How to ask what is the House Special/Best Dish in a Restaurant?

[tgeezer]

Unvoiced, that is the word I was looking for I suppose, no little vowel so neither b nor p.

The technical word you're looking for is 'unexploded', and there's even a phonetic symbol, so the more detailed phonetic transcriptions of Thai will have p̚ etc. at the end of words. I find that little diacritic quite distracting.

Actually Richard I was not really looking for any word but felt that linguistic jargon was appreciated.

Jargon is not necessary, sounds are best taught by mimicking a teacher where necessary. It would be interesting to test a lip reader on the between closing ป, บ or am I on the wrong track? Is this thread actually about how the ending is represented in Roman letters not how it (doesn't) sound?

[Richard W]

Jargon is not necessary, sounds are best taught by mimicking a teacher where necessary.

Giving the learner a clue also helps.

It would be interesting to test a lip reader on the between closing ป, บ or am I on the wrong track? Is this thread actually about how the ending is represented in Roman letters not how it (doesn't) sound?

I'd say you were on the wrong track. Nobody is arguing that final ป and บ sound different. It's about both sound and representation, apparently with agreement that Thai spelling as such is irrelevant.

[tgeezer]

I think that the group has assimilated the truth without actually saying so. There was a point in this thread where people thought it mattered whether b or p was written to represent บ as a final consonent. See the photocopied page in post 79 which says "pronounced" for ก ด and บ as a closing consonant.

[Oxx]

The choice of final consonants in Thai is complicated by the fact that the letters ป and ต were probably created after people had started writing Thai.

I find that a very curious assertion. The Thai script appears to have arisen fully formed*, putatively as the work of a certain king, who adapted the forms of some letters to reflect sounds that were present in Thai but not in the source language/script.

Ignoring the issue of authenticity (because I don't particularly want to be deported or imprisoned), the very first sentence of what is apparently the earliest extant example of Thai script (a section less contentious than subsequent ones) contains the letter ต.

This image (via Rikker's blog) shows that ป also occurs in the inscription.

Are you suggesting that these sounds weren't present in Thai at the time that the language first was written? Or that people wrote using a script that couldn't fully represent all the consonants of the language? Or that the script was first used for some Tai language which lacked these consonants and was subsequently adapted for Thai? Or is there some other explanation?

* Ignoring consonants and two tone marks that were added later to accommodate loan words.

[Richard W]

Are you suggesting that these sounds weren't present in Thai at the time that the language first was written? Or that people wrote using a script that couldn't fully represent all the consonants of the language? Or that the script was first used for some Tai language which lacked these consonants and was subsequently adapted for Thai? Or is there some other explanation?

I'm suggesting that people wrote in a script that couldn't represent all the consonants of the language, just as I'm doing now - 'th' is ambiguous. If someone needed to write Thai before the time of Ram Khamhaeng, the obvious choice would have been to use the old Khmer script. The Mon script may have been a possibility, and there are supposed to be some even older examples of written Thai using the Mon script. Gauging the degree of ancient literacy is difficult, but it may well have been extremely limited.

The choice of final consonants in Thai is complicated by the fact that the letters ป and ต were probably created after people had started writing Thai.

I find that a very curious assertion. The Thai script appears to have arisen fully formed*, putatively as the work of a certain king, who adapted the forms of some letters to reflect sounds that were present in Thai but not in the source language/script.

The modifications for the additional letters match the distinctive Sukhothai letters very well. Certainly distinctive shapes arose, and the 'diacritics' look like later additions. On the other hand, the system of dents and tails also mostly matches modern Thai shapes fairly well. It certainly looks as though a pre-existing system was modified; how much is not so clear. There's even ambiguity about how much was claimed to be new. Did the king create a completely new set of glyphs, or did he just add new characters? The basic system was not completely new, though some claim that the alphabet was actually renewed, being derived from a degenerated system which has to be repaired.

[Wopanese]

"Kho thot krap. Ahan chan det a-rai krap?"

Yes, you can say that. "chan det" means exactly "house special" or "best dish".

See meaning of เด็ด in this dictionary entry.

http://dict.longdo.com/search/%E0%B9%80%E0%B8%94%E0%B9%87%E0%B8%94

Note that there is a distinction how to ask this question. One ask either what their recommendation is, or what their "chan det" is, and not what is the most "delicious".

You can for example google อาหารจานเด็ด and find lots of suggestions.

So is the word เด็ด (det) the same word to say "delicious" as in: ลำเด็ดเด็ด (lam det-det)?