Thai For Beginners / Reading Exercises (Pages 231 And 232) Tones

[djayz]

I've completed the above mentioned book by Beenjawan Poomsan Becker, which I can highly recommend by the way, and as I was doing the reading exercises on pages 231 and 232 I was confused by some of the tones. I worked out the tones for myself depending on the consonant group, marker, คำเป็น / คำาย, etc. and then double checked these in a dictionary.

Here's where the confusion begins. Take:

Example 1: Exercise A 14 (page 231) อาทิตย์ - according to my calculations, ท, which is อักษรตำ (low class consonant), plus any vowel makes it คำเป็น and there fore it should have a mid tone. However, according to the dictionary and the book, อาทิตย์ has a mid (อา) and a high (ทิตย์) tone. I don't understand why ทิตย์ has a high tone.

Example 2: Exercise A 20 (page 232) สนามบิน - according to my calculations it should be a rising tone (ส) followed by two mid tones (นาม บิน) but it isn't. It's a low tone, rising tone and a mid tone. I understand why บิน has a mid tone, it's the other two that I don't get.

Example 3: Exercise B 3 (page 232) ฝรั่ง - I think it should be rising (ฝ) and falling (รั่ง) but it not, it's two low tones.

Can anybody tell me if there are "exceptions" to the tone rules? Or what have I misunderstood?

Thanks in advance.

I haven't looked at exercises C, D, E or F yet. If I have any more questions about those exercises, I'll be back with a new post.

PS Is there a site/link where I can find the answers/translations/tone marks to the aforementioned exercises?

[Cybervlad]

> I don't understand why ทิตย์ has a high tone.

Initial consonant - low class, short vowel, dead syllable, no tone mark == high tone.

> สนามบิน

Consonant grouping. Vowel after second consonant uses tone rules for 1st one.

> ฝรั่ง

Consonant grouping, again.

[AyG]

You appear to be missing two things in your understanding: (1) dead syllables, and (2) two syllable words where the first syllable has an unwritten/unstressed "a" sound and the class of the first letter of the first syllable influences the tone of the second syllable. Perhaps rereading the book's explanation might help.

Incidentally, for สนาม and ฝรั่ง the initially tone of the first syllable is only low in very formal speech. Becker doesn't (as far as I know) bother to mention that in normal speech the first syllable is unstressed and for all practical purposes the tone becomes mid. Other books such as the AUA ones and the Union/UTL school texts all show such tones as mid - and Union/UTL goes as far as to use a different character to indicate "unstressed".

[Richard W]

(1) dead syllables

I strongly suspect that Djayz didn't describe his reasoning properly. I think 'plus any vowel' is an error for 'plus any resonant' - the final consonant of -ทิตย์ is a resonant, namely ย.

The explanation is that consonants silenced by thanthakhat are ignored when applying the tone rules. (Loanwords from English are a messy exception.) Note that a thanthakhat can silence several consonants - as spoken a Thai syllable ends in no consonants or in one consonant, and excess consonants are normally silenced by thanthakhat.

[djayz]

Thanks to all of you, especially DavidH., for the feedback and explanations.

I've found the problem – from my understanding, the sonorant final consonants consisted of only ง, น, ม, ย, ว and the stop final consonants of ก, ด, บ. I didn’t realize there were more than just these few…