Thai - But Not As We Know It

[simon43]

Since my wife comes from Issan, and her first language is Issan/Lao, I have picked up a smattering of Lao phrases which put her family into fits of laughter, (this generally seems to be the case when a 'farang;' speaks Issan/Lao...)

Out of interest, I looked at written Lao to see how closely it resembled written Thai Of course, there are many words which are completely different. But in general, I was able to read written Lao, albeit rather slowly. My wife tells me that she can also read Lao, but again this is rather slow since she has to correleate the written form of Lao letters with Thai letters.

Also, from reading a little about the Khmere language, I can see many similarities between Khmere, Lao and Thai, (especially for numbers).

It would be interesting to know if there are any members on TV who are proficient in reading Lao or Khmere script. And what about Burmese or Vietnamese?

Just interested

Simon

[Richard W]

It would be interesting to know if there are any members on TV who are proficient in reading Lao or Khmere script. And what about Burmese or Vietnamese?

Depends what you mean by proficient. There are a few of us who've studied some Khmer, though I'm still at the beginner stage even for the script. Although the vowel symbols are mostly the same as Thai, using the Thai values is rather like reading English using Spanish vowel values. There's not much carry over for the consonants - probably less than from the Roman script to Greek or Cyrillic.

I can do character recognition for much of the Burmese Burmese script, but I don't have much clue as to the Karen additions, and I'm not convinced I'm identifying all the characters in Mon. On a good day I think it's the vocabulary that beats me with Shan (written in a Burmicised script), though I need a crib sheet for the tones. My reading ability for printed Lanna script in long text is not much worse than for Thai. Of course, sometimes it is no more than transliterated Thai.

All posters are familiar with most of the Vietnamese script Or do you mean the Chữ-nôm script, i.e. Vietnamese written in Chinese characters?

[meadish_sweetball]

I took a closer look at Lao script two years ago, and like anyone who reads Thai fairly well, I can read Lao with a little more difficulty. Although I can recognize some familiar shapes from Thai in Khmer script, it is not enough to make any sense of it. One of the Swedish language course books we used at university, 'Språk och skrift i Sydöstasien' by Jan-Olov Svantesson, had a table lining up the signs from each of the major scripts in SE Asia based on Devanagari next to each other with phonetic values for them all and some footnotes about change over time.

[Rikker]

I can generally read and understand Lao script (slowly, and I can't pronounce it very accurately). Burmese, well, it's all just circles at this point for me.

Regarding numbers, yes, Thai and Khmer are basically identical, and Lao aren't too different.

I've made some effort to learn a bit of Khmer, but it hasn't really stuck. For the higher vocab (Pali/Sanskrit derived) often the Thai and Khmer are written (and pronounced) quite similarly, if you know a few of the basic differences in the scripts.

And as Richard has pointed out, Vietnamese is mostly familiar Roman letters, with a lot of funky diacritics. I can't read that even a smidge, let alone Vietnamese written with Chinese characters.

[sabaijai]

I've studied post-1975 written and spoken Lao. I don't see how you can read Lao--slowly or otherwise--with complete comprehension without studying the script as quite a few letters are completely different than their Thai counterparts. The เอีย dipthong, for example, is replaced by a single letter.

Not to mention differing lexicons. If you know one of the 19 Isan Thai dialects it may help, as will a knowledge of northern Thai. Otherwise when you come across words such as (to use Thai script instead of Lao) ฮอด, ข้อย เทื้ือ or เดินบิน you may be left scratching your head.

I guess by 'read' you mean being able to recognise the corresponding Thai word when they are basically the same? Another obstacle when reading modern Lao with a knowledge of Thai script only is that Pali-Sanskrit-derived words are spelt phonetically rather than trying to follow the orgiinal P-S spelling (altho Thai often cheats at this ). I lost the Lao script on my computer due to a hard drive crash last week and have yet to reinstall but to use Thai script as an example, the word นคร (large city) would be written (in Lao equivalent letters) as นะคอน. Seems obvious when you're prompted with the corresponding Thai spelling but when a spelling like that appears in the middle of other Lao text you may not recognise it if you haven't already mastered the spelling system (admittedly this example is pretty easy; a better example would be P-S vocabulary that is a homonym for Lao-Thai vocab). Of course the tones are different, in this case the standard Thai [H]na-[M]khawn becomes [M]na-[H]khawn.

Further to pronunciation, some phonemes are pronounced differently than in standard Thai (aside from the tone system differences, which are fairly complex). For example the consontant clusters คว- and ขว- are pronounced more like คัว and ขัว- , thus ควาง/ขวาง comes out sounding more like คููวาง/ขูวาง.

Personally I wasn't able to read Lao with any broad comprehension until I'd taken time to learn the Lao alphabet. Even now it's slower than my Thai but I can read Lao better than any Thais I know.