Where Thai Excels, or Comes Up Short

[tgeezer]

There is a widely held belief that the spelling used on computer chat sites reflects the pronunciation of the words, เค้า for เขา มัย for ไหม etc. but I haven't found it to be so.

The tone shift isn't new. Li Fang Kuei mentions it as what appears to be a personal observation in a book he wrote (finished?) in 1977, but from his career it looks as though it was an observation made before the Second World War.

I have seen the 'tone shift' referred to before, are เค้า มัย examples of it?

[tgeezer]

A lot of this is way over my head. But feel free to post, others might understand it. I'm still looking for more basic differences.

Here's another:

As a cop, I used lip reading on many occasions, investigating crimes. Must be nigh impossible in Thai. Anyone have experience there?

Can this be done in Thai?

7H15 M3554G3

53RV35 7O PR0V3

H0W 0UR M1ND5 C4N

D0 4M4Z1NG 7H1NG5!

I cdnuolt blveiee that I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd what I was rdanieg.

[Richard W]

I have seen the 'tone shift' referred to before, are เค้า มัย examples of it?

Yes, they're prime examples of the shift. To quote Li, "Another tone shift occurs in syllables with the rising tone 24. It is limited to a small number of words or morphemes such as the personal pronouns and some final particles, which are usually weakly stressed." An exceptional example is the pronunciation นั้งสือ of หนังสือ 'book'.

This should not be confused with the wholesale changes in the realisation of the individual tones, whereby one might now be tempted to call the high tone (เสียง ตรี, C4) 'high falling' and the falling tone (เสียง โท, B4/C1-3) 'high'. (The letters are Gedney box coordinates for the typical correspondence sets).

There may be some connection with the elusive 6th tone of Bangkok Thai, which isn't a simple result of ancient initial and tone, and so is nothing to do with Northern Thai's 6 tones or with mid consonant plus no tone mark having its own tone as in some Central and NE Thai dialects/accents. This 6th tone of Bangkok Thai appears to be well and truly extinct. It was a level high tone.

The relevance to this thread is just that the Thai spelling of native words also has its irregularities even for reading.

[HeijoshinCool]

A lot of this is way over my head. But feel free to post, others might understand it. I'm still looking for more basic differences.

Here's another:

As a cop, I used lip reading on many occasions, investigating crimes. Must be nigh impossible in Thai. Anyone have experience there?

Can this be done in Thai?

7H15 M3554G3

53RV35 7O PR0V3

H0W 0UR M1ND5 C4N

D0 4M4Z1NG 7H1NG5!

I cdnuolt blveiee that I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd what I was rdanieg.

Lots of words in English sound like numbers or single letters:

1 won, one

2 to, too, two

4 for, four

8 ate, eight

b be, bee

c sea, see

i eye, aye

n in, inn

and so on.

What about Thai?

[tgeezer]

The relevance to this thread is just that the Thai spelling of native words also has its irregularities even for reading.

If the 'shift' happened so long ago, why hasn't it caught on I wonder. I overheard a conversation recently and heard เขา said very clearly several times. I've just glanced at a Facebook entry of one of my friends with five comments; everything spelt correctly. Middle age people should be affected should they not?

[tgeezer]

A lot of this is way over my head. But feel free to post, others might understand it. I'm still looking for more basic differences.

Here's another:

As a cop, I used lip reading on many occasions, investigating crimes. Must be nigh impossible in Thai. Anyone have experience there?

Can this be done in Thai?

7H15 M3554G3

53RV35 7O PR0V3

H0W 0UR M1ND5 C4N

D0 4M4Z1NG 7H1NG5!

I cdnuolt blveiee that I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd what I was rdanieg.

Lots of words in English sound like numbers or single letters:

1 won, one

2 to, too, two

4 for, four

8 ate, eight

b be, bee

c sea, see

i eye, aye

n in, inn

and so on.

What about Thai?

What I posted is joke, they say if you can't read it you are in danger of Alzheimer's, your post doesn't seem 2 ci2i with it.

[HeijoshinCool]

A lot of this is way over my head. But feel free to post, others might understand it. I'm still looking for more basic differences.

Here's another:

As a cop, I used lip reading on many occasions, investigating crimes. Must be nigh impossible in Thai. Anyone have experience there?

Can this be done in Thai?

7H15 M3554G3

53RV35 7O PR0V3

H0W 0UR M1ND5 C4N

D0 4M4Z1NG 7H1NG5!

I cdnuolt blveiee that I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd what I was rdanieg.

Lots of words in English sound like numbers or single letters:

1 won, one

2 to, too, two

4 for, four

8 ate, eight

b be, bee

c sea, see

i eye, aye

n in, inn

and so on.

What about Thai?

What I posted is joke, they say if you can't read it you are in danger of Alzheimer's, your post doesn't seem 2 ci2i with it.

Yeah, yeah, I got that, but it is quite similar to the way some people text in English, so I extrapolated, to STAY on topic.

Texting in Thai seems to take Thais longer than just walking inter-province, and speaking face to face.

Anyway, someone once told me I exhibited signs of Alzheimer's, but can't remember who ...

[tgeezer]

A lot of this is way over my head. But feel free to post, others might understand it. I'm still looking for more basic differences.

Here's another:

As a cop, I used lip reading on many occasions, investigating crimes. Must be nigh impossible in Thai. Anyone have experience there?

Can this be done in Thai?

7H15 M3554G3

53RV35 7O PR0V3

H0W 0UR M1ND5 C4N

D0 4M4Z1NG 7H1NG5!

I cdnuolt blveiee that I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd what I was rdanieg.

Lots of words in English sound like numbers or single letters:

1 won, one

2 to, too, two

4 for, four

8 ate, eight

b be, bee

c sea, see

i eye, aye

n in, inn

and so on.

What about Thai?

What I posted is joke, they say if you can't read it you are in danger of Alzheimer's, your post doesn't seem 2 ci2i with it.

Yeah, yeah, I got that, but it is quite similar to the way some people text in English, so I extrapolated, to STAY on topic.

Texting in Thai seems to take Thais longer than just walking inter-province, and speaking face to face.

Anyway, someone once told me I exhibited signs of Alzheimer's, but can't remember who ...

I like that one!

[ChristianPFC]

A very interesting topic! Let me join in.

The Thai writing system (vowels before, above, below, behind consonants, tone marks on top) is an utter mess compared to languages that use the Latin alphabet.

Lack of puntuation and capitalisation in Thai is a good thing. Even native speakers have problems with punctuation (especially apostrophies) in English or capitalisation in German. The little information that punctuation and capitalisation adds is not worth the problems it creates.

Lack of spaces between words is no problem, I found there is no need for current writing in Thai (i.e. combining letters like we do in handwriting).

Thai is phonetic (similar to German, Russian and Spanish), from the written word you know how to pronounce it. There are not many exceptions, some of them mentioned in earlier posts. English pronunciation, on the contrary, is a mess.

Many Thai words are monosyllabic (here comes the need for tones to distinguish them), and other words are formed by combination. It's easier to guess their meaning than in English. Nam dta = tear (literally eye water), nam rak = semen (love water), nam dtan = sugar (brown water, because the sap from sugar cane is brown), nam peung = honey (bee water).

Let me throw in an observation about Russian here. The cyrillic alphabet has more letters, so the information per letter is higher than in English. Nonetheless, I have the impression that words are longer, not shorter, than in English or German.

I have a book about homophones in English, and a very small collection of homophones I found in Thai. The number of palindrome words in Thai is low, I think the language is not suitable for formation of palindrom sentences.

(My background: German native, English fluent, French almost fluent, Russian and Thai intermediate, interested in Linguistics and Languages.)

[phuketsub]

Thai excels over English and many other languages because its higher pitch makes it easier to hear across long distances, such as rice fields, or in loud places like discos and clubs.