Confused About Tones

[Oswulf]

I'm just starting to learn to read Thai, and textbooks tell me that syllables ending in a short vowel sound are dead and have a tone according to the class of the initial consonant - Low/Medium/High consonants resulting in High, Low and Low tones respectively.

Why, then, are words such as ใน ดํา and เอา all pronounced with a mid tone? As is the second syllable of อะไร.

[Johpa]

I'm just starting to learn to read Thai, and textbooks tell me that syllables ending in a short vowel sound are dead and have a tone according to the class of the initial consonant - Low/Medium/High consonants resulting in High, Low and Low tones respectively.

Why, then, are words such as ใน ดํา and เอา all pronounced with a mid tone? As is the second syllable of อะไร.

Is it perhaps because none of the syllables you question are short (dead) vowels? Dipthongs, such as ใน & อะไร (second syllable) are not considered short vowels, and ดํา is not considered a short vowel regardless of what the small mark that I can barely see denotes. All are open long vowels as far as tone rules are concerned.

[Richard W]

An alternative view, with the same consequence, is that syllables such as ใน do have a short vowel, but end in a consonant (/y/ to be precise. or /j/ in strict IPA), and that syllables ending in /m/, /n/, /ng/ (single consonant - most fonts don't have the letter eng), /w/, /y/ or /l/ - 'resonants' - are live.

This is the reason that ดํา is a live syllable, and therefore pronounced [M]dam.

The mark at the top of this word is a นิคหิต [H]nik[H]kha[L]hit English/Pali 'niggahita', labelled 'nikhahit' ('whoops! Should have been 'nikkhahit') in the Unicode standard. It's the same as a Devanagari anusvara, and indicates nasality or a following nasal consonant.

Pedantically, the syllables appearing to end in a short vowel should actually end in a glottal stop, which is why they are dead syllables.

(It can sometime be useful to say that ใน has a short /a/ and that นาย has a long /a/. It's particular useful with ไม้ [M]maai 'stick', which has a long /a/ outside compounds, despite its spelling and history.)

[roadie]

Note that some vowels can sound both short and long but are classified as long for tone rule purposes, namely ai-mai-muan and ai-mai-ma-lai. Also sa-ra 'am', and sa-ra 'ao' (sorry no Thai keyboard).

[Richard W]

You'd do well to adopt my explanation or Johpa's. If you follow Roadie's approach you'll start collecting many short/long examples - เร็ว [M]reo and หิว [R]hio immediately spring to mind.

[roadie]

That's not my approach but Benjawan Becker's.

[Richard W]

Possibly we're making it too difficult. Apparently open dead monosyllables end in one of the four short vowel signs: ะ, - ิ, -ุ or -ึ, or, ambiguously, have no vowel symbol at all (like ก็ and sometimes บ่/บ).

As far as I'm aware, in polysyllabic words it's again these four vowel signs or the inherent vowel. In words like ทรมาน [MS]thor[H]ra[M]maan 'torture', the initial syllable is best regarded as being shortened after the application of the tone rules, though you can probably argue that the tone neutralisation rule also applies to the first syllable of this sort of word.

[Johpa]

Pedantically, the syllables appearing to end in a short vowel should actually end in a glottal stop, which is why they are dead syllables.

Nothing pedantic about a glottal stop, it is a valid Thai phonetic consonant even though it does not appear in the Thai alphabet. (But then the "back L, " the /ll/ in Welsh does not appear in the English alphabet as a distinct consonant although it is a valid English phonetic, although not phonemic, consonant.) My Thai professor was very adamant about us recognizing and mastering the glottal stop at the end of a short vowel syllable with no overt final consonant. And his ol' buddy Marvin Brown's AUA books use to denote the glottal stop with some sort of upside down question mark symbol in the transliteration system. So let's hear it for those two structuralists, one a teetotaller and the other, well, he stayed in Bangkok.

For those who are wondering what the heck we are talking about, the glottal stop consonant does exist in some English exclamations. When you say "oh-oh" the first oh almost always ends in a glottal stop just as all Thai short vowels do when there is no final stop consonant. And a stop consonant is a sound where the air flow is physically stopped for a moment such as the /p/, /t/, and /k/ sounds and their voiced counterparts the /b/, /d/, and /g/ sounds.

So all Thai syallables with short vowels that have no overt final stop consonant sound (p.t,k) end with a glottal stop consonant even though it is not recognized in the Thai alphabet . These syllables take on the same tone rules as syllables with a short vowel and final stop consonant because the glottal stop is phonetically a stop consonant.

[Richard W]

Pedantically, the syllables appearing to end in a short vowel should actually end in a glottal stop, which is why they are dead syllables.

Nothing pedantic about a glottal stop, it is a valid Thai phonetic consonant even though it does not appear in the Thai alphabet.

That's debatable. It's Fang-Kuei Li who described it as a 'pedantic teacher's pronunication' at the end of non-final syllables. He makes the point that มานะ 'persistence' and มนัส 'mind' frequently only differ in the final consonant - glottal stop versus /t/.

I would contend that the glottal stop actually has two symbols in Thai - o ang at the start of a syllable and sara a at the end.

But then the "back L, " the /ll/ in Welsh does not appear in the English alphabet as a distinct consonant although it is a valid English phonetic, although not phonemic, consonant.

The Welsh <ll> is a voiceless fricative, nothing to do with the 'back L' of English. You can't use the Polish barred 'l' for your example, as that's now pronounced /w/!

For those who are wondering what the heck we are talking about, the glottal stop consonant does exist in some English exclamations. When you say "oh-oh" the first oh almost always ends in a glottal stop just as all Thai short vowels do when there is no final stop consonant.

In my English speech, a stressed monosyllable cannot end in a short vowel. The nearest to one I can produce has a glottal stop at the end!