuhan is a tiny part of a huge country and there was very very little covid in the rest of China. You'd need more stats to work it out exactly, but the working assumption has to be that there's a lot more covid in Thailand right now than there was then.

2 hours ago, DavisH said:

I don't see the current spread as spiraling put of control Thais are very scared of getting infected. I would expect mask wearing to now become more common in public. Even my school is shut until 4th Jan and we are on the outskirts of BKK.

I think we're well past the point where the restrictions they put in place last time round were effective, so while I haven't given up hope, I'm not confident they will be effective this time. I guess we'll find out over the next month or so.

There are a quite a few books on this list that look interesting, but they are old editions and don't seem to be available any more. I've had a google but can't find newer editions. I'm especially interested in the titles below:

ชนิดของคำในภาษาไทย: การวิเคราะห์ทางวากยสัมพันธ์ [Parts of Speech in Thai: A Syntactic Analysis] by อาจารย์ อมรา ประสิทธิ์รัฐสินธุ์ [Amara Prasithrathsint]
 

หน่วยสร้างที่มีข้อขัดแย้งในไวยากรณ์ไทย [Controversial Constructions in Thai Grammar] by อมรา ประสิทธิ์รัฐสินธุ์ [Amara Prasithrathsint]

ภาษาศาสตร์ภาษาไทย [Thai Linguistics] by เรืองเดช ปันเขื่อนขัติย์ [Ruengdet Pankhuenkhat, M.A., Ph.D. (Linguistics)]

Does anyone know of a new edition of any of these, or anything else in the same vein that's currently available?

38 minutes ago, ThailandRyan said:

How do you know it was brought into he country by a migrant worker is a serious question.  Is it known for sure or is it just from what the idiot Health MP Anutin has stated.  Could it have been a hand me down from a Thai who had come back from Myanmar and never surfaced to admit entering illegally and was asymptomatic and passed it on again and then again.  No one will ever know the cause of this cluster, so stop slamming migrants and making unsubstantiated accusations.

I don't think anyone knows that for sure. It doesn't matter where this outbreak came from - they need to shut the door on possible routes of entry from countries that have higher incidence, whether you're talking about tourists from richer countries or migrants who have no option but to work in the grey economy (and probably nowhere to turn if they're sick). That's not slamming anybody, and it's not accusing anybody of being a carrier as if that was some sort of sin - it's just recognising the risks and the practical steps that can and should be taken to keep everybody safe.

30 minutes ago, spidermike007 said:

As Covid cases are spiking in Myanmar, an extraordinary amount of vigilance, and manpower should have been employed to make sure the borders are sealed tight as a drum.

Exactly. They even had a warning with the border crossings up north - first question should have been "where else might this happen?"

Anyway it's done now, important thing is where they go from here.

What were the numbers like when they brought in the restrictions last time round?

11 hours ago, tgeezer said:

I was wondering only about the apparent contradiction.

I'm not seeing one. Do you mean that if a vowel is followed by a glottal stop then, because the glottal stop is unvoiced, the vowel itself must be unvoiced? Why should that be?

It didn't occur to me that it might be controversial to say that, in principle, a short vowel with no final is followed by a glottal stop, but that the glottal stop is sometimes deleted. If I need support for that there is the example from forvo I have already linked to, and A Reference Grammar of Thai says:

Glottal stop occurrence is largely predictable; (i) it appears when no initial consonant is present ...  and (ii) when no final consonant appears after a short vowel ... The glottal stop is deleted when a short vowel with no final consonant appears as the first element of a compound word. This is often accompanied by a neutralization of tone especially when the original tone is low ... Tone neutralization sometimes does not occur on a high-tone syllable after glottal stop deletion... Also, glottal stop deletion and tone neutralization do not occur on reduplicated words.

11 hours ago, tgeezer said:

No I am not talking about endings because พยัญชนะ as endings are ตัวสะกด .  Actually so is "mmmmmmmm" is it not?

Sure but is the /s/ ending live or dead? As long all dead syllables end in stops and all syllables ending in stops are dead, it's easiest to define dead syllables and let live syllables be "the rest". That works for traditional Thai words but there's been a change in the approach to loanwords. There are loads of old loanwords ending with ส/ศ/ษ but of course the pronunciation is /t/. With the more recent English loanwords, the pronunciation is often /s/. /s/ is not a stop (the whole reason it used to be converted to /t/ was to make it into a stop) so if it is dead, that tells us something about what really makes a syllable dead.

Well, vowels are normally voiced unless you're whispering. There are some languages where they can be devoiced in specific contexts but the basic form of the vowel is still voiced. It's not totally clear whether there are any languages where the basic form is unvoiced. The linguists Peter Ladefoged and Ian Maddison say (in "Sounds of the World's Languages") that some Amer-Indian languages "appear" to have this kind of vowel, and that in other languages the status of unvoiced vowels (i.e. whether they are just variants or vowels in their own right) is "problematic". In the specific case of Thai, the ends of vowels are quite often devoiced (think of ปะ, for example) but I'm not sure whether the devoicing ever covers the whole thing, and anyway it's clear that all the vowels are voiced in their basic / citation form. I think what the book says is fair enough.

On point 3, it depends what you think they mean. You can say "mmmmmmmmm", for example, but if they mean that a Thai syllable cannot consist of a consonant by itself, that seems fair enough and I can't think of any exceptions. In principle you can have a "syllabic consonant", but I'm fairly sure there aren't any in Thai.

Are you raising this in relation to live / dead endings? What do you think of the ending /s/ that is now relatively common in loanwords? Live or dead? If dead, is it still best to define dead endings and let live endings be "everything else"?

16 hours ago, welshguy said:

If all the foreigners are tested, and are negative, before flying..how do they "catch" covid in quarrantine? Its either at airport/on way to airport/on plane etc etc...  Or in the quarrantine?   

 

Of course....the untested Thais on the flight...could be the cause...

Imagine you take a flight on the 15th of the month. If there's no testing, the person next to you will be infectious (on average) if they picked up the virus between the 1st and the 12th. Any sooner and it will have cleared their system. Any later and they can't yet pass it on. That means the Thais have about a 12 day window to pick up the virus and be infectious on the plane.

If you test on the 12th of the month, you won't catch anything picked up after the 9th, so the falangs have about a 4 day window to pick up the virus and be infectious on the plane.

In other words testing reduces the risk that the passenger will be infectious by about 65%. That's well worthwhile, but it doesn't mean there are no infectious falangs on the flight. If a good majority of the passengers on the flight are falangs, you are more likely to pick it up from one of them than from a Thai. On my flight there were at least 5 falangs for every Thai.

If you believe that masks are effective (I do) then you've got to look at at that too. I can only go on what I saw on my flight, which was that the Thais kept them on properly the whole time, whereas the vast majority of the falangs treated them as optional. That means that in my case there was way way more chance of picking up the virus from another falang than from a Thai.

It could be that the reason the falangs thought they didn't need to bother with masks was that they'd just been tested... but testing plus no mask is probably no better than no testing plus mask, so if that's the case it makes testing fairly pointless.

3 hours ago, tgeezer said:

How do you stop a vowel cut off with a glottal stop becoming a แม่กก ending?

It's not in danger of becoming a final ก sound - just doesn't sound similar. Final glottal stops are probably easiest to hear when a word is pronounced in isolation (as I say, they're often deleted in connected speech). There's an example on the link here.

3 hours ago, tgeezer said:

Do you see "i" as ไอ ? Is the "open i"  not a diphthong to some degree?  I see ไ more so than "i" . 

They're phonetically similar, for sure. I'd say there are some differences in the exact start and end points, but they're fairly minor. The Thai version tends to dwell on the first sound and then quickly switch to the second ,whereas the English one tends to blend the whole thing together. That's probably why you don't get the same impression of two distinct sounds that you often get with ไ. Overall, still very similar sounds.

That said, if you call something a diphthong you are saying it consists of two vowels, whereas for all the reasons we've discussed, the ย that it built into ไ is better seen as a consonant ending than as a vowel - so I wouldn't call ไ a diphthong, but this isn't due to the way it sounds so much as the way it functions. A true diphthong like เอือ can be followed by a final consonant like any other vowel, whereas ไ can't (because it's already got one). The English sound is normally regarded as a diphthong (IPA is /aɪ/, so two vowel sounds) and sure enough it acts like a vowel.

7 hours ago, tgeezer said:

JHicks: I am afraid that I have none of the tech. terms  that you have because I haven’t studied English books. I think that we agree because  you say that you don’t understand then put it in your own words! To me คำตาย means just that, I may be enunciating a glottal stop but I don’t see it in those terms. 
 

I have just looked out a schoolbook หลักภาษาไทย to see if I can find glottal stop explained. . I haven’t found that but I was surprised to find คำเป็น and คำตาย explained, they have listed อำ ไ ใ เอา as คำเป็น, obviously the readers are not expected to be able to work it out! 
 

A stop is anything that blocks the airflow through the mouth and nose. * You can create the blockage with the lips (p), the tongue (t, k) or by pressing the vocal cords together so that no air can get through (a glottal stop). If you say butter cockney style, like ba'uh, the bit in the middle is a glottal stop.

If you can keep a sound going, as in ammmmmmm, aayyyyyyyyyyyy, oowwwwwwww, that's a sure sign it's not a stop.

Stops can be voiced or unvoiced and aspirated or unaspirated, but in Thai, only the unvoiced unaspirated type is allowed at the end of a syllable.

Everything that ends in a stop is a dead syllable. Everything else is a live syllable.

Where a short vowel has no final consonant it is cut off by a glottal stop instead. ** That's why a short vowel with no final consonant is a dead syllable. ไ has a final consonant built in, so this rule does not apply.

* On some definitions it's just the airflow through the mouth that counts, and it doesn't matter if the nose is still open. You can define the term either way but the first way works better for Thai.

** The glottal stop may be deleted in speech but it is still there "underneath" or "in principle". Different claims have been made about what happens to the tones in this situation.

2 hours ago, tgeezer said:

This is an interesting topic. When I first set out to explain the problem of ไม้ needing ไม้โท when we were taught that ไ is a short vowel I thought that I had to fudge it but as I wrote I saw that it was logical as I think you will agree.  

It's a vowel symbol that usually has a short sound, so I see where they were going with that (but also why it would be confusing). I think the confusion stems from:

1. Implying that what makes a syllable like แตะ dead is the duration of the vowel, when it is the fact that the vowel is terminated by a glottal stop,

2. Not differentiating between vowel symbols and vowel sounds.

ไ is the same as อัย, which makes it a vowel plus a final consonant (as discussed above, it's phonetically a semiconsonant, and could potentially be treated either as a vowel or a consonant, but it so happens that in the Thai sound system it is treated as a consonant). The glottal stop that cuts off short vowels is for syllables with no final consonant, so doesn't apply to ไ. That means that it will always be live, no matter how short you make it.

The fact that ไ incorporates a final consonant means that it is a vowel only in the sense that it is written with a vowel symbol (like อำ). It is not a vowel in the sense of being entirely made up of vowel sounds... so I agree that the analogy you originally made with อำ is important, but I don't think it has much to do with duration.

2 hours ago, tgeezer said:

When I first learnt, I was told that there were six endings k,p,t,m,n,g and it wasn't until I started reading Thai that I learned that there are three more แม่ก.กา , แม่เกอว, แม่เกย so the real answer to your question is ย is not in the family of แม่ กน is because...

Something seems to have gone wrong with this list. I think you mean ng at the end of the English list, but then there are only two more. I also don't understand why anyone would think that ย was in แม่กน, i.e. the set of consonants that are pronounced /n/ in final position.

2 hours ago, tgeezer said:

it belongs to แม่เกย  in fact the only child! 

Yes exactly. The fact that it has a แม่ shows you that it is treated in traditional Thai grammar as a consonant ending. Traditional English grammar has been fairly well blown apart, so you can't always assume that what generations of kids have been taught is right, but what I've been saying is within the sound system / phonology of this particular language, final /y/ is much better seen as a consonant ending than part of a vowel sound. This was in response to your original comment that it was part of the vowel, but I've now seen your edit. I agree that ย is not a final consonant in เอีย. If it was then the final sound would have to be /y/, and you would be able to have e.g. เอีก. The three elements make up one vowel symbol.

2 hours ago, tgeezer said:

It doesn't come naturally to a native Thai speaker to say "line" because the ending comes before the closing consonant. Out is unnatural for similar reasons, แม่กด is not แม่ดา . Thais have to learn only that they must say dead endings live and they have no trouble.

I'm not sure what you mean by "the ending comes before the closing consonant". If you mean that it has two final consonants, so is already supposed to have ended by the time you get to the second, that's what I've been saying. I don't think it matters whether they're live or dead endings - any combination is a final cluster and the sound system just doesn't accommodate final clusters.

1 hour ago, tgeezer said:

There is no such word as ไลน (ลัยน) probably because it is impossible to read. 

Well, I don't really see why it would be impossible to read but anyway I think the writing system always serves the spoken language and not the other way around. In other words, the rule that ไ can't have a final is telling us something - maybe something interesting - about the spoken language. Also, I don't know about your Thai friends but IME Thai speakers have a really hard time with English words like line or out, so I definitely think this restriction is built into their sound system. It's not surprising if it's reflected in the writing system, but I think it goes deeper than that.

I think you can simplify the rules even more and say a live syllable is one that doesn't have a stop. I'm not really getting that point though. The only relevance I can see is that the fact that ไ and ใ don't come in a short version with a built-in glottal stop means that they pattern with อำ, which is made up of a vowel and a live consonant ending, rather than with เอีย , เอือ and อัว, which are made up of two vowel sounds and do come in a short version with a glottal stop.

1 hour ago, tgeezer said:

The problem is that ย ยักษ์ is not a closing consonant but a vowel symbol.

I've seen final sounds like /y/ and /w/ called semivowels, but by the same token you can call them semiconsonants, and I'm sure I've read that they're called that in Spanish. They're really half way between the two. Probably they act more like vowels in some languages and more like consonants in others.

It's interesting that in Thai you often find syllables with vowel + /y/ or vowel + /w/, but that is always the end of the syllable. You don't get Thai words like เอาท or ไลน, and when that type of word is borrowed, the final consonant is not pronounced.

If you treat the /y/ and /w/ semivowels / semiconsonants as vowels, that is a complete mystery. There aren't any other vowel sounds that block final consonants, and that includes sounds that are made up of two separate vowels, as in ปวด.

On the other hand, if you treat them as consonants then a word like ไลน actually has two final consonants, and since it's a general rule that only one is allowed, it makes perfect sense that the second one is blocked.

Mainly for that reason, I think that final /w/ and /y/ are best analysed as consonants in Thai. That means that ไ is strictly speaking a vowel plus a consonant rather than just a vowel, but then the same is obviously true of อำ, so I don't think it's a problem. I guess they call them สระ because they are vowel symbols as opposed to consonant symbols that belong to the alphabet.

1 hour ago, tgeezer said:

อำ (อะ+ม) being wrongly called a short vowel shows that perhaps we should not call the others short vowels so for determining tones they are live.

I'd say the vowel element is usually short but sometimes long, but I don't think this can ever make a difference to the tone, because you'd need a further final consonant to bring those rules into play, and you'll never get one because it is blocked by the ย or ม.

1 hour ago, tgeezer said:

Is there some linguistic explanation in that when some English speakers see the word Pattaya they find a อัย there or am I stretching things?  

I'm not a qualified linguist, just an interested amateur. I think that when a syllable that ends in a vowel is followed by one beginning with /y/, the /y/ does colour the preceding vowel a bit, even in Thai. I agree that it happens more in English and I think there's a general pattern that English allows syllables to blend into each other quite easily whereas Thai prefers to keep them separate. In พัทยา the second /a/ is just a linker, which means it is short and unstressed and there's not much scope for it to be coloured by the /y/. On the other hand, in Pattaya it is a full stressed vowel, so the scope is much greater. When you combine that with the fact that English goes in for more colouring anyway, you get a much more noticeable effect.

ต is unvoiced though. ด is voiced but they're obviously the same class, so you get the same range of tones. The only relationship I can see in that area is that a voiced consonant will never be high class. It will be low if it is a sonorant and mid if it is a stop - but that still gives you all the tones.

I think you're right that it would be better to number the tones.

I think the problem that English speakers have with ต and ด is that English d is half way between them. d and ด are both classified as voiced stops, but that's not the end of the story because voicing works very differently in the two languages. English "voiced" stops are actually devoiced a lot of the time, and even when they're not, the voicing only kicks in right at the end and is fairly weak. Late onset voicing is very easy to miss because the vowel will be voiced anyway, so a lot depends on a tiny difference in timing. That's not a problem in English because there are no consonant pairs that only differ by voicing, so devoicing or weak voicing will never turn one consonant sound into another - but that's not true of many other languages, and those languages tend to have fuller voicing so that there is a clear contrast. French is an example - or Thai, more to the point. What that means is that in practice, ต has no voicing, d has partial late-onset voicing and ด has full early-onset voicing. That's not to say that voicing is the only difference between d and the Thai consonants, but I do think it's the most important one.

If you're interested in this sort of thing, you can download Praat which allows you to visualise the voicing (amongst other things). Hours of fun...

1 hour ago, tgeezer said:

 I don't think that there is any difference in pronunciation between ณ and. น  in Thai but there may be for Thai Sanskrit scholars.

I was talking about ญ - why would it become /n/ in final position when /y/ is already a valid final? I think the table is helpful in answering questions like that.

โฆษะ and อโฆษะ are the Sanskrit equivalents of ก้อง and ไม่ก้อง

หนัก and เบา are aspirated and unaspirated

ธนิต is a new one on me but turns out to be the Pali equivalent of หนัก

I don't get what you mean about tone 2.

3 hours ago, JHicks said:

I don't think the language is Pali. If it was written in Thai script it would be งสอ็นสจกา, which doesn't look like Pali to me.

According to Wikipedia, the tradition with these tattoos is to spells out "abbreviated syllables from Pali incantations" - so it probably is Pali after all, and the reason it doesn't seem to make sense is that it is abbreviated (plus the characters aren't a perfect match so I'm sure I didn't nail them all). I guess that means you'd need someone who knew the incantation to figure out what it means.

On the script, all the candidates are related and look fairly similar. Wiki says "in Cambodia and central Thailand, the Old Khmer script of the Khmer Empire is used [this was the Pallava script, or a half-way house between the Pallava script and the modern Khmer script, depending on the time period. Pallava does fit some of the characters very well, but doesn't seem to fit others at all. The modern khmer script is quite angular, with lots of chevron type things like little pennants, so not a good match]. While in northern Thailand yantra tattoos may use Shan [lots of circles - not a good match], northern Thai [this is Tai Tham - the script in my last post], or Tai Lu [basically the same as Tai Tham, unless they're referring to something called "Fak Kham". I can't find any pictures of Fak Kham though. I haven't heard of it before and it seems to have died out early on], and in Laos the Lao Tham script is employed [this is basically the same thing as Tai Tham]". So it could be any of them but I think Tai Tham is most likely, especially as OP got the tattoo in northern Thailand.

It looks a bit like , which is the Tai Tham script used for the Lanna language previously spoken around Chiang Mai as well as a few other languages, including Pali. It does crop up a lot in old Buddhist texts. If it is Tai Tham (and if those are the right characters) I don't think the language is Pali. If it was written in Thai script it would be งสอ็นสจกา, which doesn't look like Pali to me. The other possible languages aren't spoken by many people and I don't think there are any online dictionaries.

5 hours ago, Neeranam said:

How would you transcribe นิรนาม?

I think Neeranam is OK but maybe Niranam. 

FWIW I think the way you've done it is better. Maybe it depends on your accent. I have heard quite a lot of the Australian accent recently and it's really struck me how they pronounce the vowel in words like bit very much like อิ. They have IPA [i] where I have IPA [ɪ] (I'm from the UK). I think that vowel is even more lax in most American accents, so even further from อิ. I'd say the sound is more important than the length so would go with ee. Of course if you ask someone who doesn't know any Thai to pronounce it it will still come out a fair way from นีรนาม, but that's transliteration for you.

I thought the issue with ภิกษุ was to do with the ending. I see that although the RID doesn't support Pali vs Sanskrit explanation, the Thai Wikipedia does.

I've come across that grid before and found it helpful when I was wondering why yoga is spelt with ค or why ญ is pronounced [y] when it is in final position.

What I don't know is how the sounds of Sanskrit relate to the sounds of English cognates. For example, the word candle comes from the root kand, which belonged to the last common ancestor of Sanskrit and English and meant to shine. Is that also the origin of จันทร์ in วันจันทร์? After all, ท represents Sanskrit [d], and the moon is your classic shiny thing.