A And U

[Richard W]

I am talking about 'kham mueang'.

Siamese Thai (Standard Thai) as spoken by Northerners is something else (i.e. Siamese Thai with a Northern accent). It is true that in Siamese ร represents a rolling /r/, but in real 'kham mueang' speech, no word is pronounced with that same type of rolling /r/.

The ร - ฮ is only apparent in some words like โรงเรียน - โฮงเฮียน, in others, like รถ the sound is /lód/ in kham mueang. Is there an /r/ phoneme in the Lanna script - I don't know, but I doubt it. Even if 'kham mueang', like Lao, has a letter that looks like ร, it is not for certain that this letter has ever represented the same sound.

The Lanna script has all the consonants of the Thai and Lao alphabets except ด and ฎ. Like Khmer, it uses ฑ for /d/, though it occasionally represents the same sound as ท does. There is a ร letter. In all languages used in the Lanna script, it is the preferred letter for <r> of Indic origin. On Proto-Tai *r, let me quote Fang-Kuei Li:

This consonant was probably a Proto-Tai tongue-tip vibrant or trill, which probably required strong breath to achieve. Words with this initial have series 2 of the tones, thus indicating its voiced origin. Among the SW dialects, it is preserved as r- in Ahom and Siamese, but Lü has a literary pronunciation hr-, a voiceless r-, for the common h- in ordinary speech; other SW dialects show simply h-. Among the CT dialects it is represented by r- or l- (where l- and r- are merged) in Nung, Tay and Tho; by ɬ, a voiceless lateral, in Lungchow; and by hr- in T'ien-pao. Among the NT dialects it is represented by r- or its equivalents, l-, ð- or ɣ-. That this *r- was accompanied by strong breath (voiced?) can be shown not only by its development into h- in many SW dialects, but also by the development of Proto-Tai *pr- and *tr- into Proto-CT *phr- and *thr- (see 5.3; 7.3).

In words of both native and Tai origin, written <r> may simply aspirate the preceding stop consonant. Otherwise, <r> of Tai origin is pronounced /h/. Northern Thai has a special consonant (<h> with a tail added) that may be used instead of inital <r> in such words. Lao in the Lanna script, like Lao in the Lao script, uses a modified form of <r> for /h/ originating from Proto-Tai *r. Word-initially, <r> of Pali (or Sanskrit, but that's rare) origin is generally pronounced /l/, for /r/ has not yet been restored in normal Northern Thai speech.

The 'khon mueang' up in the North never got that close to the heart of the Khmer empire though, so possibly (I am speculating here, but still) they never adapted the /r/ pronunciation

Possibly, but Northern Thai is also full of words of Khmer origin. Khmer also has independent influence on Lao.

This sounds like a false assumption that 'kham mueang' is a deviation from Siamese, but it is not. It has its own rules and its own writing system, as well as its own phonetic set of sounds. When using the Siamese Thai alphabet to write 'kham mueang' we are in fact transcribing it (phoneticizing it) in a different alphabet...

Actually the phonetics are very like Thai. The main differences are in the clusters - Kam Muang has a lot with /w/ as a second element, e.g. /sw/, /lw/, /yw/, and no other sound as second element - and in the /ia/ type diphthongs, Kam Mueang has a length contrast. Unlike Siamese and Lao, Northern Thai only has four mid consonants (อ, อย, ฑ and บ) and mostly still distinguishes six tones. The spelling of vowels is quite similar to Thai and Lao, but that may be a matter of recent influence.

There are two ways of writing Kam Mueang in the Thai alphabet. One is transliteration, and the other, the one commonly used for normal communication, is transcription. Transcription is most easily spotted by the frequent use of mai chattawa.

[meadish_sweetball]

That's a very interesting and thorough explanation.

What do you think about the issue I was trying to prove though, that kham mueang really is its own system with no /r/ phoneme?

[Richard W]

That's a very interesting and thorough explanation.

What do you think about the issue I was trying to prove though, that kham mueang really is its own system with no /r/ phoneme?

You could say, 'It's its own system' of most dialects.

There's certainly a strong tradition of pronouncing Indic <r> as /l/ - it even finds its way into the spelling of my wife's name in the Thai alphabet. I'm not sure /r/ won't make a comeback in words from Pali, just as /h/ has been restored in English words from Latin. One of the monks at Wat Uttaram in Chiangdao even called the Tua Mueang no nen /ra na/ (not /la na/)! (The name gets transliterated with ro ruea in Siamese.) I've argued hard to ensure that that letter gets called LANNA LETTER RANA and not LANNA LETTER LANA in Unicode. After all, the letter for Indic <r> wasn't going to be called LANNA LETTER LLLA or some such. The Unicode names were not easy - we've wound up with an Indic/Tai hybrid - and would have been even worse if we had not ruthlessly ignored Lao usage.

For now, I think the best solution is to transliterate 'r' and pronounce /l/ - unless it's a native word, when you should definitely pronounce /h/.

Why should /r/ make a comeback? Because of Siamese. Some teachers do manage to teach [r] - my wife had one of them. It was a bit odd. When we first met, she was speaking Siamese to her friends with nary a trace of /r/, but had no problem with my name.