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Thai Reference Grammar

onebir

By onebir
in Thai Language

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aanon Silver Member

aanon

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This was originally published by the FSI, 1964, author Richard B. Noss

http://www.sealang.net/archives/noss/

There's a link on the site to a .djv (open source image format) plugin, at the bottom of this page: http://www.sealang.net/archives/

thanks onebir,

i was just looking for a thai reference grammar online yesterday, so your pointer to this link is timely for me. i will try downloading the plugin, noss's grammar and perhaps some of the other thai works.

i will add some comments here for others if anything is noteworthy.

all the best.

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aanon Silver Member

aanon

Posted
Posted
This was originally published by the FSI, 1964, author Richard B. Noss

http://www.sealang.net/archives/noss/

There's a link on the site to a .djv (open source image format) plugin, at the bottom of this page: http://www.sealang.net/archives/

thanks onebir,

i was just looking for a thai reference grammar online yesterday, so your pointer to this link is timely for me. i will try downloading the plugin, noss's grammar and perhaps some of the other thai works.

i will add some comments here for others if anything is noteworthy.

all the best.

following up,

download of plugin was about 6 mb. viewing of the noss reference grammar failed in firefox, regardless of whether i chose to view or save as. in explorer, no problems. loading of the 257 page document by noss was very quick, and moving between pages seems much quicker than comparable acrobat document.

noss's thai reference grammar is hard going but very detailed. for example it covers how dern becomes damnern and uay becomes amnuay. and how my friend toby gets called tobong toby. there's a good explanation in there of kwarm and garn and other such prefixes, plus lots more. even a detailed discussion of the various things that can happen to tones, emphasis and rhythm when speakers are expressing different levels of emotional involvement.

i haven't really got into looking at the syntax section yet.

the end effect is it makes me want to buy a modern thai grammar in book form. this could feasibly be printed out, but the funky transliteration system and lack of thai script is a drawback.

nonethess, i'll return to learn more from noss's grammar from time to time.

thanks onebir.

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onebir Gold Member

onebir

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thanks onebir.

You're welcome. Have you had a look at the Thai-English corpora?

It's probably more use to a general audience, but no-one seems to be interested :o I should have called it 'how to figure out which thai words you should be using when your dictionary doesn't give you enough examples'!

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aanon Silver Member

aanon

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thanks onebir.

You're welcome. Have you had a look at the Thai-English corpora?

It's probably more use to a general audience, but no-one seems to be interested :o I should have called it 'how to figure out which thai words you should be using when your dictionary doesn't give you enough examples'!

hi again onebir,

i use the sealang thai corpus regularly when checking a thai usage (it works well but, if i can offer some feedback, i don't really like the way the sought word is displayed with a big gap between it and the surrounding words. in this respect i think the chula concordance engine is easier to use).

having looked at your description, the thai-english corpora looks very useful, and i will try it out next time i am lost for a word in thai.

______

by the way (and this a little off topic) i looked in the thai-english corpora for the word 'calculate' and got a paragraph back, of which this sentence was a part:

หินปูนสแตโทลิทนี้ ยังนำมา วิเคราะห์หาธาตุคาร์บอน-14 ซึ่งเป็นวิธีที่ตกทอดมาจากการ ทดลองอาวุธในบรรยากาศ

The statoliths were also analysed for carbon-14, a legacy of atmospheric weapons tests.

The translation seems incorrect. The English version says the carbon-14 was a legacy (of atmospheric weapons tests), while the Thai version says the method of analysis was a legacy of those tests.

I assume things like this will occur because there is no way to screen the bitexts at this level? How do you ensure you're getting quality data?

All the best, and thanks for the tools.

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Rikker Gold Member

Rikker

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Posted (edited)
I assume things like this will occur because there is no way to screen the bitexts at this level? How do you ensure you're getting quality data?

The bitext corpus continues to grow, but as stated on the main page, the material comes from around the web. A significant chunk is from wanakam.com, a website for amateur Thai translators. I don't think wanakam itself edits submissions, so the translations are probably only as good as the translator's understanding of English and Thai and translation skill, although some stories list an editor (บรรณาธิการต้นฉบับ) at the end of the translation, after the author's name. Having read quite a few of them (and having done a portion of the sentence-level alignment to prepare them for use in the corpus), I've run into a mix of errors, mistranslations, sentences left out here and there... But overall, it's a very good learning tool. The goal here is to compile these resources, align them, and make them searchable, but sealang doesn't do any of the generating of the translated content itself. It just provides access to aligned versions of what's out there.

Edited by Rikker
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wasabi Gold Member

wasabi

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I use the book 'Thai Reference Grammar' by James Higbie and Snea Thinsan and find it very good.

When I saw the heading of this thread, that's the book I thought it would be about. I wish that book was available in an ebook format but it's not. I do have a hardcopy but I always end up having to flip back and forth, a process which would be accelerated if it was an e doc.

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meadish_sweetball Star Member

meadish_sweetball

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Higbie/Thinsan is great in that it is easily accessible to anyone, and not just linguists. Unfortunately, in its efforts to cover as much as possible, it is a bit uneven in terms of quality.

My take on it is that it is useful, but some constructions are not quite natural Thai, and some translations will seem a little contrived - but dont get me wrong though - it IS a good reference work to have on your shelf.

If you are only getting one though, a less comprehensive but more accurate grammar is 'Thai - An Essential Grammar' (Routledge) by David Smyth.

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onebir Gold Member

onebir

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Has anyone managed to download the two dictionaries for off-line viewing?:

http://www.sealang.net/archives/michell/djvu/index.djvu

http://www.sealang.net/archives/bradley/br...djvu/index.djvu

After installing the .djvu plugin, the downloads seems stuck on ~99% and don't complete.

don't know which you're using, but post 4 above mentions that plugin only worked in explorer (might be worth mentioning the problem to the developers...)

I hadn't noticed the dictionaries, so it's a good think you mentioned them!

Edited by onebir
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katana Platinum Member

katana

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Thanks.

I can get them to display in both Firefox and IE, although downloading the 'bundled' dictionary doesn't seem to complete in either browser. The 'Indirect' download doesn't seem so easy to navigate, although it seems to download fine except for the last directory page.

May try emailing them, if I can find a contact email.

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Acquiesce Silver Member

Acquiesce

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Higbie/Thinsan is great in that it is easily accessible to anyone, and not just linguists. Unfortunately, in its efforts to cover as much as possible, it is a bit uneven in terms of quality.

My take on it is that it is useful, but some constructions are not quite natural Thai, and the translations will seem a little contrived - but dont get me wrong though - it IS a good reference work to have on your shelf.

If you are only getting one though, a less comprehensive but more accurate grammar is 'Thai - An Essential Grammar' (Routledge) by David Smyth.

Thanks for that meadish, tomorrow i will have a look in the Chula book centre for that one.

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aanon Silver Member

aanon

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Has anyone managed to download the two dictionaries for off-line viewing?:

http://www.sealang.net/archives/michell/djvu/index.djvu

http://www.sealang.net/archives/bradley/br...djvu/index.djvu

After installing the .djvu plugin, the downloads seems stuck on ~99% and don't complete.

hi there,

in the case of the grammar, i opened it to read and then decided to use the save function of dejavu to save to disk. that took quite a while to complete but finished eventually. i had no problems viewing the two dictionaries from beginning to end, but didn't try then saving.

if you've only tried directly saving to disk, perhaps this view-then-save might be a solution.

all the best.

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wasabi Gold Member

wasabi

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Agree, Smyth is the way to go. Too many errors in Higbie.

Thanks I think I'll pick up the Smyth book. I do like the Higbie book, but something a little better organized and concise would be appreciated. I have had several Thai friends mention some passages in the Higbie book are wrong, but I still would recommend it as part of an overall reference collection.

Edited by wasabi
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rch1023 Explorer Member

rch1023

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Thanks.

I can get them to display in both Firefox and IE, although downloading the 'bundled' dictionary doesn't seem to complete in either browser. The 'Indirect' download doesn't seem so easy to navigate, although it seems to download fine except for the last directory page.

May try emailing them, if I can find a contact email.

I downloaded the plugin no.2 for Firefox and Opera. Opera needs to be closed and re-opened before the plugin is active. Opera is also more revealing on downloads. It reports

"The requested URL /archives/michell/djvu/b0001.djvu was not found on this server."

and

"The requested URL /archives/bradley/bradley73/djvu/c.djvu was not found on this server."

... so this is why the dictionary downloads hang. Can anybody speak to SEALang about this?

Otherwise I can read the dictionaries online. I note that some of the pages seem to have been chopped off at the bottom.

For general online use I find the Highlight Dictionary (http://www.nextproject.net/dictionary/default.aspx) most convenient.

- Roger -

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