JHicks

17 hours ago, Neeranam said:

On a side note, do you have any idea why  ภิกษุ is transliterated as Bhikku? Maybe an alternative spelling.  I'm not really a Buddhist but did do a retreat in the 90's for 10 days at Wat Suan Mohk, the temple of the revered monk Buddhadassa Bhikku พุทธทาสภิกขุ

Some sources say Bhikku is Pali while Bhiksu is Sanksrit, but the RID says that both words belong to both languages. The Pali texts from Sri Lanka appear to use Bhikkhu (based on the transliterations into English and Thai), so I don't know why Bhiksu is preferred in the Thai translation. It may be a legacy from an earlier period when Mahayana Buddhism was dominant.

4 hours ago, tgeezer said:

I chose ภิกษุ suspecting that I should have *written พระ because as I understand it บวช is what a ภิกษุ is doing, which would mean that he is not a full monk. 
...

*edit: Replaced  wrote with written,  both sound alright to me but may as well try to learn some English while I am here!  Does anyone know which is correct and why? 

2 hours ago, tgeezer said:

Thanks for doing that but  I was interested in the past tense of write, wrote or written!  I discover that they are both acceptable being derived from the archaic form writ.
 

Yes, but I think the point was that this doesn't apply after a modal like will or should. These words have to be followed by an infinitive, and an infinitive can't mark tense by definition, so for the past you use have (in the infinitive) plus the past participle. That gives you "should have written". It's not the same construction as "I have written", where the "have" is not an infinitive (you can tell because it doesn't change in the third person - we say "he should have written a book", not "he should has written a book").

Here's the same thing in image form (the screenshot shows "อาหารอร่อย"). I got slightly different numbers but it's the same pattern - unstressed "long" a is the same duration as unstressed "short" a, but stressed long a is much longer.

There's no stressed short a to complete the picture. There are a few elsewhere in the dialogue, but they're in particles and particles can behave strangely (as you say) so I didn't do the measurement.

The blue line is the pitch BTW. The pitch tracking can be a bit off, especially when the voice is at a low level. You can see the rising tone of อาหาร turning the corner at the transition to the n sound, but in reality it doesn't shoot up the way the tracking shows.

I haven't got a great deal to do just now, so I measured the duration of the first vowels in อาหาร and อร่อย. You can always argue about exactly where one sound ends and the next beings, but basically they're all within a whisker of each other - say 80ms +/- 10%.

I've read (and found) that for unstressed vowels in natural speech, there is often no measurable difference between the supposedly short and the supposedly long version. Perceived difference is another matter because the perceiver knows that the vowel is long or short (as the case may be) and registers the pronunciation as correct, so may well insist that there really is a difference... but it's just an illusion. Of course if you have a word pronounced in isolation, as in "It's Friday and our word of the day is อาหาร", you may well get a genuine long vowel in a normally unstressed syllable - but that's an artificial case.

Thanks guys. Between that and some googling it does look possible. Current requirement is for a negative test within 72 hours of boarding, btw. It's the time limit that seems to cause most problems but I found one place saying the result would be available within 24 hours and other saying 1-2 days.

I'd be in trouble if it came out positive but what can you do?

On 11/22/2020 at 10:38 AM, tgeezer said:

... so corrections will help me too.  
Here is the first dialogue. 
สนุขไหมคะ

สนุขครับ

อาหารอร่อยไหมคะ

อาร่อยมากครับ 

เผ็ดไหมคะ

ไม่เผ็ดครับ

เอาผลไม้คะ

เอาครับ ขอบคุณมากครับ

คุณชอบอาหารไทยไหมคะ 
ชอบมากครับ

 

You wrote อร่อย the first time but อาร่อย the second.

It seems to have got started with a mistransliteration. Based on the RID, the usual ศรี looks to be from Sanskrit ศฺรี, while the word ศีรษะ is from Sanskrit สีส (which would have been pronounced สีสะ). In other words there was no ร in the original and the consonant was ส not ศ (they're not the same in Sanskrit).

It's hard to see where the ศร came if not from ศฺรี, even though that would have been a mistake. But if so, why is the vowel where it is? It's a bit of a mystery. If it did come from ศฺรี, I reckon you may as well go the whole hog and spell it ศรีษะ.

The spelling ศรีษะ is used in some of the definitions in some dictionaries (Lexitron for example) but does not appear as a headword. Maybe the spelling is gradually changing.

I'm making some travel plans and it looks like I'll need a PCR covid test on departure from Thailand to get into my next port of call. The test needs to be done no more than 72 hours before take-off.

For obvious reasons there's been a lot of discussion about getting tests at home before coming into Thailand, but does anyone know if it's practical to get one in Thailand before leaving?

Definitely an interesting topic. I just think it's incredibly hard to judge the naturalness or mood of a sentence in a language that's not your own. Also, I suspect the sentence from open subtitles is a google translate job.

7 hours ago, tgeezer said:

Changes have occurred in English and I wonder if they have influenced Thai or whether Thai has changed naturally in a similar way.  
A How are you? 
B. Good thanks.

To my generation the respondent is making a judgement upon his character.  My answer is  "I am well thanks." 
Compare that with what I think has happened in Thai. 
ก. สบายดีไหม  It could be สบายไหม 

ข. สบายดีครับ.    ~~~~.    สบายครับ 

I see the parallel but I don't think these things are related. For what it's worth my analysis of the English situation would be that:

"I am X" is a predicative construction, so X should be an adjective rather than an adverb - "I am happy", "I am angry"...

By some historical quirk the word "well" came to be used in this construction even though it is normally an adverb. I for one feel that this "well" is the opposite of "ill" - but when I respond to "How are you?", I'm not just talking about my health.

"Good" would obviously be the usual form of the adjective, and normally it has about as broad a meaning as you can get. I understand what you're saying about the meaning having been narrowed down in this particular context, but as far as I can see that can only have happened because "well" had come to be used instead, and there wasn't really a good reason for that in the first place. So as I see it, we've ironed out a historical quirk and restored "good" and "well" to their proper places.

All of that strikes me as being very specific to English - even to UK English. I don't know the history of สบายดี but I don't think I've seen it suggested that it's a new construction, and I know it's the same in Lao, which is supposed to be more conservative. I suspect that expressions like สบายดี and อร่อยดี have been around for a good while. If English has anything similar, I'd say it's "good and ready", where the "good" just brings out the "ready". If you wanted to negate this you'd normally get rid of the "good", so that fits with the point you make about the Thai.

It strikes me that Thai goes in for this trick of piling up similar words to adjust or emphasise the meaning more than English does. We do have a few examples - "a great big house", or maybe "a washer-dryer", but they're few and far between. With Thai, I have quite a bit of trouble working out whether extra words really are redundant, whether they are there for emphasis or to adjust the meaning, or whether they just seem redundant to me because of differences between Thai and English grammar (as in สามารถ... ได้, which made my head explode at first).

10 hours ago, EricTh said:

I am looking for the informal common word. I believe 'Talok' is another formal Indic word.

I think it actually came into Thai from Khmer. A lot of words did, including everyday vocab like เดิน, เรียน, ถนน, or สะอาด. Many of them originally started with consonant clusters that Thai speakers find / found hard to pronounce, and these clusters got expanded out to become a short syllable with "a" followed by a longer syllable (as in ถนน - or ทะเลาะ).  This is one source of all the unwritten "a"s you find in Thai.

3 hours ago, Atlan said:

Ohh wow, Thank you very much for the effort.

 

I have to say, I did not concider an OCR Tool, as I did not think that Thai would be readable at all. But Thanks for the hin, I might try that.

 

No worries. It was actually quite good typing practice. I've been using an online typing trainer but it's pretty boring so I don't end up doing enough. A lot of the free OCR sites won't do Thai but some do - i2OCR is one. You might have to split the pdf into image files first. I don't think it'd be perfect but it might be good enough. If it doesn't work out (and you don't find what you need on the links Kokesaat has just posted) I could type out a couple more.

I need to get my typing speed up so I copied out the first little story.

เช้าวันเสาร์ แม่ชวนมานีไปซื้อกับข้าวที่ตลาด มานีช่วยหิ้วตะกร้าให้แม่ ในตลาดมีคนมากและมีของขายหลายอย่าง ของกินก็มี ของใช้ก็มี แม่ถามราคา และเลือกซื้อแต่ของดีที่ราคาไม่แพงเกินไป แม่ซื้อผ้า หวี สบู่ และของกินหลายอย่าง มีเกลือ มะนาว ปลาทู ไข่และไก่แม่จะซื้อหมูกับเนื้อด้วยแต่ไม่มีขาย เพราะวันนั้นเป็นวันพระ มานีเห็นผลไม้น่ากินหลายอย่าง มีเงาะ ลำไย นอ้ยหน่า จึงขอให้แม่ซื้อเงาะ สายแล้วแม่ยังซื้อของไม่เสร็จ มานีเดินตามแม่อยู่นานจนหิว มองเห็นร้านหนึ่งมีของกินน่าอร่อยและราคาไม่แพงเพราะมีป้ายบอกไว้ มานีจึงชวนแม่เข้าไป แม่เห็นว่าบ้านอยู่ไกลตลาดจึงพามานีเข้าไปซื้อกิน ในร้านมีคนมาก

แม่พูดว่า “ร้านนี้ทำของอร่อย จึงมีคนมากินกันมาก”

มานีพูดกับแม่ว่า “เขาคงได้เงินมากนะคะแม่”

“ถ้าขายดีก็ได้เงินมากซีลูก” แม่ตอบ

“คนขายของต้องได้เงินมากทุกคนหรือคะแม่” มานีถาม

“บางคนก็ได้มาก บางคนก็ได้น้อย ถ้าใครได้น้อย ก็ต้องพยายามทำของให้ดีๆ จึงจะมีคนซื้อ” แม่ตอบ

“มานีอยากขายของบ้าง เราจะได้มีเงินมากๆ” มานีบอกแม่

แม่ยิ้มด้วยความพอใจ แล้วบอกกับมานีว่า “ดีแล้วลูก”

It looks to me as though the pdf might be OCRable.

You could look at Lingopolo or Mondly. I don't know how good they are but quite a lot of people seem to use them.

Not what you asked but it doesn't take that long to learn to identify the tone from the Thai spelling. At point you'd be able to go back to Memrise.

Sometimes the tones are irregular, i.e. the written tone does not match the normal spoken tone. For those words, if you show the written tone then some will say you're wrong because that's not how the word is normally pronounced, whereas if you show the spoken tone then some will say you're wrong because it doesn't match the Thai spelling. That could be what's going on with one/both of these apps. Can you give some examples?

15 hours ago, KhaoNiaw said:

...

Central Thai is one accent but there are many many others. But for Thai the spelling rules are based on (official Thai) Central Thai and not vice versa.

The people talking about Lao or Isaan probably don't realize that Isaan has 30+ variations and Laos is different again. My girlfriend is from Laos and she knows immediately if someone is an Isaan Thai, and also recognizes if they're northern Lao or southern Lao etc.. If you watch Lao Star TV, official Lao is not that different from official Thai and you'll understand a lot. 

...

Just as with English, accents basically tell people where you're from, and you'll always have 'foreign' traces. Nothing wrong with that. 

I'm quite interested in different Thai accents but haven't really been able to get to grips with them. Any time the subject comes up, Thais seem to talk about using different words rather than pronouncing the same words differently. Apparently the southern accent is supposed to be clipped (I haven't been down there but have heard they swallow the ends of their words) whereas the northern accent is supposed to be slow and drawn out. That's a start I guess but pretty vague. What I've noticed myself is that there's a lot of variation in the tone shapes. Sometimes a word will just have a different tone, but then the same tone will come out differently depending on the region. I haven't found anything that would tell me e.g. an Isaan mid tone goes like this, a southern falling tone goes like this... so I haven't really been able to dig into this much.

5 hours ago, tgeezer said:

who knows the background of the Google translator?

You know it's statistical, right? It looks for similar sentences previously translated by human beings and tries to stitch something together out of what it finds. This works quite well for language pairs where there is a lot of previously translated material and it is reasonable quality (like French / English). For other pairs, not so much. Amazon used it / a similar approach to translate English product descriptions to Swedish when it recently launched in Sweden, with some fairly comical results.

47 minutes ago, Oxx said:

2 hours ago, KannikaP said:

I put Space Bar into Google translate and the lady  came back with SA-PACE BAH.

 

Did you then try searching Google for "'สเปซบาร์"? Top results (for me, at least)  "บริษัท สเปซ บาร์ จำกัด", "Drunk Space Bar", "Spacebar Design Studio", "SO SOUL SPACE BAR", "Space bar salaya" &c..  Not a lot there about keyboards.  Again, it shows the perils of believing Google for English-Thai translation.

I think that's just because they usually write space bar or spacebar rather than transliterating. See here for example, where you can learn to use "Energy Dance Mode".

We've already got เว้นวรรค courtesy of KeeTua's wife. Strictly speaking I think that's the space itself (but in English, would you say "press the question mark key"? It's really just a quirk of English that we say "space bar" as often as we do).

If you really want a word in there that means "key" or "bar" or whatever, I believe the original Thai terms were คานเคาะวรรค or คานเว้นวรรค or คานเคาะ. See here for example - there may have been other variations too. I'm not sure how widely used those terms are now though.

4 hours ago, Maestro said:

11 hours ago, Wongkitlo said:

They should really update this. I don't think any Thais really pronounce ก as K. I wonder if whoever did  this could really speak or read English properly. 

 

The Royal Thai General System of Transcription (RTGS) is not intended as a pronunciation guide, not for Thais, not for English speakers, not for speakers of any other language.

 

It is important always to note the difference between a pronunciation guide and a transcription system.

I'd describe it as more of a spectrum. At one extreme you have pure transliteration systems that only care about representing the original characters, and not at all about the pronunciation. RTGS is not like that. If you take ด as an example, it uses d in initial position and t in final position. The only reason for doing that is to reflect the pronunciation, so RTGS is not right at the transliteration extreme of the spectrum.

ก is not really a g. It's not the k in Kate either, but the k in Kate would be RTGS kh. The phonetic difference between kh and ก is that ก is unaspirated. The h in kh is there to represent aspiration, so it makes sense to take it off and use k by itself. It's the same for ต / ท (t / th) and ป / ผ (p / ph), so this gives you a fairly consistent system.

We wouldn't think of using d for ต because the existence of ด makes it obvious that ต isn't really a d. Similarly, we wouldn't think of using b for ป because the existence of บ makes it obvious that ป is not really a b. It's a lot harder to notice that ก is not really a g, because Thai doesn't have a true g to compare it to.

The IPA letter for ก is k.

Overall I'd say that k is technically accurate and more logical, but much more likely to be misunderstood and pronounced as kh. G would be less accurate but also less likely to be misunderstood, so you can still make a case for it.

1 hour ago, Wongkitlo said:

I have been impressed by Stu Ray Jay for a while. I am now following his suggestion of just learning the 28 or so  most important gaw gai characters in groups according to their class. He has a system of mapping the tongue as it moves around the mouth and opening and closing the throat

There's something I don't like about that guy, but he does usually know his stuff. Maybe have a look at the phonemic approach to consonant classes (that's a link - I'm told they don't always show up). It's not too hard to sort the consonants into "mid", "low" and "has both high and low versions" based on sound.

The first part of the alphabet is organised by place of articulation, i.e. where the tongue is in the mouth. Pretty much all Indic scripts are organised that way, and have been for centuries. Useful to know but not SJR's idea!

For me something clicked when I stopped thinking of the tones as a sort of finishing touch that went on top of the syllable, and realised that they are as much a part of the syllable as the consonants and vowels. After that they stuck a lot easier and I didn't have to rely on having them written down nearly as much.

2 hours ago, The Theory said:

On 10/21/2020 at 5:09 AM, kenk24 said:

How does it compare to Vietnamese? 

No idea about Vietnamese, but I was much, much better with Japanese. I feel that I'm a dumb regarding Thai. Japanese was much easier for me to catch words from speakers and repeat them about the same. It did not work for me with Thai. I'm always wrong, eventually gave up. I believe learning language is just like other things. Person to person it works differently and it is depends on different things + talent in language. 

It's probably going to be harder for a Westerner to pick up spoken Vietnamese than spoken Thai - the number of totally new sounds is about the same (I think there are actually a couple more, if we're comparing with English) but the tonal system is quite a lot more complex. On the other hand, reading and writing is a lot easier - the spelling is pretty regular, the characters are obviously the ones we're already familiar with (or pretty much), there aren't really any tone rules, they use spaces and there aren't any unwritten vowels or syllables. I say that based on a month or so of learning - I went over thinking I might spend quite a bit of time there, but as it turned out I wasn't that into it.

I've only spent a couple of weeks in Japan but the language is known for having a relatively simple sound system, so it makes sense that it would be easier to pick up the pronunciation of Japanese than Thai (or Vietnamese). Reading and writing is obviously a different matter...

6 hours ago, Peeba boy said:

Thanks I have booked it now for 1 November. thai airways

Good for you - does this mean they've now told you you'll be able to get a COE as a new Elite member?

4 hours ago, jayhon73 said:

Gotcha all, thanks. I'll just contact the embassy here. Again, nothing I read about this says you need 500,000 in SAVINGS...just in BANK DEPOSITS over the past 6 months.

 

 

Usually the requirement is that your balance has not dropped below x for y months. The METV is like that, and there's some kind of retirement visa that requires a balance of at least 800k for a certain time. In both cases it's the balance that counts, not the deposits. I can't see them running a scheme where you're OK if you've had 500k in deposits even if you've been overdrawn the whole time...

I saw something on twitter about this new entry route (not the STV) and it looked to me to be the same idea. The tweet was fairly short on detail, but the whole reason they want to see your bank statements is that they want to make sure the people they let in are going to spend money.

Anyway, I wouldn't count on it happening any time soon, if it happens at all. A lot of ideas are floated but never get off the drawing board.

This question has come up a few times but there have been no reports of people entering on the elite scheme. In fact, what you've just posted is probably the most detailed info we've had. There was a guy who posted a few days ago saying that he had been told by Thai Elite and the London embassy that if he applied the process would take 60-90 days, but he wasn't a current member and it wasn't clear whether the 60-90 days was just the application process or whether he'd been told he'd actually get in to Thailand within 90 days.

We do know that existing members who have been stranded out of Thailand the longest are going to be given priority, but how that works out in practice is anyone's guess.

However long it's taking now (if it's even happening now), the new visa is bound to shake things up because there will be more competition for ASQ places.

Edit: I now think that มาฆะ and มกร are two completely separate words that just happen to have been used in the names of months at different times.