History of Leading ห and อ?

[ThaiNotes]

Does anyone know the background of leading  ห and อ to change the class of the following consonant in words such as ใหญ่ and อยู่?  It seems very odd to have this system of modifying the tone rules when additional tone marks (or additional consonants) could have done the job.  Indeed, was the change of class the primary function here, or did these characters affect pronunciation in some other way*?

 

So, did this system predate the use of tone marks (which seems unlikely)? Did it come later? (For example, is it used in the Ramkhamhaeng inscription?) And if it was part of the original orthography of Thai, why is it there?

 

 

 

* It's pure speculation, but normally อ as an initial consonant is pronounced /ʔ/.  Could อยู่ have originally been pronounced /ʔyùu/?  And by parallel with the Hmong language, could ห have represented heavy breathing out of the nose with the lips sealed.  (Sorry, don't know technical term.)
 

[Richard W]

Ignoring tone, there is pretty good evidence that อยู่ was originally pronounced /ʔjuː/.  The glottal stop is preserved in several Tai dialects in China, most notably in the standard (northern) Zhuang.

 

There's pretty good evidence that ห nam represents voicelessness - early loans into Khmu and Palaung show voiceless resonants.  Voicelessness is hard to distinguish from a cluster with /h/, as can be seen in the Welsh digraphs mh, nh, ngh and rh, which represent voiceless consonants.

 

This system is present in the earliest Thai writing, which goes back to a time when Thai seems to have had just the three tones for 'live' consonants.  The contrast in Tai languages between voiced and voiceless initial consonants became a contrast in voice quality (breathy v. modal), which resolved itself as a tone split sometimes (e.g. Siam and Laos) backed up by aspiration.  There are a few Tai dialects where the original change is still in progress.  This split is widespread in East Asia, and also affects non-tonal languages.

 

The middle consonant sounds in Thai each go back to only one original consonant or cluster.  Mai tri and mai chattawa seem to have been added because words from Chinese (especially names) resulted in the full 5-way contrast with them as well.  (Mai tho on high consonants and mai ek on low consonants had apparently already merged in Siamese.)

 

The system of tone marking in Thai had a hard time getting started.  There is an argument that something else was intended by the tone marks, and that it just happened to get regularised as a system of tone marks.  A six-way tone marking (presumably 5 marks contrasting with nothing) might easily have been abandoned.  The 3-way marking system of the Ramkhamhaeng inscription was far less used in later inscriptions, and there are various interpretations of that phenomenon.

Edited December 3, 2016 by Richard W
Typos,.

[tgeezer]

It's interesting that หย่ or อญ่ doน't exist, either ย or ญ is นาสิก, I can't remember which, and that could have something to do with why ห or อ . It does seem overly complicated, although one is used to it now, how would it be if the tone marks applied consistently to every class?


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[Richard W]

10 hours ago, tgeezer said:

It's interesting that หย่ or อญ่ doน't exist, either ย or ญ is นาสิก, I can't remember which, and that could have something to do with why ห or อ . It does seem overly complicated, although one is used to it now, how would it be if the tone marks applied consistently to every class?

หย่ does exist, e.g. in หย่า 'divorce'.  The usual theory, though, is that this derives from *ɲ̥ - the voiceless (or pre-aspirated?) palatal nasal.  However, หญ is a very rare combination that occurs in a few very common words.    (ญ is the consonant that is a nasal in Indic languages, and is still nasal syllable finally in Thai, as in เหรียญ 'coin'.)

 

It's not at all unusual for initial /j/ to be reinforced, e.g. [dj] or even [dʒ] for initial ll- in Mexican Spanish.  There's a suggestion that Proto-Tai did not have the 4-way contrast *ʔj ~ *j ~ *ɲ ~ *ɲ̥ proposed by Li, but just *ʔj ~ *ɲ ~ *ɲ̥.  The contrast *j ~ *ɲ is supported by only a few dialects, and it is suggested that the apparent contrast is caused by late-spreading loanwords.

 

Laos (Lanchang as it was then) and Lanna kept things simple; when they dropped the glottal stop from *ʔj, they invented a new letter by stretching ย.  In Siam,   *ʔj , *j (if real) and *ɲ simply merged as consonants, yielding ย, except for the 4 cases where the sequence อย for old *ʔj was kept.  There were complications in Siam because *ʔj was a middle consonant, so it may be represented by หย just to get the right tone.

[tgeezer]

I should have looked in the dictionary. I refreshed my touch typing lately and was reminded of แป้นอักษรเหย้า (home keys) , one reads without thinking "why not เย่า".


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