tonal marks and consonant classes and...

[BananaBandit]

...and I'm not entirely sure what. Or how to describe it. But I'll give an example here:

 

ไก่ย่าง

 

even though 

 

ย่าง

 

has a written ไม้ เอก

 

you pronounce it like it has a ไม้ โท

 

and there are (i think) 9 other consonants besides "ย" that have this rule.    why is that the case?

 

also, can someone provide one specific web link that contains examples of all these, uh, how would you describe them? ...tonal relationships to consonant classes??   ...i give up trying to articulate it. feel free to suggest a more apt description!

[BritManToo]

Thais don't learn pronunciation by working through 'rules'.

They learn by repatriation and memory.

[RichCor]

1 hour ago, BritManToo said:

They learn by repatriation and memory.

...I thought is was Chinese dissidents that learned by repatriation and memory

[katana]

I'm not sure that's right that ย่าง is pronounced as though it has a ไม้โท.
ย ยักษ์ is a low class consonant, so with the ไม้เอก, ย่าง is pronounced falling tone.
With a ไม้โท, it would high tone.

[Oxx]

11 hours ago, BananaBandit said:

can someone provide one specific web link that contains examples of all these, uh, how would you describe them? ...tonal relationships to consonant classes??

http://thai-notes.com/reading/index.shtml

[tgeezer]

Try Thai-language.com. Everything is there in reference. They even have a forum for questions although there are few people posting there now. The advantage is that anyone who does respond is reading from the same hymn sheet. 

[BananaBandit]

23 hours ago, katana said:

I'm not sure that's right that ย่าง is pronounced as though it has a ไม้โท.
ย ยักษ์ is a low class consonant, so with the ไม้เอก, ย่าง is pronounced falling tone.
With a ไม้โท, it would high tone.

If I were to say that you pronounce 

 

ย่าง

 

like a middle or high class consonant with a  ไม้โท

 

then that would be correct.   Correct?

[katana]

Yes, middle or high class consonants with a ไม้โท are falling tone eg บ้าง ห้าง etc
But since ย ยักษ์ isn't a middle or high class consonant, not sure why you would want to do that.
The rule for ย่าง is that a low class consonant with a ไม้เอก is falling tone.

[BananaBandit]

5 hours ago, katana said:

But since ย ยักษ์ isn't a middle or high class consonant, not sure why you would want to do that.

Because I didn't know any better...Just started paying attention to consonant classes. 

 

I'm sure the websites mentioned in this thread have valuable info, but it's kind of a daunting amount of material. Luckily, I found something more targeted:   a one-picture roadmap of sorts that lists the consonant classes and then tells you what tone to use based on the combination of consonant class and  วรรญยุกต์

 

I doubt it's anything new to most of the denizens of the language forum. But, for me, it could be a Rosetta Stone. 

Edited August 26, 2020 by BananaBandit

[tgeezer]

Then you will find that endings (closing letter) effect the tone as well. Questions on that will be answered here by me saying live and dead words while others might say closing consonants or final letters. I recommend T-L.com to home learners because any questions they may have arise therefrom and can be easily answered using the same references.  
Disagreements here arise mostly because we have not all used the same learning resource. 
If a picture appears it isn’t from T.L. Com 

[BananaBandit]

คำตาย 

 

becomes a possibility only if there is no 

 

วรรณยุกต์

 

correct?

Edited August 28, 2020 by BananaBandit

[Delight]

I attach 2 charts -from which you can determine tone of a Thai syllable.

If interested -then the only place to store them is in your head.

 

[Oxx]

12 hours ago, Delight said:

I attach 2 charts

 

The second chart in particular is deficient.  It fails to acknowledge the importance of syllables ending in a glottal stop, which are dead - just like those ending -k/-p/-t.  It also fails to get the tone of short vowels that do not end in a glottal stop correct.  For example, consider the first vowels in สะพาน and สบาย.  These words are pronounced \sàʔˑphaan\ and \saˑbaay\ - first syllables low and mid tone respectively.

[katana]

Are you saying the first tone of sabai สบาย is mid rather than low?

Lots of sites state it's low eg Thai2English etc

[Oxx]

1 hour ago, katana said:

Are you saying the first tone of sabai สบาย is mid rather than low?

Lots of sites state it's low eg Thai2English etc

 

Yes I am, and all those sites are wrong.  Thai script can't represent a mid tone, short vowel, so it's represented in respelling (such as in the RID) at high or low tone.  Sites that rely upon Thai representations of pronunciation are therefore 100% wrong in this respect.

 

To quote Peter J. Bee, an expert on Thai at London University's School of Oriental and African studies, writing about the unwritten mid tones:

 

Quote

"Only in artificial 'dictation' style do they close with a glottal final. Only in dictation style, moreover, do they bear the phonemic tone we would expect from their spelling."

 

In other words, the /a/ in สบาย in normal speech is (a) mid tone, (b) not closed with a glottal stop, and (c) (though Bee doesn't state this) unstressed.

 

You will also find that in quality learning materials such as those of the Union method and in reference works such as David Smyth's reference grammar this is acknowledged.

Edited September 1, 2020 by Oxx

[Oxx]

Just to add, SEALang Library Thai website, based upon the highly authoritative work of Mary Haas, gives the pronunciation of สบาย as /saˈbaay/.  (It shows the stress, which most reference sites don't.)  

[jackdd]

8 hours ago, Oxx said:

To quote Peter J. Bee, an expert on Thai at London University's School of Oriental and African studies, writing about the unwritten mid tones:

You are taking what he said out of context.

In case anybody wants to verify this, here the source: http://sealang.net/sala/archives/pdf4/bee1975restricted.pdf

He is only referring to what he calls "linker-syllables", as for example the "tha" in รัฐบาล.

It has nothing to do with สะพาน or สบาย.

[Oxx]

4 hours ago, jackdd said:

You are taking what he said out of context.

You're right.  My mistake.  However, the second paragraph of the article suggests that the linker syllable feature is associated with unstressed prefixation and goes on to give several examples of the mid tone short /a/.  So, my point remains correct, even though my reference was wrong.

[tgeezer]

On 8/28/2020 at 3:32 PM, BananaBandit said:

คำตาย 

 

becomes a possibility only if there is no 

 

วรรณยุกต์

 

correct?

Not according to the chart which I posted:  ก้ะ ก๊ะ ก๋ะ ข้ะ ม้าก etc. they may be possible in theory but best to learn the basics, dead words with high or mid class consonants are low tone.  Low class consonants are high with a short vowel and falling with a long vowel.  You soon get used to seeing the word and using the correct tone after schooling yourself as kids are schooled, then when you see ค่ะ it sticks out like a dog's balls. 

[nrasmussen]

On 9/1/2020 at 4:32 PM, Oxx said:

 

Yes I am, and all those sites are wrong.  Thai script can't represent a mid tone, short vowel, so it's represented in respelling (such as in the RID) at high or low tone.  Sites that rely upon Thai representations of pronunciation are therefore 100% wrong in this respect.

 

To quote Peter J. Bee, an expert on Thai at London University's School of Oriental and African studies, writing about the unwritten mid tones:

 

 

In other words, the /a/ in สบาย in normal speech is (a) mid tone, (b) not closed with a glottal stop, and (c) (though Bee doesn't state this) unstressed.

 

You will also find that in quality learning materials such as those of the Union method and in reference works such as David Smyth's reference grammar this is acknowledged.

Thanks for the clarification. I never really thought about this before.

 

So to put it in other words: in case of an unstressed syllable the vowel reduces to a schwa (ə) and the tone approaches a mid tone. Would that be correct? If it is, then it would be an easy rule for me to remember.

[Oxx]

21 minutes ago, nrasmussen said:

So to put it in other words: in case of an unstressed syllable the vowel reduces to a schwa (ə) and the tone approaches a mid tone. Would that be correct?

 

Close, but not quite.  Similar principle, though.  Schwa is a mid central vowel.  The unstressed /a/ is an open front vowel.  However, in an unstressed syllable the tone definitely approaches mid tone (and there is no glottal stop).

[JHicks]

5 hours ago, nrasmussen said:

Thanks for the clarification. I never really thought about this before.

 

So to put it in other words: in case of an unstressed syllable the vowel reduces to a schwa (ə) and the tone approaches a mid tone. Would that be correct? If it is, then it would be an easy rule for me to remember.

Not sure if this needs pointing out but we're only talking about linker syllables here, not any unstressed syllable. A linker is a minor syllable with a short a and no final. All linkers are unstressed syllables, but not all unstressed syllables are linkers.

 

For non-linkers, stress can affect the way the realisation of tone quite a bit, but the tone itself does not change. There is quite a good paper by Potisuk on this. It's online somewhere. For linkers, some people argue that the tone is converted into a mid-tone (Oxx's view), and some argue that they have no lexical tone. For most purposes it doesn't make much difference which way you look at it.

[Oxx]

1 hour ago, JHicks said:

Not sure if this needs pointing out but we're only talking about linker syllables here, not any unstressed syllable.

 

I think you may not be following the discussion.  Yes, I misquoted from a piece about linker syllables, but the discussion really is about the unwritten, unstressed, no glottal stop, mid-tone /a/ - not linker syllables.

 

As for Potisuk, perhaps you could provide a little more information?  I'm sure I'd enjoy reading the paper.

[JHicks]

1 hour ago, Oxx said:

 

I think you may not be following the discussion.  Yes, I misquoted from a piece about linker syllables, but the discussion really is about the unwritten, unstressed, no glottal stop, mid-tone /a/ - not linker syllables.

 

As for Potisuk, perhaps you could provide a little more information?  I'm sure I'd enjoy reading the paper.

Course I'm following it - I was saying that the phenomenon you are describing only occurs in linker syllables.

 

I will see if I can find a link for the paper I mentioned. There are a couple of other papers on stress which deal with the change or loss of tone in the type of syllable you are describing, which they call linker syllables.

[JHicks]

The Potisuk one can be found here by scrolling down to Potisuk, S., Gandour, J.T. and Mary, P.H. 1994, "F0 correlates of stress in Thai", in Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area, vol. 17, no. 2, pp. 1-27. If you look at the appendix you'll see that the unstressed syllables he was investigating were not linkers - he finds that the tones are preserved although the realisation changes.

 

I think the Luangthongkam paper referred to in the introduction to Potisuk may be one of the ones that goes into some detail on linkers, but I can't find it just at the moment. The one I've got in mind is a thesis from Edinburgh uni. Anyway, the upshot is that tone neutralisation only occurs in linker syllables.

[Nout]

On 8/24/2020 at 8:40 PM, BritManToo said:

Thais don't learn pronunciation by working through 'rules'.

They learn by repatriation and memory.

Yeah sure they return home as an act of repatriation. 555 Your insight into Thai pedagogical matters sure are original.

[JHicks]

I don't seem to be able to edit my previous post but have now found the Luangthongkam paper here. The author's own conclusions don’t really differ from the summary of previous research she gives on p. 91, except that you might think from the summary that linkers were only found in words of three or more syllables, whereas Luangthongkam expressly includes the first syllable of two-syllable words like the ones discussed higher up this thread (see p. 93) and the first and second syllables of words like มะละกอ (see p. 191). The summary is in footnote 4 of page 91 and reads:

 

The term "linker-syllables" was used by Bee (1975), and It has been adopted as a useful term. In the first paragraph of his article entitled, "Restricted Phonology in Certain Thai Linker-Syllables," Bee says:

 

Phonologists agree that vowel quantity is phonemic in Thai. The syllables which I wish to term linker-syllables have as vowel the phoneme /a/, a short vowel quantitatively speaking, usually realized as [ə].

 

Bee gives some examples, e.g. sattawat, ratthabaan, sappada [sic], etc.; the middle syllables of the three words which are underlined here are called linker-syllables by Bee. In his note (1), he refers to a similar comment made by Henderson (1949: 198). He then continues:

 

they do not conform to the accepted phonological rule that all Thai syllables which are phonemically short must close with some final consonant or other. Only in artificial 'dictation' style do they close with a glottal final. Only in dictation style, moreover, do they bear the phonemic tone we would expect from their spelling. Otherwise, (in normal speech, that is) the pitch of the syllables seems to be self-adjusting, as unobtrusive as a linker should be, accommodating itself to the clear realization of tones in what went before and what to come after.

 

NB this is not exactly the same as saying that the syllables change to mid tone (this is the debate I mentioned above - I think it is better to say that the original tone is stripped from the syllable than that it is replaced with a mid tone).

 

Since tone stripping is a post-lexical process you wouldn't expect it to be reflected in the spelling, even in a phonemic spelling system. That means it shouldn't make any difference whether the vowel is written or implied. It also means the fact that you can't write a short vowel without a final without indicating a glottal stop and a tone is not a flaw in the writing system, which tries to represent the phonemic structure of the word rather than its phonetic realisation.

Edited September 3, 2020 by JHicks

[BananaBandit]

On 9/2/2020 at 6:17 AM, tgeezer said:

Low class consonants are high with a short vowel and falling with a long vowel. 

So, for example:

 

ยัง

would have high tone

 

and

ยาก

would have falling tone, correct?

 

On 9/2/2020 at 6:17 AM, tgeezer said:

dead words with high or mid class consonants are low tone

So, for example:

 

ถูก

would have low tone, correct?

[tgeezer]

Not completely, you know the rules for dead words because ยาก ถูก are correct
If you look at the chart I posted you should see มาตราตัวสเกด , that means syllable endings. I see endings as split into families with a mother แม่ there are nine. I was taught  k,p,t,m,n,g and  open:แม่กา, y: แม่ เกย and W:  แม่ เกอว were ignored as being too complicated. I went for a long time ignoring them too.  You will realise that ยัง is แม่กง so live.  Live words are not affected by length of the vowel. 
This is not taught in English instruction and might seem confusing but identifying deadwords seems easier to me. 
คำตาย คำสระสั่นไม่มีตัวสะกด พวกหนึ่ง และคำ นมาตรา  กก กดด กบ . Deadwords are words with short vowels without a closing consonant and words ending in k,t or p 
 

Every other syllable(word) which are not in these forms is live, they are common tone unless there is a high class initial consonant. 

กา คา are common tone because they are live หา is fourth tone because it is live with a high class initial, หาก is a deadword (ending in ก) so first tone, หัก similarly. 

คะ is high because it is a deadword with a short vowel. มาก is a deadword with a long vowel so first tone.   
 

Edited September 5, 2020 by tgeezer

[BananaBandit]

On 9/5/2020 at 2:24 AM, tgeezer said:

You will realise that ยัง is แม่กง so live.

If a low consonant like  ร  has a short vowel with a dead consonant ending like  ก   ...as in the word  รัก  ...then there is a high tone, correct?