lack of spaces between Thai words

[Chou Anou]

Wow, the level of idiocy and lack of basic awareness about well-established linguistic facts in this thread is just mind-boggling.

 

I'll only focus on one issue: we read primarily by recognizing WORDS and phrases. Not by decoding the elements that make up individual words. Sothemorewordsyouknow, thelessitmattersiftherearespacesbetweenthemornot. You can still read the sentence easily. 

 

Thai is not in the minority of world languages when it comes to not putting spaces between words. Many, many languages do this and people read just fine.

 

Seriously, people can be so narrow-minded and blind to logic (not to mention judgmental and condescending to other cultures) when they encounter situations that happen to not be structured exactly the same way things are structured in their own language/culture.

[PatOngo]

9 minutes ago, Chou Anou said:

Wow, the level of idiocy and lack of basic awareness about well-established linguistic facts in this thread is just mind-boggling.

 

I'll only focus on one issue: we read primarily by recognizing WORDS and phrases. Not by decoding the elements that make up individual words. Sothemorewordsyouknow, thelessitmattersiftherearespacesbetweenthemornot. You can still read the sentence easily. 

 

Thai is not in the minority of world languages when it comes to not putting spaces between words. Many, many languages do this and people read just fine.

 

Seriously, people can be so narrow-minded and blind to logic (not to mention judgmental and condescending to other cultures) when they encounter situations that happen to not be structured exactly the same way things are structured in their own language/culture.

  Itotallyagreewithwhatyouaresaying!

[Oxx]

18 minutes ago, Chou Anou said:

I'll only focus on one issue: we read primarily by recognizing WORDS and phrases. Not by decoding the elements that make up individual words. Sothemorewordsyouknow, thelessitmattersiftherearespacesbetweenthemornot. You can still read the sentence easily. 

 

But not as easily as if the sentence had spaces.  By eliminating the word boundaries one has to do significantly more parsing.  In the particular example, one has to eliminate "sit", "sift", "the", "rear", "pace", "aces", "bet", "tween", "ent", "hem", and probably others.  Personally, I initially interpreted "morno" as "moron".

 

18 minutes ago, Chou Anou said:

Thai is not in the minority of world languages when it comes to not putting spaces between words. Many, many languages do this and people read just fine.

 

Yes, Thai is definitely in a minority.  Excluding languages which use ideograms (which is a totally different issue), it's almost exclusively SE Asian languages (Thai, Burmese, Lao, Khmer) and Tibetan which do so.

[BananaBandit]

14 hours ago, NCC1701A said:

yesitishorrible.

wheniwatchmyThaigirlfriendreadshereallystudiesthesentenceandseemstobedoingahugeamountofwork.

 

14 hours ago, bluesofa said:

Ha ha! Just proves the point though. If you understand the language you can read it's fine.

 

When I started learning Thai, my Thai teacher wrote simple sentences with a space between the words, for me to be able to understand it easily.

Later on she stopped using the spaces as I started to be able to read more Thai.

 

yeah, i can read the example above. but it's no fun to read.   not fine at all. unnecessarily burdensome...i certainly wouldn't want to read a 300-page book written like that. 

[Chazar]

14 hours ago, NCC1701A said:

yesitishorrible.

wheniwatchmyThaigirlfriendreadshereallystudiesthesentenceandseemstobedoingahugeamountofwork.

better still rearrange the first and last an you can still understand it 

 

"It deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe."

[Chazar]

1 hour ago, Chou Anou said:

You can still read the sentence easily. 

Im sorry  I could not read  your example easily and I knew  all the words

[Chazar]

11 minutes ago, BananaBandit said:

 

 

yeah, i can read the example above. but it's no fun to read.   not fine at all. unnecessarily burdensome...i certainly wouldn't want to read a 300-page book written like that. 

Maybe if  the  book was printed on a larger size 1  sheet for  all 300  pages????

[simon43]

12 hours ago, oldhippy said:

Does "naam" not mean water, toilet, liquid,... or even German TV poster (a Klingon)?

Well it doesn't mean toilet ????  That is 'water room' or hong naam.  Is water not a liquid?

 

How is it different from English?  Think of 'bow', as in bow and arrow, or bow to the king.  Or I read today and I read yesterday.  A word that is spelt the same can even be pronounced differently or have different meanings.

[simon43]

When I read Thai, I recognise common words and their overall letter pattern, so I don't need to try to read each individual letter sound.  If I encounter a word that is new to me, I first 'isolate' the word by identifying where it ends, based on my understanding of Thai grammar rules etc.  Then I can apply pronunciation rules to correctly read/speak the word.

 

Of course, by then the karaoke screen has moved onto the next part of the song...... ????

[IraqRon]

I always felt that spaces would help me to read thai and wondered why no spaces and came to the conclusion that years ago when the written language here was developing the materials for writing upon were very rare and expensive so the no spaces thing was to save on the writing material.  Now if we could just do something about long drawn out sentences like mine above.

[EricTh]

I can read the Thai transliteration 1000 times faster than reading Thai words.

 

We have to figure out where the word start and end which is a pain in the ass for uncommon words especially those long sanskrit words.

 

It makes learning Thai difficult for more foreigners beyond the elementary level.

 

It'sjustlikenotseparatingEnglishwithspaces andcommas. Yeswecanreadbutittakes1000timesslower. 

[canuckamuck]

14 minutes ago, simon43 said:

Well it doesn't mean toilet ????  That is 'water room' or hong naam.  Is water not a liquid?

 

How is it different from English?  Think of 'bow', as in bow and arrow, or bow to the king.  Or I read today and I read yesterday.  A word that is spelt the same can even be pronounced differently or have different meanings.

What he means is a lot of words are non specific and it is difficult to understand without context.

Naam is great example Someone tells there is liquid in the fridge. They don't bother being specific.

All mouse shaped rodents are Noo. No difference between rats and shrews. If it looks like a crocodile it's a jarakae. Not an alligator or a caiman. Conversating in Thai is often an exercise in guessing games. You can see the problem when you want to ask for something specific but it takes many sentences to narrow down the context. Get someone to interpret a question for you which would have an unmistakable but simple answer in English and you will often see a conversation occur which ends with no specific answer, and often irrelevant lines of questioning.

[ColeBOzbourne]

1 hour ago, BananaBandit said:

yeah, i can read the example above. but it's no fun to read.   not fine at all. unnecessarily burdensome...i certainly wouldn't want to read a 300-page book written like that. 

 

1 hour ago, Chazar said:

Im sorry  I could not read  your example easily and I knew  all the words

Maybe it comes down to how good of a reader you are in the first place, no offence intended. I could read the example easily and quickly. Some can, some can't. For curiosity, I pasted it to MS Word and flipped it upside down. I can usually read upside-down fairly quickly, but in that case it was indeed slow and burdensome. Most Thais I have seen, even those without higher education, can read Thai extremely fast, they don't need spaces, and it's impressive.

 

To be fair, I was a science teacher in the USA for 30 years and many of my students had the most atrocious, sloppy, run-together, terrible hand writing you can imagine, so I've had plenty of practice. I am also currently learning to read Thai, and it is MUCH easier for me with spaces between the words.

[BananaBandit]

 

6 hours ago, BananaBandit said:

20 hours ago, NCC1701A said:

yesitishorrible.

wheniwatchmyThaigirlfriendreadshereallystudiesthesentenceandseemstobedoingahugeamountofwork.

 

6 hours ago, Chazar said:

better still rearrange the first and last an you can still understand it 

 

"It deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe."

 

The second example is, indeed, far more palatable (though I suspect it would be problematic for a native-Thai speaker trying to read English). 

[BananaBandit]

20 hours ago, anterian said:

The language you use determines one's ability to think, particularly with abstract concepts. Thais are not really that stupid, they just have a poor language to think with. 

 

that's a pretty interesting take.... so the language is actually preventing its people from accessing their full IQ ??... as i don't currently know the language well enough to have my own firm opinion, i'd be curious to hear an example or two as to how the thai language impedes thinking, abstract or otherwise...
 

[Oxx]

59 minutes ago, BananaBandit said:

21 hours ago, anterian said:

The language you use determines one's ability to think, particularly with abstract concepts. Thais are not really that stupid, they just have a poor language to think with. 

 

that's a pretty interesting take.... so the language is actually preventing its people from accessing their full IQ ??... as i don't currently know the language well enough to have my own firm opinion, i'd be curious to hear an example or two as to how the thai language impedes thinking, abstract or otherwise...

 

Pretty interesting? Actually, it's utter bunkum.  We don't think in language, but in concepts.  Language is simply for communicating those concepts.  That's why, after having had a thought, we sometimes struggle to find the right word(s).  If were were thinking in words, then there would be no struggle.

 

Looking at it differently, do you think cavemen who didn't have language were incapable of thoughts? Or people who haven't learned a language?

 

Consider other species.  Dogs and cats don't have a complex language, but are capable of relatively complex thought.

 

Language has nothing to do with one's ability to think.

[mfd101]

I had an interesting experience about 3 years ago when I gave a Thai novel to our (then) 12-year-old niece. I had read the novel in English - a famous one from the 1950s set in early C20th Bangkok - and enjoyed it so thought (perhaps a bit prematurely) that I could give her the Thai original to read, the only book in a book-free illiterate peasant family.

 

The effect was startling. She was commanded by her elders & my b/f her uncle to sit at the end of the table where I was sitting with my laptop and read the book. So she interprets this to mean that it's a test of her reading-aloud ability and sits there reading out the words in singsong fashion. I don't know if the words were separated or all strung together on the page, but clearly this reasonably intelligent near-adolescent girl had no idea of reading a book quietly for pleasure ... So much for the village education system!

 

Book never seen again.

[CygnusX1]

Another problem I have with lack of spaces is that sometimes I find it hard to tell if I’m looking at a compound word or two or three monosyllabic words, and Thai has so many compound words. I don’t have this problem with the series of children’s books I’m currently struggling through, as although there are no spaces, they’re e-books, and have been set up so if I double click on text it highlights the whole word for me.

Question for the experts here - do native speakers sometimes find the breakup of words ambiguous due to the lack of spaces? Could this be used deliberately for wordplay and double-entendres by authors?

[BananaBandit]

4 hours ago, Oxx said:

Language has nothing to do with one's ability to think.

But everything to do with expressing one's thoughts. 

 

If there is something deficient about a particular language ( and I honestly don't know enough to say that Thai is deficient in such a way ), it would impact one's ability to articulate one's thoughts to oneself or to others. 

 

4 hours ago, Oxx said:

Looking at it differently, do you think cavemen who didn't have language were incapable of thoughts? Or people who haven't learned a language?

 

They'd have thoughts, but likely quite a bit of trouble when it came to expressing those thoughts with any sort of precision. 

[katana]

7 hours ago, Oxx said:

 

Pretty interesting? Actually, it's utter bunkum.  We don't think in language, but in concepts.  Language is simply for communicating those concepts.  That's why, after having had a thought, we sometimes struggle to find the right word(s).  If were were thinking in words, then there would be no struggle.

 

Looking at it differently, do you think cavemen who didn't have language were incapable of thoughts? Or people who haven't learned a language?

 

Consider other species.  Dogs and cats don't have a complex language, but are capable of relatively complex thought.

 

Language has nothing to do with one's ability to think.

Sorry, but that's just not true. Where do you think the phrase deaf and dumb comes from? You think with a language. If you never learnt a language, you will be mentally handicapped.
Take the example of deaf people. Deaf people who were diagnosed late and never learnt sign language will invariably grow up retarded.

...Thus, deaf people who aren’t identified as such very young or that live in places where they aren’t able to be taught sign language, will be significantly handicapped mentally until they learn a structured language, even though there is nothing actually wrong with their brains. The problem is even more severe than it may appear at first because of how important language is to the early stages of development of the brain. Those completely deaf people who are taught no sign language until later life will often have learning problems that stick with them throughout their lives, even after they have eventually learned a particular sign language...
https://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2010/07/how-deaf-people-think/

[cooked]

On 9/18/2019 at 9:27 PM, greeneking said:

Sorry I can not remember where I heard this.  The rich and well educated were able to somehow come to understand reading and writing the language with teaching and persistence.  But it was not desirable the rest should be able to reach the competency they could have managed if there had been gaps between the words.

When I had a shot at learning Hebrew many years ago a rabbi told me that the priests that cobbled the written language together did it with the aim of making it difficult for the common people to access the religious and legal texts, leaving the elite in control. The funny thing was, that he said "and it still fulfills that function today". 

[Damrongsak]

8 hours ago, Oxx said:

 ... Looking at it differently, do you think cavemen who didn't have language were incapable of thoughts? Or people who haven't learned a language?  ...

Cavemen were pretty clever.  However, the lack of language prevented them from discussing details and delayed progress.

 

[1FinickyOne]

BananaBandit...

 

who could ever separate that one?

[bluesofa]

The word I always smile about separating is manslaughter - should it be man's laughter? 

[sirineou]

4 minutes ago, bluesofa said:

The word I always smile about separating is manslaughter - should it be man's laughter? 

It all depends on which side you are.

[simon43]

What he means is a lot of words are non specific and it is difficult to understand without context.

 

Ah, I understand what you mean now - there simply are enough concise words in Thai language to properly explain exactly what you mean, unlike English where one often has a choice of words that mean the same thing - to a concise level.  'Noo' is a good example in Thai, as you mentioned.

[Oxx]

6 hours ago, katana said:

Where do you think the phrase deaf and dumb comes from?

 

You appear to be unaware that the word "dumb" here means unable (or unwilling) to speak.  It stems from the fact that deaf people often have great difficulty learning to speak.  Nothing to do with their intelligence or ability to think.

[Damrongsak]

I just keep thinking about telling time from a digital clock vs. an analog clock.  With the latter, I can immediately know the approximate time and even judge how much time I have left for something.  Not much thought required, just pattern recognition of a sort.  Could this be related to individual word recognition or perhaps ideograms or whatever? 

[mfd101]

9 minutes ago, Damrongsak said:

I just keep thinking about telling time from a digital clock vs. an analog clock.  With the latter, I can immediately know the approximate time and even judge how much time I have left for something.  Not much thought required, just pattern recognition of a sort.  Could this be related to individual word recognition or perhaps ideograms or whatever? 

No. Just what you're used to. Your analog pattern goes back to early childhood. Your digital is much more recent.

[jacnl2000]

I'm not an expert. Would'nt know how to pronoune a space in a tonal language. People do inhale oxygen (take a breath of air) while speaking. At such moments in time it's quite difficult to produce a sound.

Know that technically speaking tonal signs do contain invisible dotted circles which must somewhat overlap with the current character count and are being used by an additional Thai interpreter to direct signs to their proper locations. At these reflective moments in time the flow of characters is being delayed due to the additional interpretation of tonal signs required.

Have asked this before at this forum : i'm still searching for accurate corresponding C/C++ source code. Thanks in advance for pointers.



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