lack of spaces between Thai words

[tgeezer]

I was reviewing the Immigration Act this morning and found a brilliant example which supports your post digbeth  

I am looking at two copies, one from 1. Mahidol University and 2. parliament.go.th 

These extracts from each section 1 item 6, the composition of the committee to implement the Act,

1.                         ..... ประกอบด้วยปลัดกระทรวงมหาดไทยเป็น

>ประธานกรรมการ // ปลัดกรทรวงการต่างประเทศอธิบดีกรมตำรวจ  // อธิบดีกรมแรงงาน... 

2.                                                    ..... ประกอด้วย> ปลัดกระทรวงมหาดไทยเป็นประธารกรรมการ //ปลัดกระทรวงการต่างประเทศ  // อธิบดีกรมตำรวจ >อธิบดี ฯ ... 

 

I have shown spaces with // and next line > just in case the programme renders my input meaningless.  

 

 

 

 

 

[Percy Penguin]

On 9/26/2019 at 3:02 PM, phichay said:

... Once you learn the rules of the consonants (starting and finishing consonants) and the vowel structures, whether straight or clustered, you will understand that there is no need for gaps between words. The rules dictate the start and finish of the word...

I don't think they dictate the start and finish of the word, otherwise the problem mentioned by digbeth wouldn't exist. I think the point is more that although Thai script doesn't usually show word boundaries like English, it does usually show syllable boundaries, which English doesn't. We don't tend to take this on board, I guess because there's no equivalent in the languages most of us grew up with. We complain that the tool we are used to is missing instead of learning to use the one we've been given.

 

We can read English script without spaces without too much trouble even with no practice at all, after years of being used to spaces, and with no way of identifying syllable boundaries except by recognising the words. That being the case, there's no reason to think that the lack of spaces in Thai causes any problem to native speakers who have grown up with it and can recognise the syllable boundaries instantly, as well as knowing the words.

[illiterate]

On 9/26/2019 at 9:38 PM, amexpat said:

Because it would be so much easier if there were spaces between the words along with all those rules - and exceptions. 

 

It would be easier if we spelled "phone" as fone too. 

 

I will tell you what, when we set up a system to make our language much easier to learn, get back us here and maybe the Thais will consider it at that point. 

[ylmiri]

Whyyour Englishlanguage hasso muchspacing inbetween alsomakesit difficultfor Thaistoread, Thaipeopledon't likespacingyou know.

[ylmiri]

On 9/18/2019 at 10:14 PM, Bangkokazy said:

70 to 80% of Thais cannot read or write their own language.
If you want to learn Thai, it must be Bangkok dialect.

The rest of the dialects are wasted learning

70 to 80percent of Thais cannot read or write their own language.

Oh, no, that can't be true. Where did you get that figure from? Statistic from the education department?

[amexpat]

4 hours ago, illiterate said:

It would be easier if we spelled "phone" as fone too. 

 

I will tell you what, when we set up a system to make our language much easier to learn, get back us here and maybe the Thais will consider it at that point. 

But, but, whatabout...

[Bangkokazy]

On 10/6/2019 at 6:06 PM, ylmiri said:

70 to 80percent of Thais cannot read or write their own language.

Oh, no, that can't be true. Where did you get that figure from? Statistic from the education department?

An overview of what I mean

Languages of Thailand

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Thailand

[zhounan]

Chinese also has no spaces between words, but is not confused as Thai is. 

[kokesaat]

Learning to read and write Thai was certainly not easy, the language came in bits and pieces.   When I concentrated on learning tones, I couldn't take more than an hour of practice with my teacher.  The effort was more than my brain could take.   Slowly but surely, though, despite being in my 60's and wearing hearing aids, the language came to me.  I'm still an amateur at speaking but can initiate a conversation about most anything if I have a minute to think things through.  There's still plenty that kicks my behind, but overall, learning the language was worth every bit of the torture of getting there.

 

[cmarshall]

So, all the provincials here believe that Thai word spacing is inherently inferior to the word spacing they have grown up with?  As far as I know, no East Asian languages have word spacing.  Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Burmese either have no word spacing in the Thai manner or have spaces around every character (not word) which is the same thing.  Doesn't seem to bother them.  I can tell you from experience the more you read Thai, the easier it gets, however slowly.

 

Classical Greek and Latin did not have word spacing, which only appeared, along with punctuation and capitalization, during the Middle Ages.  People managed.  I think it would be impossible to construct a test that would control for other variables and isolate the effect on reading efficiency of just word spacing.  

[Percy Penguin]

25 minutes ago, cmarshall said:

So, all the provincials here believe that Thai word spacing is inherently inferior to the word spacing they have grown up with?  As far as I know, no East Asian languages have word spacing.  Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Burmese either have no word spacing in the Thai manner or have spaces around every character (not word) which is the same thing.  Doesn't seem to bother them.  I can tell you from experience the more you read Thai, the easier it gets, however slowly.

 

Classical Greek and Latin did not have word spacing, which only appeared, along with punctuation and capitalization, during the Middle Ages.  People managed.  I think it would be impossible to construct a test that would control for other variables and isolate the effect on reading efficiency of just word spacing.  

Well, that second bit seems to imply that spacing was an improvement, and if that's the case for Latin and Greek, you have to ask why it wouldn't be the case for Thai as well. My answer is that Thai already shows syllable boundaries, and the real problem is that westerners don't really cotton on to this because they are so used to the system of showing word boundaries using spaces.

 

I had the same thought as you about tests. The nearest thing would be syllables per minute, I think, but that still doesn't control for everything. I did have a look for something along those lines and there were studies comparing European languages but nothing on English vs Thai. I don't believe that an adept reader of Thai is any slower than an adept reader of English.

[cmarshall]

42 minutes ago, Percy Penguin said:

Well, that second bit seems to imply that spacing was an improvement, and if that's the case for Latin and Greek, you have to ask why it wouldn't be the case for Thai as well. My answer is that Thai already shows syllable boundaries, and the real problem is that westerners don't really cotton on to this because they are so used to the system of showing word boundaries using spaces.

 

 

The introduction of spacing would imply an improvement under the assumption that change equals improvement.  But why would one think that?  Are either shorter or longer skirts on women an improvement?  How about the introduction or disappearance of horsehair wigs on men?  One needs to be wary of succumbing to the Whig interpretation of history as inherently progressive.

 

I don't know enough of the history of writing to know what the medievals thought they were doing when they adopted changes in writing.  Did they believe they were increasing legibility or efficiency in reading?  Or was it just a series of fads?  

 

We know that the largest economy in the world, China, and the third largest, Japan, have writing systems that impose significant additional educational burdens by comparison with alphabetic writing systems.  Nevertheless, both countries have higher literacy rates than the US.  

 

https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/the-highest-literacy-rates-in-the-world.html

 

I don't know what you mean by claiming that Thai already has word boundaries.  That's not the case.  Words have a beginning and an end, of course, but these are not indicated graphically. 

Edited October 12, 2019 by cmarshall

[Percy Penguin]

1 hour ago, cmarshall said:

 

The introduction of spacing would imply an improvement under the assumption that change equals improvement.  But why would one think that?  Are either shorter or longer skirts on women an improvement?  How about the introduction or disappearance of horsehair wigs on men?  One needs to be wary of succumbing to the Whig interpretation of history as inherently progressive.

I don't think you have to assume that all change equals improvement to conclude that a change in a writing system that is voluntarily adopted and sticks for centuries is helpful to users of that system. I certainly don't think that history is inherently progressive.

 

1 hour ago, cmarshall said:

 

I don't know enough of the history of writing to know what the medievals thought they were doing when they adopted changes in writing.  Did they believe they were increasing legibility or efficiency in reading?  Or was it just a series of fads?  

 

We know that the largest economy in the world, China, and the third largest, Japan, have writing systems that impose significant additional educational burdens by comparison with alphabetic writing systems.  Nevertheless, both countries have higher literacy rates than the US.  

That may well be so, but there are a lot of factors that fed into literacy rates besides the efficiency of the writing system, so I'm not sure where it takes us. I know zip about Chinese and Japanese, so can't comment on how they relate to Thai.

 

1 hour ago, cmarshall said:

I don't know what you mean by claiming that Thai already has word boundaries.  That's not the case.  Words have a beginning and an end, of course, but these are not indicated graphically. 

I didn't claim that. I said that the Thai script generally marks syllable boundaries but that westerners tend to be oblivious to this. I was suggesting that this system might be just as good as our system of marking word boundaries, but only if you actually use it... As I said in a previous post, we tend to complain that the tool we are used to is not available, but don't look at what else is in the box.

[cmarshall]

1 hour ago, Percy Penguin said:

I don't think you have to assume that all change equals improvement to conclude that a change in a writing system that is voluntarily adopted and sticks for centuries is helpful to users of that system. I certainly don't think that history is inherently progressive.

 

I didn't claim that. I said that the Thai script generally marks syllable boundaries but that westerners tend to be oblivious to this. 

 

Thai does not mark syllable boundaries any more than it marks word boundaries.  "To mark" means to represent graphically, i.e. explicitly, with a "mark."  There are no marks indicating syllable boundaries.  It's true that the reader can figure out where the syllable boundaries are implicitly, but figuring something out by learning and applying the Thai spelling rules is not the same as having it indicated graphically, in the way that Japanese marks syllable boundaries by spaces, i.e. with a "mark."

 

Your persist in your Whig advocacy by assuming that any changes in a writing system arise or persist, because of some evolutionary advantage particular to the writing system itself, rather than, say, from random changes in fashion or adoption of some language or writing practice to indicate membership in a favored class or group.  So, for instance, Urdu speakers didn't decide to write Hindi with Arabic, rather than Devanagari, script, because of some inherent efficiency in the writing style, but to demonstrate membership in the Moghul ruling class.  

[Percy Penguin]

1 hour ago, cmarshall said:

 

Thai does not mark syllable boundaries any more than it marks word boundaries.  "To mark" means to represent graphically, i.e. explicitly, with a "mark."  There are no marks indicating syllable boundaries.  It's true that the reader can figure out where the syllable boundaries are implicitly, but figuring something out by learning and applying the Thai spelling rules is not the same as having it indicated graphically, in the way that Japanese marks syllable boundaries by spaces, i.e. with a "mark."

 

Sorry but I think that’s much too narrow. The script indicates where the boundaries are, which English doesn’t. ‘Figuring out’ may be what we do as learners, but if the comparison is going to be fair, it has to be between adept uses of both systems.

If you consider a random string like

 

ดาตแอง

 

and transliterate it as you might for an English speaker, you get something like

 

daataeng

 

We can see from that that there are two syllables, but have no idea where the boundary is – in other words we can’t tell whether it is daa / taeng or daat / aeng. That makes a big difference to the way we read the string.

 

As far as I know that string is meaningless, so a Thai speaker can’t tell where the boundaries are by recognising the words (whichishowwewouldextracttheboundariesinEnglish). Nevertheless, if you look back at the Thai you can see it has to be daat / aeng, because daa / taeng would be

 

ดาแตง

 

I think that is just as obvious to a native Thai speaker / reader as the tone of a word like พูด. In your terms the tone of that word is not marked but has to be ‘figured out’, whereas the tone of a word like ช่าง is marked, because the spelling rules require a diacritic. I don’t think there is a relevant distinction here. In both cases the script indicates the tone to an adept reader right away – it’s not something they have to puzzle over. The same goes for the syllable boundaries. I am happy with the term ‘marked’ – if you want to use a different word that’s fine with me, but it doesn’t affect the point.

[cmarshall]

2 minutes ago, Percy Penguin said:

Sorry but I think that’s much too narrow. The script indicates where the boundaries are, which English doesn’t. ‘Figuring out’ may be what we do as learners, but if the comparison is going to be fair, it has to be between adept uses of both systems.

If you consider a random string like

 

ดาตแอง

 

 

and transliterate it as you might for an English speaker, you get something like

 

 

daataeng

 

 

We can see from that that there are two syllables, but have no idea where the boundary is – in other words we can’t tell whether it is daa / taeng or daat / aeng. That makes a big difference to the way we read the string.

 

 

As far as I know that string is meaningless, so a Thai speaker can’t tell where the boundaries are by recognising the words (whichishowwewouldextracttheboundariesinEnglish). Nevertheless, if you look back at the Thai you can see it has to be daat / aeng, because daa / taeng would be

 

 

ดาแตง

 

 

I think that is just as obvious to a native Thai speaker / reader as the tone of a word like พูด. In your terms the tone of that word is not marked but has to be ‘figured out’, whereas the tone of a word like ช่าง is marked, because the spelling rules require a diacritic. I don’t think there is a relevant distinction here. In both cases the script indicates the tone to an adept reader right away – it’s not something they have to puzzle over. The same goes for the syllable boundaries. I am happy with the term ‘marked’ – if you want to use a different word that’s fine with me, but it doesn’t affect the point.

 

Virtually every point you make is wrong.  Where did you get the idea that you know enough Thai to have an opinion about it?

 

I am sorry, but you don't know enough to make having a conversation with you worth the trouble.  Best of luck with the rest of your life.

[GalaxyMan]

On 9/19/2019 at 10:57 AM, canuckamuck said:

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.

That's because there aren't that many words in Thai, especially compared to English. I remember learning Hebrew and being dumbfounded by the fact that it would take me 2, 3, 4 sentences to explain something that could be explained with just a few words in English. It's one of the reasons so much English has become de facto part of other languages.

 

Per Dr. Google...

English: 171,476
German: 300,000
French: 100,000
Spanish: 100,000
Russian: 350,000
Hebrew: 33,000
Chinese: 7,000 characters; 106,230 words
Thai: 2,864

[canuckamuck]

4 minutes ago, GalaxyMan said:

That's because there aren't that many words in Thai, especially compared to English. I remember learning Hebrew and being dumbfounded by the fact that it would take me 2, 3, 4 sentences to explain something that could be explained with just a few words in English. It's one of the reasons so much English has become de facto part of other languages.

 

Per Dr. Google...

English: 171,476
German: 300,000
French: 100,000
Spanish: 100,000
Russian: 350,000
Hebrew: 33,000
Chinese: 7,000 characters; 106,230 words
Thai: 2,864

That is shocking if it is true. Most Thais must know every single word of their language then. 

Most English speakers know 20,000 to 30,000 words.

[tgeezer]

9 minutes ago, canuckamuck said:

That is shocking if it is true. Most Thais must know every single word of their language then. 

Most English speakers know 20,000 to 30,000 words.

I wonder how Google counts the words. 

  My RID has about 920 pages, I have not counted the words but just a glance shows more than three per page!  
 

[cmarshall]

1 hour ago, canuckamuck said:

That is shocking if it is true. Most Thais must know every single word of their language then. 

Most English speakers know 20,000 to 30,000 words.

Well, yes, it would be shocking if true, but it isn't true.  Other estimates of English words reach 500,000.  My own Anki deck of Thai vocabulary flashcards that I have personally encountered  is over 14,000.  

[uhuh]

1 hour ago, Percy Penguin said:

 

I think that is just as obvious to a native Thai speaker / reader as the tone of a word like พูด. In your terms the tone of that word is not marked but has to be ‘figured out’, whereas the tone of a word like ช่าง is marked, because the spelling rules require a diacritic. I don’t think there is a relevant distinction here. In both cases the script indicates the tone to an adept reader right away – it’s not something they have to puzzle over. The same goes for the syllable boundaries. I am happy with the term ‘marked’ – if you want to use a different word that’s fine with me, but it doesn’t affect the point.

 

Thais don't know the correct tone because it's marked. They recognize the whole word, they know this word, and as a native speaker they know how to pronounce it, including the correct tone.

 

Some mısplaced dìacritic's dont bother a na-tive speaker.

[uhuh]

Just now, cmarshall said:

Well, yes, it would be shocking if true, but it isn't true.  Other estimates of English words reach 500,000.  My own Anki deck of Thai vocabulary flashcards that I have personally encountered  is over 14,000.  

Google "how many words in Thai language" and you get 2864.

Read one line further and you see that this number is from an old TVF thread. 

Open this thread and you see various conflicting opinions.

One even quotes 855000, quite a bit more than 2864.

[Oxx]

LEXiTRON dictionary has 43,121 Thai word entries.  RID (1999) has 38,824 words.  RID (2011) is rather differently organised, and has 20,973 head words, with many of these containing a number of related words.  Of course, the RID has its Dictionary of New Words, which brings the count even higher.

[GalaxyMan]

2 hours ago, Oxx said:

LEXiTRON dictionary has 43,121 Thai word entries.  RID (1999) has 38,824 words.  RID (2011) is rather differently organised, and has 20,973 head words, with many of these containing a number of related words.  Of course, the RID has its Dictionary of New Words, which brings the count even higher.

Seems more realistic. In any event, it still shows that the Thai vocabulary is very limited next to English, therefore taking more words to convey some single-word English concepts.

 

Do you feel that Thai uses context in the same way or in place of the nuance of thought possible in English because of its greater vocabulary?

[Oxx]

4 minutes ago, GalaxyMan said:

In any event, it still shows that the Thai vocabulary is very limited next to English,

 

Not really.  Thai was originally a monosyllabic language.  It is therefore perfectly natural to string together such monosyllables to convey more complex concepts.  In this sense it's akin to languages which use ideograms in their scripts (e.g. Chinese, Japanese).  Each ideogram conveys a sense or meaning, and groups of ideograms combine their meanings to make a new word.

 

Thai and English achieve the same end result, conveying meaning, but by different mechanisms.

 

[cmarshall]

1 hour ago, GalaxyMan said:

Seems more realistic. In any event, it still shows that the Thai vocabulary is very limited next to English, therefore taking more words to convey some single-word English concepts.

 

Do you feel that Thai uses context in the same way or in place of the nuance of thought possible in English because of its greater vocabulary?

Do you find that the relative poverty of English with respect to pronouns and the resulting inability subtlely to shade the discourse with respect to the relative class, power, wealth, responsibility, familiarity, and closeness of the speakers hobbles what English speakers can express?  So, for instance, in Thai I can put you down in a very rude way just by using the pronoun กู as "I" to refer to myself, no matter how polite the rest of the sentence is.  

 

Or, is it possible that English is admirably suited to the objectives of English-speaker, while Thai is uniquely well-constructed for the somewhat different needs of Thai-speakers?