Matching the mood.

[tgeezer]

I was reading a translation of an article explaining anaerobic exercise for distance runners recently and came across this:  เผาผลาญ 
เผาผลาญ pow plaan both 4th tone.

Longdo has translations under the heading Open Subtitles where I can get examples of usage. There is a disclaimer ระวัง คำแปลอาจมีข้อผิดพลาด which I take as a challenge. 

If anyone is interested there are many which I think worth noting and hopefully discussing but I just take one. 

 Boy, they gotta burn a lot of fuel to run them cars, you know it.  พวกเขาเผาผลาญเชี้อเพลิงไปมากเพื่อวิ่งรถพวกนั้น คุณรู้มั้ย 
Formal in parts - fuel rather than gas or petrol but the tone of the English is not written language whereas the Thai is. 
I think that the Thai says that Those cars consume a lot of fuel don't you know?  
It is entirely a matter of opinion but I think that a Thai would say รถพวกนั้นกินนำมันไปมากๆ น่า 

Hopefully the group would like to offer alternative views, I am especially interested in whether my using only Thai definitions leads me astray; I chose to say consumed rather than burn intentionally to make it more formal.  
Parlance is an individual thing so to say that all Thais would refer to liquid as (ถูก)กินไป is not a question that a Thai could answer, the tone or mood is what I question. 
 

 

[tgeezer]

I was hoping that my example might have aroused some interest.
The use of พวก กิน น่า which I would have thought might contradict or inform some people's understanding of these words.  

Be that as it may and since this is my topic; my comment in another thread about not paying much attention to my own language is actually not correct. Changes have occurred in English and I wonder if they have influenced Thai or whether Thai has changed naturally in a similar way.  
A How are you? 
B. Good thanks.

To my generation the respondent is making a judgement upon his character.  My answer is  "I am well thanks." 
Compare that with what I think has happened in Thai. 
ก. สบายดีไหม  It could be สบายไหม 

ข. สบายดีครับ.    ~~~~.    สบายครับ 

It looks as though because the negative answer is ไม่สบาย it is felt that something is missing without ดี in the affirmation of the respondent's condition but ดี and ไม่ do not have the same role. (ไม่ดี) 

 Or it maybe a need to be verbose which would not be in  the nature of Thai where " less is more." . 
When an English speaker encounters Thai it can seem to be missing a lot of words which we find necessary.   

 

[JHicks]

Definitely an interesting topic. I just think it's incredibly hard to judge the naturalness or mood of a sentence in a language that's not your own. Also, I suspect the sentence from open subtitles is a google translate job.

 

7 hours ago, tgeezer said:

Changes have occurred in English and I wonder if they have influenced Thai or whether Thai has changed naturally in a similar way.  
A How are you? 
B. Good thanks.

To my generation the respondent is making a judgement upon his character.  My answer is  "I am well thanks." 
Compare that with what I think has happened in Thai. 
ก. สบายดีไหม  It could be สบายไหม 

ข. สบายดีครับ.    ~~~~.    สบายครับ 

I see the parallel but I don't think these things are related. For what it's worth my analysis of the English situation would be that:

 

"I am X" is a predicative construction, so X should be an adjective rather than an adverb - "I am happy", "I am angry"...

 

By some historical quirk the word "well" came to be used in this construction even though it is normally an adverb. I for one feel that this "well" is the opposite of "ill" - but when I respond to "How are you?", I'm not just talking about my health.

 

"Good" would obviously be the usual form of the adjective, and normally it has about as broad a meaning as you can get. I understand what you're saying about the meaning having been narrowed down in this particular context, but as far as I can see that can only have happened because "well" had come to be used instead, and there wasn't really a good reason for that in the first place. So as I see it, we've ironed out a historical quirk and restored "good" and "well" to their proper places.

 

All of that strikes me as being very specific to English - even to UK English. I don't know the history of สบายดี but I don't think I've seen it suggested that it's a new construction, and I know it's the same in Lao, which is supposed to be more conservative. I suspect that expressions like สบายดี and อร่อยดี have been around for a good while. If English has anything similar, I'd say it's "good and ready", where the "good" just brings out the "ready". If you wanted to negate this you'd normally get rid of the "good", so that fits with the point you make about the Thai.

 

It strikes me that Thai goes in for this trick of piling up similar words to adjust or emphasise the meaning more than English does. We do have a few examples - "a great big house", or maybe "a washer-dryer", but they're few and far between. With Thai, I have quite a bit of trouble working out whether extra words really are redundant, whether they are there for emphasis or to adjust the meaning, or whether they just seem redundant to me because of differences between Thai and English grammar (as in สามารถ... ได้, which made my head explode at first).

 

[tgeezer]

Do you know, There was much discourse on T.L.com about สามารถ and ได้ years ago, I don't think that I could see it then but it makes sense to me now. I can't give examples obviously but when I come across them I can explain the feeling if not the need.