Cononant Clusters

[JamieP]

I'm trying to get my head round reading properly now and want to do it properly, learn the tone rules and on that.

I'm slightly confused on the following cluster: กรุ

กรุงเทพ is pronounced groong-thep,

while

กรุณา is ga-roo-na.

Why not groo-na?

Help!!!

Thanks in advance,

Jamie

[loong]

I think that it is just something that you have to learn, nearly all words that start with กร are pronounced as a consonant cluster with just a few exceptions

I can think of just a few other exceptions:

July

กรกฎาคม

gà-rá-gà-daa-kom

Verb

กริยา

gà-rì-yaa

Case, event

กรณี

gà-rá-nee

Then you have some words that begin with กรร such as scissors, กรรไกร, gan grai, but that's a different story

Actually Thai2English has grì-yaa for the romanisation of กริย, gor-rá-nee for กรณี and gron-grai for กรรไกร. Can somebody confirm the proper pronounciation? Well scissors is definitely wrong

[JamieP]

Thanks.

As someone who has been known to use the "because that's the way it is" answer in my English classes, I'll roll with that.

[DavidHouston]

From the RID:

กริยา[กฺริยา, กะริยา] (ไว) น. (ส. กฺริยา; ป. กิริยา)That's interesting: the RID gives two alternatives, one with the implied /a/, the other without. Note that the distinction appears between Sanskrit and Pali.

กรณี[กะระ-, กอระ-]

Here again, the RID provides two acceptable alternatives.

กรรไกร[กันไกฺร]

The RID seems to have no ambiguity with this one.

Mechanical transcriptions and phonetic renderings are great, but each and every mechanical reading must be checked with a real native speaker.

[Johpa]

As someone who has been known to use the "because that's the way it is" answer in my English classes, I'll roll with that.

Like English, Thai has borrowed words that don't quite fit the borrowed alphabet. And some of those borrowed words did not fit the Thai phonemic rules and thus those strange silent letters, sort of like the silent "k" in words in English beginning with "kn". English borrows a Roman alphabet for basically a Germanic language. Thai borrows an alphabet borrowed from South Asia via Angor (Nakorn) Wat. Thai has words that are transliterated into Thai from their Indic Sanskrit/Pali roots just as English has words borrowed form Latin leading English to have both a hard "c" as in /case/ or a soft "c' as in /cent/. And there are words that have simply been borrowed from neighboring languages, most notably Khmer. And thus the "because that's the way it is" has a rational basis as the rules that tend to govern such instances are complex and need not, and are not, known to native speakers.

[Richard W]

And there are words that have simply been borrowed from neighboring languages, most notably Khmer.

And Johpa could have added that some Indic borrowings have been modified in Khmer, so ครุฑ [H]khrut 'garuda' and ครู [M]khruu 'teacher' have lost vowels that were etymologically present.

Actually, when Thai was first written, there was a way of showing whether there was a vowel or not, but the Siamese clearly found it too troublesome to write the difference.

[RickBradford]

I guess you just have to memorise the words -- especially the Pali/Sanskrit derived ones, just like somebody reading English has to learn and memorise 'cough', 'rough', 'through', 'bough', 'though', and even 'lough' if you want to be difficult.....