Spelling And Pronuciation Of Kao

[Artamus]

OK, well this is probably a stupid question, but as I am studying Thai remotely without access to a tutor I don't have anyone to answer stupid questions like this.....

The word kao (he, she, him, her) is written with the Thai character "koo kai", and to my knowledge is pronounced with a high tone. However, "koo kai" is a high class consonant which according to all the tone rules I have read are never pronounced with a high tone (there's not even a tone mark for it). Kao is written without a tone mark, so the pronounciation according to the tone rules should be rising (live syllable). So why is it pronounced with a high tone? Confused!

thanks

[madjbs]

It IS spoken with a rising tone, not high tone

[riga]

OK, well this is probably a stupid question, but as I am studying Thai remotely without access to a tutor I don't have anyone to answer stupid questions like this.....

The word kao (he, she, him, her) is written with the Thai character "koo kai", and to my knowledge is pronounced with a high tone. However, "koo kai" is a high class consonant which according to all the tone rules I have read are never pronounced with a high tone (there's not even a tone mark for it). Kao is written without a tone mark, so the pronounciation according to the tone rules should be rising (live syllable). So why is it pronounced with a high tone? Confused!

thanks

I think that เขา has a rising tone as you would expect from the tone rules. The alternative spelling เค้า has a high tone (but if I get it right is a kind of slang word for she/he/her/him).

[Jay_Jay]

You will also often here girls use the word เค้า to refer to themselves -

เค้าไม่อยากไปกินข้าวกับเขาแล้ว /khao mai yak pai kin khao kap khao laew/ - "I don't want to go to dinner with him anymore"

ปลอยเค้า! /ploy khao/ - let go of me!

[meadish_sweetball]

In the everyday spoken language, เขา is almost pronounced เค้า - in informal writing (cartoons, personal letters, internet chatting, web forums to some extent), the spelling เค้า is often used instead, to reflect the pronunciation.

It is simply one of the words that are not pronounced regularly according to the tone rules, except for in careful, formal language and dictation.

[withnail]

Agree with Meadish but would add the word always so that it reads: is almost always pronounced .......

[Artamus]

Agree with Meadish but would add the word always so that it reads: is almost always pronounced .......

Thanks for the clarifications. Evidently one of the exceptions that proves the rule. At least I am not going crazy.....

[meadish_sweetball]

Agree with Meadish but would add the word always so that it reads: is almost always pronounced .......

Cheers, that is what I meant to say.

[5tash]

Another example is the question particle ไหม (rising tone) which is pronounced มั้ย (high tone) almost always in everyday speech. มั้ย is how you see it written informally as well.

[riga]

Just to add one more ฉัน that in everyday speech often become ชั้น.

But I see this more a difference from the formal way of writing and the informal way used when speaking or "chating",

which it doesn't mean that those words are now exceptions... they are pronounced according to the tone rules, and simply one or the other form is used depending on situations

[DavidHouston]

Let me through out a thought here. Could it be that speech which uses the high tone for is clearly written as rising tones is demonstrating "intonation", rather than "tones"? Take for example the difference between "ไหม" and "มั้ย". If you consider various interrogatory sentence which are tagged by this word, is there any difference in meaning implied by the use of the latter, rather than the former?

[Richard W]

There is or once was almost a phonological rule that unstressed form words have the high tone rather than the rising tone in normal use. Thus it should apply to ผม 'I' as well.

[withnail]

Let me through out a thought here. Could it be that speech which uses the high tone for is clearly written as rising tones is demonstrating "intonation", rather than "tones"? Take for example the difference between "ไหม" and "มั้ย". If you consider various interrogatory sentence which are tagged by this word, is there any difference in meaning implied by the use of the latter, rather than the former?

My guess here is that it's just our western brains telling us that it's intonation because it seems to mirror our use of intonation when asking questions. I suspect it's more of a linguistic time/energy saving device. I've always thought the same about swearwords; what is it about them that makes us sometimes naturally start saying them even though we don't want to? Isn't it always that they seem to flow off the tongue? I certainly have noticed that วะ seems easier to say than ครับ.

This could just be nonsense, but I'd be interested to hear a more experienced linguist's views.

[meadish_sweetball]

อะไรวะ

...oh, sorry.

It's funny you should mention it, one of those actually escaped me in the completely wrong situation just a day ago. And it was certainly not intended, not even subconsciously because I was responding to a perfectly normal question and did not feel there was anything wrong with it.

To return to the subject though, rising tones require a higher degree of pitch control than high tones because they change pitch direction - first the pitch dips down and then goes upwards again. Whereas the typical high tone just goes in one direction, with only a slight hint of a rise, but no initial pitch dip. Hence, the high tone is easier to pronounce, while the distinction to other tones is still reasonably preserved (albeit not in the correct way for a rising tone).

Home-hewn argument though, take it with a spoonful of น้ำปลา.

[merck]

Let me through [sic] out a thought here. Could it be that speech which uses the high tone for is [sic] clearly written as rising tones is demonstrating [sic] "intonation", rather than "tones"? Take for example the difference between "ไหม" and "มั้ย". If you consider various interrogatory sentence [sic] which are tagged by this word, is there any difference in meaning implied by the use of the latter, rather than the former?

อะไรหว่า ... can you write that in English please....

[luteplayer1981]

Just to clarify and add a little confusion to an already controversial subject, it seems when people discuss the nature of the lexical tones in standard Thai, whether educated Thai native speakers, Thai language teachers, or foreigners trying to learn and/or understand Thai phonology, there is much confusion as to what we are talking about. The Thai orthographic system, Thai phonological representation of lexical tones, and their phonetic realisation are 3 separate things.

To start, let's accept that in standard Thai at least, there are no level tones, but only contou

r tones i.e. tones which either rise, fall, or fall/rise or rise/fall from an initial fundamental pitch. This should not come as a surprise to an

yone who has really focused on the tonal fluctuations of standard Thai speakers.

It can also be verified by consulting Peter Ladefoged's Course of Phonetics website, chapter 10.7 where he has recorded a native speaker using all 5 standard lexical tones with an otherwise unchanging syllable. As can be seen and heard from measurements of the Fundamental frequencies (F0), all tones are contoured. Moreover, these contours do not correspond to those of the orthography. The reality is that though it is an orthographically shallow writing system when compared to say English or even Italian or Spanish, nonetheless, the graphemes of Thai and their system of organization evolved over a period of time and with a purpose that does not reflect an accurate representation of the phonetic realities of the modern standard spoken language. They were developed without the aid of sophisticated acousitical measurement or linguistic technique, so this is not surprising. What is surprising is that many learners are encouraged to believe that the orthography of Thai does represent its phonetic reality, rather than a phonological one. At any rate, I suggest any skeptics consult the Course on Phonetics website before continuing.

The 5 lexical tones of standard Thai with actual pitch measurements in Hertz are:

low tone= low falling; Fo from 100>89 Hz; na 'name'

mid tone= mid falling; Fo from 100>93 Hz; na ' field'

high tone= high rising; Fo from 105>140 Hz; na ' aunt'

rising tone= low falling/rising; Fo from 100>85>120 Hz; na 'thick'

falling tone= high falling; Fo from 140>70 Hz; na 'face'

As can be seen and heard, all the tones fluctuate from an initial fundamental frequency, ending at another higher or lower frequency by the end of the syllable nucleus. Of course women's starting Fo will be higher than men's and a child's Fo will be higher than an adult's. Nonetheless, the relative shape of the contour is the same, i.e. the pattern of frequency shift is reproduced whatever the starting fundamental frequency.

Not to add to the confusion, but there are many regional varieties of Thai , some of which realise the lexical tones differently from standard Thai. To mention only one instance, the dialect of the Buriram region (south) influenced by Khmer, realises the word laew 'already' as a high falling tone while standard thai orthography writes it is a high 

tone and pronounces it as a rising tone.

So, all in all, don't believe too much of what you read about Thai tones.

I hope this sheds some light on an otherwise controversial subject.

[meadish_sweetball]

Excellent post, luteplayer.

All your points are sound. Perhaps a bit over the heads of beginners though.

For somebody who is starting out with Thai it is probably the least confusing to start with learning the theoretical tone rules of the writing system - even though this is not exactly how people pronounce words in reality, it is a relatively consistent standard to lean on for starters. To a person who can hear and appreciate the differences between the written standard and the spoken language, the actual phonetic realizations and exceptions will gradually develop anyway.

the dialect of the Buriram region (south) influenced by Khmer, realises the word laew 'already' as a high falling tone while standard thai orthography writes it is a high

tone and pronounces it as a rising tone.

I think the cursive part is a bit confusing.

The actual, pronounced pitch rises as in all long syllable 'high tone' words, yes, but the pitch contour is still not the same as the tone that is usually called 'rising' in Thai, which - pitch-wise - dips before it starts to rise. The 'high tone' in spoken แล้ว /láew/ does not have that initial pitch dip.

[Johpa]

Excellent post, luteplayer.

All your points are sound. Perhaps a bit over the heads of beginners though.

Svenske, Lute's points are indeed mostly about sound, but not about language. The fact that an oscilloscope shows that the human voice rarely makes a perfect level tone is akin to the statement that nobody is able to draw a perfect circle freehand. Some people can clearly draw a better circle than others, but I have no problem recognizing anyone's attempts at drawing a circle and recognizing it as a circle and not confusing it with a square or a triangle. Of course language is far more complex than simple geometric figures and Thailand, until recently with the advent of national media and national education, was occupied by many dialects with influences from neighboring languages, not to mention the existence of historically relocated minority groups such as the "Yong" speakers south of Chiang Mai. So variation is still quite common and in the rural areas where these dialectical differences are still quite common, Thais love to sit around and talk about the differences in speech between one tambon and another.

And I am a bit confused over Lute's statement that Thai is a "shallower" orthography than English. Last time I looked, the Roman alphabet had a total of 26 symbols to represent some 44 English phonemes. Now if it was me looking for a metaphor to describe this situation, I might say that English is the "shallower" orthography.

[luteplayer1981]

Excellent post, luteplayer.

All your points are sound. Perhaps a bit over the heads of beginners though.

For somebody who is starting out with Thai it is probably the least confusing to start with learning the theoretical tone rules of the writing system - even though this is not exactly how people pronounce words in reality, it is a relatively consistent standard to lean on for starters. To a person who can hear and appreciate the differences between the written standard and the spoken language, the actual phonetic realizations and exceptions will gradually develop anyway.

the dialect of the Buriram region (south) influenced by Khmer, realises the word laew 'already' as a high falling tone while standard thai orthography writes it is a high

tone and pronounces it as a rising tone.

I think the cursive part is a bit confusing.

The actual, pronounced pitch rises as in all long syllable 'high tone' words, yes, but the pitch contour is still not the same as the tone that is usually called 'rising' in Thai, which - pitch-wise - dips before it starts to rise. The 'high tone' in spoken แล้ว /láew/ does not have that initial pitch dip.

Regarding some assumptions in the observed responses to my original post, first, the aside about the realisation of orthographic high tones in Buriram dialect, which are actually realised as falling tones in natural speech, whether they start from a higher Fo, or relative pitch, or not (they do), they are still obviously falling tones in this dialect. For the locals who use the standard Thai dialect (standard central Thai or Siamese as it used to be called) this same orthographically high tone is realised as a rising tone though

 it does initially descend in pitch slightly. This may be cause enough to consider renaming it a falling/rising tone as exists in standard mandarin (the 3rd tone as in the word ma 'horse'). At least this would be less confusing to novice non-native learners of the Thai language who are told that there is a high tone, while in fact , as every critic

al listener and learner can attest, the so-called high tone is a rising tone, though it starts from a higher initial Fo (fr

equency) than the rising tone. So, as pointed out in the original post and shown in the reference , Thai 

actually has 2 rising tones, not a rising tone and a high tone. The fact that one

 starts higher than the other,then rises, is immaterial to the description of the acoustic reality. It m

ay even appear to casual observers of the language that the rising tone only rise

s, but as pointed out, it falls, then rises. To avoid confusion , let's refer to the orthographic rising tone as a falling/rising tone.

This is the source of much confusion to many non-native learners of Thai who also learn the conventions of the writing system. Wh

en told that a word like /naam/ 'water' is a hiɡh tone,one can be perplexed as to the desiɡnation, ɡiven the obvious contour of the tone. The reason it appears strange to us i

s that we have not learned the phonology of the language unconsciously as enfants

 as native Thais have. We are consciously learning rules to make sense of what we

 hear in order to use the sounds and rules for their organisation as instruments of communication. 

I for one, do not feel it is at all clear or helpful to a novice speaker of Thai to insist on misrepresentative names for discrete and otherwise discernable tonal characteristics of Thai syllables. Why it should be thought efficient or easier to mislabel the actual tones without clarification as to what is part of a Thai's mental representation (phonological reality) and what is phonetic reality is not clear. But this is the accepted way of teaching and learning the language that foreigners experience. Why not simply let learners know that a high tone in orthographic terms is realised as a high rising tone (at least in isolation as opposed to some tonal shifts which occur in compounds which transition? Seems it would save a lot of wasted time and unnecessary obfuscation. This is the observation I was forced to accept after observing many tens of thousands of conversations of native thai speakers. No Thai speaker ever explained the reality to me as, for the most part

, they are not conscious of it. But we are.

The purpose of referring to the Buriram dialect was only to mention that there are many dialectal varieties of Thai, dozens in fact, and that they too are rule based systems with alternative realisations for the same orthographic representations of standard thai. They are not exceptions. They exemplify different rule based systems often influenced by areal effects and sometimes even different underlying linguistic origins.

[luteplayer1981]

Excellent post, luteplayer.

All your points are sound. Perhaps a bit over the heads of beginners though.

Svenske, Lute's points are indeed mostly about sound, but not about language. The fact that an oscilloscope shows that the human voice rarely makes a perfect level tone is akin to the statement that nobody is able to draw a perfect circle freehand. Some people can clearly draw a better circle than others, but I have no problem recognizing anyone's attempts at drawing a circle and recognizing it as a circle and not confusing it with a square or a triangle. Of course language is far more complex than simple geometric figures and Thailand, until recently with the advent of national media and national education, was occupied by many dialects with influences from neighboring languages, not to mention the existence of historically relocated minority groups such as the "Yong" speakers south of Chiang Mai. So variation is still quite common and in the rural areas where these dialectical differences are still quite common, Thais love to sit around and talk about the differences in speech between one tambon and another.

And I am a bit confused over Lute's statement that Thai is a "shallower" orthography than English. Last time I looked, the Roman alphabet had a total of 26 symbols to represent some 44 English phonemes. Now if it was me looking for a metaphor to describe this situation, I might say that English is the "shallower" orthography.

Without referring to esoteric and inapt analogies I would say that the observations of my original post were in fact linguistically very conservative. Phonetics is all about measuring describing and explaining the acoustic properties of language, both natural and synthesized. Many instruments are used to do so. For details on the descriptions

 of the labels used for the Thai tones and the method of measurement you may refer to the Course on Phonetics website.

Dialectal variety is a fact of the broad region known as Thailand. In fact, there are over 70 languages spoken in this relatively small country. Nonetheless, the initial observations regarding the realisation of Thai lexical tones in the standard dialect made no reference to these variants, other than the Buriram example. To clarify, the referenced pitches were for a native Thai adult male speaker of 

standard Thai. It is not an exceptional example. It is the norm for the  'standard' variety of Thai. If however you have other research that indicates that the what we refer to as s

tandard Thai,  has another pattern of lexical tones, I would love to see it.

As to my use of the term orthographically shallow in referring to the Thai writing system, I refer you to Henry Rogers "Writing Systems: A linguistic Approach", 2005, Blackwell. Rogers defines and uses the terms shallow and deep to refer to orthographic systems which represent the morphemes of a language with varying degrees of transparency. Deep systems, such as English, Burmese, Tibetan, are those in which allomorphic variation is not well represented in orthography e.g. the vowel in the English word 'child' /tʃajld/ is written the same when the word is pluralized 'children' even though the vowel of the root has changed /tʃɪldrɛn/. Likewise in the words 'south' /sawθ/ and 'southern' /sʌðərn/ the changed vowel and consonant phonemes are represented with the same -ou- and -th- digraphs. This is what we refer to, in linguistic terminology, as an orthographi

cally deep writing system because there is no graphic representation of allomorph

ic variation. You must know the language to know how to pronounce these spellings

.

Thai and for example ,Finnish, are considered to be orthographically 'shallow' writing systems because they are closer to a one-to-one phoneme/grapheme system i.e. there are more examples of allomorphs written differently. 

As you can imagine, a Thai transliteration of the above

examples from English would use different vowel graphemes to represent the allomorphic variation in the words.

So, there was no 'metaphor' in my use of the term "orthographically shallow" to refer to the Thai writing system.

[Johpa]

Without referring to esoteric and inapt analogies....

As to my use of the term orthographically shallow in referring to the Thai writing system, I refer you to Henry Rogers "Writing Systems: A linguistic Approach", 2005, Blackwell. Rogers defines and uses the terms shallow and deep to refer to orthographic systems which represent the morphemes of a language with varying degrees of transparency. Deep systems, such as English, Burmese, Tibetan, are those in which allomorphic variation is not well represented in orthography e.g. the vowel in the English word 'child' /tʃajld/ is written the same when the word is pluralized 'children' even though the vowel of the root has changed /tʃɪldrɛn/. Likewise in the words 'south' /sawθ/ and 'southern' /sʌðərn/ the changed vowel and consonant phonemes are represented with the same -ou- and -th- digraphs. This is what we refer to, in linguistic terminology, as an orthographi

cally deep writing system because there is no graphic representation of allomorph

ic variation. You must know the language to know how to pronounce these spellings

I stand corrected relative to this relatively new metaphor of "deepness" regarding orthographic systems. I left academia quite awhile ago and confess and I am not up to date on the current fashion terms in linguistics, and yes, the terms deep or shallow as used by Mr. Rogers are indeed metaphors that are defined by Mr. Rogers so that we know what the heck he is talking about. I am a bit surprised that the "deep" metaphor is still used in linguistics as I thought it had gone out of favor back in the 1990s. Ah, but fashion is always cyclical.

As for my analogy, we shall have to agree to disagree whether it was inapt or apropos. However inapt you may have felt it to be, and I thought it was a bloody good analogy, esoteric it was not.

I should note that most of the people here do not have a linguistic background nor are they able to parse all the IPA characters. And I can count on my fingers the number of regular contributors that are capable of following your academic arguments. I think you have much to add to this forum and look forward to your contributions. But best to spell out and explain the jargon and not dwell too much on the phonetics unless they are realized phonemically as well, as it will only serve to confuse those trying to simply learn the language.

[BPayette]

, luteplayer.

All your points are sound. Perhaps a bit over the heads of beginners though.

Svenske, Lute's points are indeed mostly about sound, but not about language. The fact that an oscilloscope shows that the human voice rarely makes a perfect level tone is akin to the statement that nobody is able to draw a perfect circle freehand. Some people can clearly draw a better circle than others, but I have no problem recognizing anyone's attempts at drawing a circle and recognizing it as a circle and not confusing it with a square or a triangle. Of course language is far more complex than simple geometric figures and Thailand, until recently with the advent of national media and national education, was occupied by many dialects with influences from neighboring languages, not to mention the existence of historically relocated minority groups such as the "Yong" speakers south of Chiang Mai. So variation is still quite common and in the rural areas where these dialectical differences are still quite common, Thais love to sit around and talk about the differences in speech between one tambon and another.

And I am a bit confused over Lute's statement that Thai is a "shallower" orthography than English. Last time I looked, the Roman alphabet had a total of 26 symbols to represent some 44 English phonemes. Now if it was me looking for a metaphor to describe this situation, I might say that English is the "shallower" orthography.

Lute's frequency analysis is very enlightening. You are correct in that human voices cannot really be true to a "pure" high, no or low tone, but he's correct is that Thai's do have these contours which are not explained in the transliteration of Thai words. It helps to know these little tricks in order to be better understood.

Having an Issan wife, I'm also trying to learn Lao, and that is an even different variation on the Thai tone system.

Bottom line, getting the tone absolutely correct is EVERYTHING when trying to speak to Thais. Wheras the European (Latin) based languages are very fogiving in pronouciation/understanding, Thai has quite a narrow "bandwidth".

What sounds like the correct pronunciation to a non Thai can be incomprehensable to a Thai, if the tone is just slightly off.

Perhaps these countours that Lute enlightened us on can aid in this.

[Rikker]

I'm enjoying the turn this thread has taken, but I very much agree with Johpa in post #21. We should clearly define jargon, if we're going to use it, and avoid it if unnecessary, since this is primarily a language-learning forum, not a linguistics forum. Nor is it an academic forum of any kind, so there's no need to write in a formal style (since comprehension of more than a few fellow posters is, hopefully, the goal). เขียนแบบเป็นกันเองก็ได้

Hey, nice contributions, luteplayer. Stick around!

[DavidHouston]

I for one, do not feel it is at all clear or helpful to a novice speaker of Thai to insist on misrepresentative names for discrete and otherwise discernable tonal characteristics of Thai syllables. Why it should be thought efficient or easier to mislabel the actual tones without clarification as to what is part of a Thai's mental representation (phonological reality) and what is phonetic reality is not clear. But this is the accepted way of teaching and learning the language that foreigners experience. Why not simply let learners know that a high tone in orthographic terms is realised as a high rising tone (at least in isolation as opposed to some tonal shifts which occur in compounds which transition? Seems it would save a lot of wasted time and unnecessary obfuscation. This is the observation I was forced to accept after observing many tens of thousands of conversations of native thai speakers. No Thai speaker ever explained the reality to me as, for the most part, they are not conscious of it. But we are.

Luteplayer,

I have two questions.

1. In common teaching parlance Thais do not refer to their tones as Normal, Low, Falling, High, Rising. This seems to be Western terminology. As far as I know, the way Thais refer to their tones is เสียงสามัญ เสียงเอก เสียงโท เสียงตรี เสียงจัตวา, a set of names completely divorced from description of the sound. Does not this method avoid the pitfalls of mislabeling?

2. You describe the Thai classical tones in terms of precise linguistic descriptions. You also note that Thai has at least 70 dialects or variants. How does linguistic science describe the variations from the norm in the actual tones spoken in the various dialects? For example, where I live in Southern Thailand (the Phuket variant) the เสียงเอก เสียงโท เสียงตรี เสียงจัตวา exist but are clearly different from standard Thai.

Thank you very much for joining our forum and helping to explain these interesting issues.

[katana]

...As far as I know, the way Thais refer to their tones is เสียงเสียง เสียงเอก เสียงโท เสียงโท เสียงจัตวา...

Did you mean เสียงสามัญ for mid tone?

[meadish_sweetball]

Yes... should be

เสียงสามัญ = 'mid tone'

เสียงเอก = 'low tone'

เสียงโท = 'falling tone'

เสียงตรี = 'high tone'

เสียงจัตวา = 'rising tone'

[DavidHouston]

...As far as I know, the way Thais refer to their tones is เสียงเสียง เสียงเอก เสียงโท เสียงโท เสียงจัตวา...

Did you mean เสียงสามัญ for mid tone?

Yes, sorry; the wages of sin of cut and paste. Please edit my original posting to reflect "เสียงสามัญ". Thanks.

[Johpa]

Yes... should be

เสียงสามัญ = 'mid tone'

เสียงเอก = 'low tone'

เสียงโท = 'falling tone'

เสียงตรี = 'high tone'

เสียงจัตวา = 'rising tone'

The direct translations of the non-mid tones in Thai is simply tone 1, tone 2, tone 3, & tone 4. So the question posed by Lute remains whether the traditional English descriptions can be improved with more technical descriptions based upon phonological recording equipment and whether such descriptions might improve the learning of the tones by those of us who come from the tonally challenged languages within the greater Indo-European language group. I hope to see the local professor of Thai here in the US this weekend and I will try to get some thoughts from her.

[Johpa]

Spoke to my friend who is the Thai professor, and is a Thai national, at the nearby major University here in the US. She warns her students not to bother asking other Thai students about tones, other than simply modeling the correct pronunciation of a word, as they will not have a clue what you are talking about. Apart from a minuscule few who have studied linguistics, few Thais have any notion of what we perceive as the tones. As far as consonant classes, a few of the more retentive Thai students might remember their hated grammar lessons from high school. But asking the average educated Thai about consonant classes would be like randomly asking English speakers to remember what a gerund is or to give an example of a past participle. But it remains an interesting pedagogical question whether renaming the tones to more accurately reflect the phonological data will result in an improved production of the tones by students whose native languages are non-tonal.

[mangkorn]

Great post, Johpa. Past participle, indeed. (How many Englishmen would you have to ask, before you finally got a suitable answer to that one?)