Rule or Exception?

[ColeBOzbourne]

When reading Thai I know many of the rules and clues for pronunciation, and that some words are just exceptions and must be memorized. But I’ll use the word อุณหภูมิ (temperature) as an example since it has two things that catch me off guard. Apologies if my transliteration makes you cringe: อุณหภูมิ = un-hà-puum

 

First question. I thought that if (ห) was placed in front of a low class consonant, it would be silent, and would change that consonant from low class to high class. But here it is not silent, it forms a separate syllable, and is not a class changer. Is this an exception or have I overlooked a rule?

 

Second question. I don’t understand why the short vowel in (มิ) is silent. I seem to remember other words with the combination (ติ) where the vowel is also silent. Possibly at the end of a word. Why is the vowel silent?

 

Had I not looked up the pronunciation, and screwed up on both accounts, I would have been inclined to pronounce อุณหภูมิ as something like ‘un-puu-mi’, with the middle syllable being rising tone.

 

Thanks for any clarification you might give.

[johnray]

Flash the cash and they instantly understand.

[digbeth]

in the original Indian Pali-Sanskrit the 'mi' in Bhumi is pronounced

 

Like the airport สุวรรณภูมิ if you pronounced in poom it's just Thai, but if you pronounced it Bhu mi indians understand it as well

 

English is equally rife with odd spellings that reflect the origin of the word

[JHicks]

7 hours ago, ColeBOzbourne said:

First question. I thought that if (ห) was placed in front of a low class consonant, it would be silent, and would change that consonant from low class to high class. But here it is not silent, it forms a separate syllable, and is not a class changer. Is this an exception or have I overlooked a rule?

 

It's more to do with the rule, which only applies to low class consonants that don't have a high class equivalent. If there's a ready-made high class version (like ผ), ห is not used as a class changer.

 

On your second question, it might be worth pointing out that  ์ basically cancels the consonant, so if it was used here you would lose the ม as well. That means there's no way to show that it's silent, but they still keep it in there to reflect the original Indic spelling. As far as I can think this only happens with short i. I believe the original vowel gets dropped because otherwise the word is hard to fit into the Thai stress pattern. It's a while since I've looked at this but IIRC short i is usually (always?) dropped at the end of longer Indic words. In this case (again, IIRC) you can tell the word is Indic from the use of ภ and รร, so it's at least a fair bet that it's going to be silent.

[ColeBOzbourne]

Thank you for your helpful replies. I am just now beginning to study and appreciate some of the history behind the Thai language so gradually the pieces are coming together.

[bamboozled]

Wow this is a great thread. I am just now studying this stuff and sometimes you feel all alone in doing so. It is very difficult to get your head around, Thai language that is. And, I believe, very difficult to teach. My latest idea on this is that there really is no "beginner" Thai. The rules are so complex and multi-level and everywhere that you almost have to know them all right from the start just to understand "See Jane run." But of course it's impossible to know them at the beginning which makes teaching it a conundrum with a lot of back peddling. And throwing out what you have already learned when you subsequently learn that the previous rule is not really the rule at all but just scaffolding to hold you up while you climb higher. ...yeah!

[EricTh]

Many of these idiosynchrasies are due to loanwords from Sanskrit. They aren't true Thai words, that's why the spelling is weird.

 

In real life, the common people don't use it in conversation but most if not all Thai teachers usually don't teach what common people say except for a few words.

 

That's why I have stopped going to Thai classes because I want to learn how to speak and not how to read formal Thai newspapers which use a lot of Sanskrit words.

 

Edited September 15, 2020 by EricTh

[tgeezer]

อุณห- อุณหะ  means hot  + ภูมิ means land /place 

อุณหภูมิ is those two words joined without modification to make one word when spoken สระ อะ is placed between them.  ThIs is Sanskrit/ Pali  grammar called สมาส joining two words to make one. In this case in the written form the ะ has been dropped only to reappear when spoken! 
รัฐศาสตร์ is รัฐ+ศาสตร์ รัดถะสาด 

 

Incidentally ผลไม้ (ผนละไม้) are Thai words but some think are S/P because of the สระ อะ 

[kokesaat]

I'd be willing to bet this word is one of those trick words on Thai language tests (for Thais).

According to the website คำไทย   

คำว่า  อุณหภููมิ อ่านว่า  อุน หะ พูม

มักอ่านผิดเป็น อุน นะ พูม / อุน นะ หะ พูม

 

It's one of those Thai words that I leave to the professionals to explain the mechanics......but find them easy to learn once you've made a blunder in pronunciation and have it pointed out  Sort of like spelling ศีรษะ, so often seen misspelled on those pesky escalator signs warning you to watch your head.  Even the Thai dictionary developed by nectec.or.th misspells it in one place in their online dictionary as ตัดศรีษะ

 

Again, once you learn it (especially when learned and used in error......like seperate or hemorroid) you'll remember it.  Why it's spelled that way?...........over to the experts

 

[Oxx]

8 hours ago, tgeezer said:

Incidentally ผลไม้ (ผนละไม้) are Thai words

 

Sorry, but it's patently obvious that that ผล is not a Thai word.  If it were it would be written ผน.  In fact it's derived from either Sanskrit or Pali where the word for fruit in both languages is phala.

[tgeezer]

4 hours ago, Oxx said:

 

Sorry, but it's patently obvious that that ผล is not a Thai word.  If it were it would be written ผน.  In fact it's derived from either Sanskrit or Pali where the word for fruit in both languages is phala.

There is no need to apologise for pointing that out.
I am repeating what I learnt years ago and have never looked at closely until now, for which I thank you.  The subject was สมาส.  I should have said that ผลไม้ belies its appearance because ไม้ is a Thai word.  

I suppose that if a word ends with a consonant other than ก ด บ ม น ง it could be inferred that it is not likely to be a pure Thai word, ยล is perhaps the exception that proves the rule.  
แม่กม stands alone in having no "kin" so common things are likely to have a Thai and a  ส.ป. version If the Thai word ends in ม.  นำ้ - ชล. springs to mind.  ชล from which we get ชลประทาน - Give water (irrigation) This appears to be another example of Thai + Sanskrit given the สมาส treatment. 
 

[tgeezer]

Edit: whilst doing the dishes I reflected on ชลปรทาน = give water and think that I should have said "given water".  

[tgeezer]

Damn, left it too long again, 

edit: ประทาน 

[JHicks]

4 hours ago, tgeezer said:

I suppose that if a word ends with a consonant other than ก ด บ ม น ง it could be inferred that it is not likely to be a pure Thai word, ยล is perhaps the exception that proves the rule.  

According to the Thai wiktionary (link) ยล is from Khmer.

According to the Khmer/English dictionary here, the final is pronounced l in Khmer.

[tgeezer]

I answered hastily, when I realized that 'here' was a link, "here" it still is not obviously a different color. 
Being เขมร probably makes it a Thai word but I shall research it. 

Edited September 19, 2020 by tgeezer

[JHicks]

5 hours ago, tgeezer said:

I answered hastily, when I realized that 'here' was a link, "here" it still is not obviously a different color. 
Being เขมร probably makes it a Thai word but I shall research it. 

That's weird - it shows up fine in Firefox. Maybe you have an option to underline links in your settings (in FF it's on by default but you can switch it off).

 

I thought Khmer and Thai belonged to different language families, and having looked again it seems they are basically unrelated. There will still be a lot of shared vocabulary, just because speakers have been rubbing shoulders for so long.

 

Obviously a borrowed word gets incorporated into the language at some point, and I think this can change the way you read it - if you treat มกราคม as a Sanskrit word you will probably pronounce it มะ-กะ, but as an adopted Thai word it can just as well be มก-กะ, with doubling of the ก. The transliteration into Thai would have been มาฆะห์, so it looks as though the word was adopted before the spelling settled down.

 

Edit: another example is มณฑล, which is a faithful transcription of the Sanskrit word that came into English as "mandala", but is read the Thai way and becomes มน-ทน. In this case it's obvious from the spelling that you are looking at a Sanskrit word but the pronunciation has been fully adapted to Thai.

Edited September 19, 2020 by JHicks

[Oxx]

5 hours ago, JHicks said:

I thought Khmer and Thai belonged to different language families, and having looked again it seems they are basically unrelated. There will still be a lot of shared vocabulary, just because speakers have been rubbing shoulders for so long.

Just because speakers rub shoulders doesn't mean that lexis will be transferred.  Consider the case of Welsh and English.  There's only a tiny handful of Welsh words that have been adopted into English (and some of these are contentious):  flannel, penguin, cwm, corgi.

 

Similarly, very few Malay words have entered Thai.  (Discussed at https://forum.thaivisa.com/topic/680829-malay-loanwords-in-thai/ )

 

Putting it bluntly, the English looked down on the Welsh, and the Thais looked down on the Malays, so generally did not adopt their lexis.

 

In the case of the Khmer, it was rather different.  The Thais actually looked up to them and, for example, stole their dance style and aspects of their temple architecture (particularly prangs).

 

It is believed that during the Ayutthaya period Khmer was widely spoken amongst the elite, and this was the primary route for Khmer lexis' entering the language.

 

 

[Oxx]

5 hours ago, JHicks said:

Obviously a borrowed word gets incorporated into the language at some point, and I think this can change the way you read it - if you treat มกราคม as a Sanskrit word you will probably pronounce it มะ-กะ, but as an adopted Thai word it can just as well be มก-กะ, with doubling of the ก. The transliteration into Thai would have been มาฆะห์, so it looks as though the word was adopted before the spelling settled down.

This is not, in my opinion, right.  It is only recently that literacy has become common in Thailand.  Monks would know the word makara from Pali - it's a type of dragon.  And Pali in Thai script is read with /a/ as the default vowel sound after each consonant.  They would pronounce it มะกะระ, and this is what the laiety would hear when monks preached and what they would remember.  There is no question of the "spelling settling down".

 

What has subsequently happened, as literacy has spread, is that people have mispronounced the word, based upon the spelling.  So, nowadays มกร as a standalone word is pronounced มะกอน, and มกร- as a prefix can be pronounced มะกอระ- or มะกะระ- according to context.  มกราคม is an exception it that it can be pronounced มกกะรา-.  (Pronunciations from RID.)

[JHicks]

10 hours ago, Oxx said:

Just because speakers rub shoulders doesn't mean that lexis will be transferred.

Fair point, I oversimplified when I said "just". What I was trying to say was that, given that the two countries are next to each other, the fact that there is a lot of Khmer vocab in Thai is not evidence that they are related languages.

 

10 hours ago, Oxx said:

There is no question of the "spelling settling down".

This was a reference to the spelling being มกร, when the transliteration of the Sanskrit would have been มาฆะห์. That is based on the Sanskrit names of the months here, but it's always possible that that info is wrong or that the Thai names actually derive from Pali and the Pali was not quite the same as the Sanskrit. When you say that the Pali word is makara, is that based on directly on the Pali, or is it based on the fact that the word was transliterated as มกร?

 

I'm sure it's correct that มกร would intially have been pronounced Pali style as มะกะระ, and was later reinterpreted based on Thai spelling conventions. That's really what I meant by incorporation - at some point a loanword is appropriated and comes to be treated as a Thai word, and this means that you will find words that are obviously Indic but are pronounced as if they were Thai. I'm not sure I want to call that mispronunciation - I see it as a healthy part of the incorporation of the loanword - but it does make life more complicated.

[JHicks]

Edit: I now think that มาฆะ and มกร are two completely separate words that just happen to have been used in the names of months at different times.