Need Assistance

[anchan42]

In re this discussion, see:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29language-t.html?_r=1&hp

Any thoughts? Thanks.

I read about two third of it and stop. I don't know all the languages they cited in that article so I can not really made a scientific evaluation. However, I personally think it a load of BS. What shaping our mind and our language is our culture not the other way round.

Thai is similar to Chinese in that the verbs do not inflect with tense but the does not relief us from thinking about timing of an event. If you say "ไปเที่ยวกับเพื่อน" You are likely to raise eyebrows.Better to say ไปเที่ยวกับเพื่อนมา adding มา at the end to indicate past tense. If you want to talk about you habit then you say ฉันชอบไปเที่ยวกับเพื่อน

My wife and my mother in law annoy me every time when they try to tell me which way to go while driving. They use เลี้ยวขึ้น เลี้ยวลง instead of เลี้ยวซ้าย เลี้ยวขวา. Whether it เลี้ยวขึ้น เลี้ยวลง seems to depend on the level of the next road comparing to the one we are on. When I asked them to use ซ้าย or ขวา, I could feel that there was a short pause before they actually speak it out. They ware converting their coordinate system to mine in their mind and they often got it wrong.

Thai Language definitely does not tell them to do that.

[tgeezer]

Take a second look at "house is big" I think this sentence on it own would sound weird. The listener might want to ask back "What house?". Adding "the" or "this" or หลังนี้ would make the sentence sounds better. Am I correct?

Thank you, you are a saint. :jap: This is what I am trying to establish but when I have written sentences out in, what I think, full, it has been questioned, or worse, ignored.

. บ้านใหญ่ means 'a big house' which means 'big house', are not all nouns singular?

The trick is to only say or write what is necessary to convey the meaning. A sentence is still a sentence even if some of the words are implied.

Edited August 31, 2010 by tgeezer

[anchan42]

David: thank you for posting this article. It was very, very helpful to me. I had long been struck by the fact that Thai native speakers routinely catalog the relationships between themselves and everyone they speak to and also among all the people they are talking to--a task that I find impossible to do on the fly. That is, I might be able just (on a good day) to remember that I am this person's พี่ but that person's พ่อ and another person's น้า

It funny because I have the same difficulty. I call a few people พี่ or น้อง in the office where it obvious but mostly I just use คุณ or just the name. I used to be accused of being cold and aloof. Those accusation disappeared with time.

but there's no way I'm going to, on the fly remember that person A and person B have a different relationship with each other than they do with me and therefore if I speak to person A about person B I should use the A-B relationship, not the me-A relationship. Can't do it. I usually just give up and stick to ผม คุณ, even though that does serious damage to the critical role that relationship plays in Thai conversations. It's not that I'm incapable of conceptualizing all this stuff.

I don't think we do that. Do we?

[mikenyork]

Anchan asks "But I don't think we do that do we?" in reply to my comment about the complexity of pronouns in Thai.

In answer to Anchan42's question about juggling relationships in conversation: Here is a hypothetical situation. I am out to dinner with:

A= my son

B = my grandson (sonof my daughter)

C= my first wife (sonand daughter's mother).

D=me

E=mygranddaughter(daughter of my son)

If I want to say, tomy grandson ( that I think C is a nag (she was and is), I would say

ยายเป็นคนขี้บ่นbut C is not my grandmother. If I want to ask A if he is going to take Cto the movies, I say ลูกจะพาแม่ไปดูหนังไหม but, of course, C isn't my mother (she got a little confused aboutthis at times, but nonetheless). If Iwant to tell E to let B take her to the bathroom I say

"ไปห้องน้ำกับพี่"

Theseare simple examples, but far more complex examples could be cited. I think it's both amusing and telling that Anchan does this so automatically as a Thai native speaker that the difficulty ofdoing it doesn't occur. Trust mewhen I tell you that, in our heart of hearts, farangs only have one, count emone personal pronoun for themselves, "I", and one, yes one, for the person theyare talking to, "you". We donot have the few hundred such words "tagged' to the people we're talking to which would be required tospeak Thai like a native. When I used toget into arguments with my kids, if the going got hot, even they became คุณ and I became ผม

[Peppy]

On the subject of "juggling relationships in conversation":

I think English does this as well to some extent. My grandfather has always referred to his wife (my grandmother) as "Mother" or "Grandma" in the presence of his kids and grandkids, even when he's speaking directly to her. My mom calls my dad "your father" when she's talking to me--she'd never say "John", or "my husband", though she might refer to him that way when she's talking to her friends.

It's not so difficult to transfer this sort of thinking to Thai--just think of everyone around you as your family, and refer to them accordingly. Like, when you talk about your "older brother" Joe (พี่โจ) to your "child" (ลูก), he becomes "your uncle" Joe (ลุงโจ) etc. etc.

[anchan42]

I think we do that only with people who are younger or children. I would not talk to my wife or my mother that way. Referring to my wife as daughter or your daughter when speaking to my father in law would be very rude and almost certainly get me a death warrant.

Doing this to young people can be considered nice, polite or patronizing. Thai's can usually tolerate patronizing from older people but it's not a good idea to be taken that way.

You might run in to someone who say ผมลูกคนโตครับไม่ได้เป็นน้องใคร

[anchan42]

Take a second look at "house is big" I think this sentence on it own would sound weird. The listener might want to ask back "What house?". Adding "the" or "this" or หลังนี้ would make the sentence sounds better. Am I correct?

Thank you, you are a saint. :jap: This is what I am trying to establish but when I have written sentences out in, what I think, full, it has been questioned, or worse, ignored.

. บ้านใหญ่ means 'a big house' which means 'big house', are not all nouns singular?

The trick is to only say or write what is necessary to convey the meaning. A sentence is still a sentence even if some of the words are implied.

Which one sound more natural to you? "A big house is expensive" or "Big houses are expensive"

What is the different between the two in meaning?

[GarryP]

I think we do that only with people who are younger or children. I would not talk to my wife or my mother that way. Referring to my wife as daughter or your daughter when speaking to my father in law would be very rude and almost certainly get me a death warrant.

Doing this to young people can be considered nice, polite or patronizing. Thai's can usually tolerate patronizing from older people but it's not a good idea to be taken that way.

You might run in to someone who say ผมลูกคนโตครับไม่ได้เป็นน้องใคร

That is classic. I could imagine some beginners in the language making these mistakes. When speaking with my mother-in-law, the only time I would refer to my wife as "your daughter" would be in a jokingly angry way. Other than that, a definite no-no.

[tgeezer]

Take a second look at "house is big" I think this sentence on it own would sound weird. The listener might want to ask back "What house?". Adding "the" or "this" or หลังนี้ would make the sentence sounds better. Am I correct?

Thank you, you are a saint. :jap: This is what I am trying to establish but when I have written sentences out in, what I think, full, it has been questioned, or worse, ignored.

. บ้านใหญ่ means 'a big house' which means 'big house', are not all nouns singular?

The trick is to only say or write what is necessary to convey the meaning. A sentence is still a sentence even if some of the words are implied.

Which one sound more natural to you? "A big house is expensive" or "Big houses are expensive"

What is the different between the two in meaning?

Nothing at all but they come from different situations don't they, often people ask 'what does x mean? when there is no answer because there is no context.

Big houses are expensive. Buying a big house is expensive. The point is that if you don't specify you can't do much more than make a statement in general.

At least that is how I see it.

I will wait for examples to appear in posts and see what I come up with.

[mikenyork]

I can't tell you the difference in meaning, but I think I can show a difference in the way the two sentences would likely be used in conversation.

Example 1:

A: When I get married, I would like to have a big house.

B: A big house would be expensive.

Example 2:

A: There are a lot of big houses in that neighborhood.

B: Big houses are expensive.

Since singular and plural are not normally clearly differentiated in Thai conversation (they can be, of course, but usually they're not), there is absolutely no difference in specificity in Thai between the two statements, but in English Example 1 is just a little more specific. We are discussing "a" big house which could, if need be, be further specified and described. In example 2 we are talking about big houses as a general category.

IMHO I'm not an expert, just how it sounds to my American ear.

[Peppy]

I think we do that only with people who are younger or children.

Yes, I agree--and I think it works the same way in English. I guess the difference, that Mikenyork was lamenting, is that Thai has a tendency to use family relationship words as pronouns in informal situations, whereas in English we'd just call everybody by their first name.

My point though is that it isn't all that hard to adapt to the Thai system (if the situation calls for it), since we do the same thing all the time in English when we're talking to and about family members.

[mikenyork]

Just to be clear, I wasn't lamenting the fact that Thai incorporates relationships into normal conversation. The way Thai uses relationship pronouns is one of the most powerful things about the language, IMHO. I was lamenting my difficulty in keeping all these relationships straight, something which I don't think Thais struggle with at all. The entire post was in reference to a fascinating NYT article posted by David from Houston which talked about the information that different languages require their speakers to divulge in the normal course of events. Thais are forced by their language to divulge what their relationship with that person is by the pronouns they use to refer to that person, whereas in English we don't have that problem. Our problem is that we are forced by English to reveal the specific sequence of events by the verbs we use to describe those events. Thai doesn't have this problem. The article also discusses how different languages sharpen different skill-sets, so that some aboriginal Australians, because their language requires describing all movements in terms of ordinal directions, have a very developed sense of direction.

[Peppy]

Just to be clear, I wasn't lamenting the fact that Thai incorporates relationships into normal conversation.  The way Thai uses relationship pronouns is one of the most powerful things about the language, IMHO.  I was lamenting my difficulty in keeping all these relationships straight ...

Sorry, yes, that's what I meant.

The entire post was in reference to a fascinating NYT article posted by David from Houston which talked about the information that different languages require their speakers to divulge in the normal course of events.  Thais are forced by their language to divulge what their relationship with that person is by the pronouns they use to refer to that person, whereas in English we don't have that problem.  Our problem is that we are forced by English to  reveal the specific sequence of events by the verbs we use to describe those events.  Thai doesn't have this problem.  The article also discusses how different languages sharpen different skill-sets, so that some aboriginal Australians, because their language requires describing all movements in terms of ordinal directions, have a very developed sense of direction.

I have to say I'm not taken with the idea that these things are language-based. I think it's more of a cultural thing. The aboriginal Australians from that article have a culture which describes directions as compass points, but I'm sure their language must be capable of expressing directions ego-centrically as well, even if it would sound very strange to them. Likewise, it's perfectly good English to say "There's a spider on the floor north of your foot"--it only sounds funny because our culture doesn't usually describe things that way.

Indeed, I think culture does have a big hand in developing the skill sets a person has. Someone who grows up in a family of potters will likely be good at pottery, and someone whose parents are violinists will probably have an above average ability to appreciate and critique violin music, even if they don't play themselves. But all of that's culture; language has nothing to do with it.

[tgeezer]

I can't tell you the difference in meaning, but I think I can show a difference in the way the two sentences would likely be used in conversation.

Example 1:

A: When I get married, I would like to have a big house.

B: A big house would be expensive.

Example 2:

A: There are a lot of big houses in that neighborhood.

B: Big houses are expensive.

Since singular and plural are not normally clearly differentiated in Thai conversation (they can be, of course, but usually they're not), there is absolutely no difference in specificity in Thai between the two statements, but in English Example 1 is just a little more specific. We are discussing "a" big house which could, if need be, be further specified and described. In example 2 we are talking about big houses as a general category.

IMHO I'm not an expert, just how it sounds to my American ear.

Perhaps, but I can't see any difference.

[anchan42]

I can't tell you the difference in meaning, but I think I can show a difference in the way the two sentences would likely be used in conversation.

Example 1:

A: When I get married, I would like to have a big house.

B: A big house would be expensive.

Example 2:

A: There are a lot of big houses in that neighborhood.

B: Big houses are expensive.

Since singular and plural are not normally clearly differentiated in Thai conversation (they can be, of course, but usually they're not), there is absolutely no difference in specificity in Thai between the two statements, but in English Example 1 is just a little more specific. We are discussing "a" big house which could, if need be, be further specified and described. In example 2 we are talking about big houses as a general category.

IMHO I'm not an expert, just how it sounds to my American ear.

Thanks for the explanation. That is what I understand.

[anchan42]

Just to be clear, I wasn't lamenting the fact that Thai incorporates relationships into normal conversation. The way Thai uses relationship pronouns is one of the most powerful things about the language, IMHO. I was lamenting my difficulty in keeping all these relationships straight, something which I don't think Thais struggle with at all. The entire post was in reference to a fascinating NYT article posted by David from Houston which talked about the information that different languages require their speakers to divulge in the normal course of events. Thais are forced by their language to divulge what their relationship with that person is by the pronouns they use to refer to that person, whereas in English we don't have that problem. Our problem is that we are forced by English to reveal the specific sequence of events by the verbs we use to describe those events. Thai doesn't have this problem. The article also discusses how different languages sharpen different skill-sets, so that some aboriginal Australians, because their language requires describing all movements in terms of ordinal directions, have a very developed sense of direction.

I disagree with the notion that because of Thai verbs are not inflected with tense and hence Thais are not require to think about time when speaking or telling a story. Thais usually relying heavily on context in casual speech but that does not mean they are not thinking about time or tense when converting thoughts to utterance. I am not sure how can you tell a story without thinking about time.

I would not be surprised if the aboriginal case turn out to be a hoax similar to "Eskimo's words for snow hoax" but again, I might be limited by Thai language in this aspect. This is not me being sarcastic but rather based on the fact that I have no first-hand experience with any such language.