Tricks/rules To Knowing The Invisible Vowels Between Thai Consonants

[my benny rai]

The more I study Thai the better I understand this culture and how and why they make the mistakes they do in English. But one thing that is driving me crazy is how written words in Thai constantly do not show vowels that exist when spoken or read aloud. For example, the Thai word for “road” is missing sala “a” and “o” vowels that must be pronounced during oral reading. Are there any rules or ways to know the invisible vowels, mostly A or O sounds between the Thai consonants? Are there any good websites or books that help one know the vowel sounds that are not written? Or am I just going to have to “mmrz” one word at a time?

[meadish_sweetball]

There are no hard and fast rules, so it is mostly a matter of memorizing the words one by one. At least this is what I have done.

Mary Haas's Student's Dictionary ( http://www.amazon.com/Thai-English-Student...s/dp/0804705674 ) contains phonetics for each Thai entry, so you will be able to see the correct pronunciation if you look the word up there.

The automatic transcription system in for example www.thai2english.com can not be trusted to know if a silent vowel is 'a' or 'o', which confirms there is no perfect rule - if there was, Mike would have applied it already.

Richard W or Rikker (oh bother, where art thou?) might have something more substantial to offer here though?

[Rikker]

Rikker (oh bother, where art thou?)

I hope I'm not actually a bother , but I've been on much-needed vacation for the past couple weeks.

NOTE: Anyone who needs the romanized Thai, paste this into thai2english.com.

So, I'm putting my thinking cap on. Hmm....

Ultimately, a lot of it will be memorization. But there are some tricks for making educated guesses when you see new words.

In a one-syllable word, short /o/ is going to be the most likely answer. Things like ผม ดม ชน กลม ลบ, etc.

Look at surrounding words to see if there is more than one possible way to read it. When faced with ambiguities, context and common sense will help to clear them up. For example, ตากลม might be either [ตาก-ลม] (hang out to dry in the wind) or [ตา-กลม] (round eye). They're not likely to be confusable in actual use, though, since one is a verb phrase and the other one is a noun phrase.

You're largely going to find implicit /a/ อะ vowels in words of Indic origin (i.e. Pali or Sanskrit). They're all over in Thai, but the easiest way to spot Indic words is that they use the more rare letters of the Thai alphabet (ฆ ฏ ณ ฐ ภ etc.), they have "silent" letters (with a การันต์ symbol, like ทุกข์ [ทุก]), and when that fails, they will frequently have more than one syllable. If you see these indicators, you can often make educated guesses on pronunciation when you run into new words.

Random example:

มัธยม = มัด-ทะ-ยม (The syllable-final letter ธ is a clue that it's Indic and has the extra implicit syllable)

Also, expect implicit อะ vowels at word boundaries in compounds. That is, in Indic-derived compounds, words have a "combining form" which is different from their standalone form. สาร [สาน] becomes [สา-ระ] in words like สารคดี [สา-ระ-คะ-ดี].

You can also determine the correct implicit vowels based on spelling of the rest of the word. For example, สม has an implicit short /o/ vowel, but if you see the word สมาชิก, you can know that it must not be /sa-maa-chik/ and not /som-/ because of the following า. The ม can't be both at once.

One thing that helps is you can be confident (with very high certainty) that you won't see implicit vowels at the *end* of a word. These are being phased out by the Royal Institute (as evidenced by spelling changes between RID 1982 and RID 1999), and they've pretty much always been very rare. So with the word the OP mentions, ถนน (which happens to come from Khmer), for example, there's no way it could read [ถน-นะ] or [ถะ-นะ-นะ], because there would have to be an ะ at the end. Take a sentence like ผมเดินตามถนน, the only ambiguity is in ตามถนน, where it *possibly* could be read ตา-มด-นน, but ถ is very rare at the end of a syllable and it would be pretty meaningless if you read it like that anyway.

Compound words are sticky. Phys Ed in Thai is called พลศึกษา [พะ-ละ-สึก-สา], and while [พน-สึก-สา] may be a valid-seeming guess, the clue is the Indic origins, which you might notice from the ศ and ษ letters, as well as ศึกษา being two-syllable. พล is pronounced [พน] on its own, but becomes [พะละ] in its combining form.

There is also the occasional stinker like ผอบ [ผะ-อบ] which is basically impossible to guess, since it looks like it should read "pob". Learn the basic words, and the rest will get easier with reading practice and a few million mistakes. Keep a dictionary with phonetic spelling (either Thai or English) near you at all times.

Edited January 3, 2007 by Rikker

[meadish_sweetball]

I hope I'm not actually a bother

No, I meant like 'oh bother! where has he gone to?'...

Excellent post as usual, very useful.

[Grover]

Are there any good websites or books that help one know the vowel sounds that are not written? Or am I just going to have to “mmrz” one word at a time?

There is a lot of good info in Rikkers post. As for books, the best and by far the most comprehensive I came across regarding reading Thai was a small booklet published by the Australian National University, about 20 or 30 pages long about reading Thai. It covered this whole topic very well, succinct and all sorts of great info. Unfortunately I don't have a copy anymore. but you might want to try the ANU website if your interested in it.

This same booklet is in electronic format in a multimedia CDROM they published about reading Thai, which is also quite good.

Edited January 3, 2007 by Grover

[steveromagnino]

I only know from speaking/reading, and not sure what the rule is, but basically 9 times out of 10, if single consonent then it is the o sound in pom, kon etc.

If more than 1 syllable, then the preceding inserted vowel sound in the first/second etc syllable is a short a without stop, and the last syllable is the o sound; like in tanon.

But.,... the a sound can be clearly recognised if listening, as the sound is not the same as the ะ sound; the vowel shortener sala ะ is a short cut off vowel sound, as in a-rai - what; but when we hear aroi the vowel is not cut off, so we know that we spell a-rai using the sala a or ang ror rua but for aroi we don't need that as the vowel runs into the consonant. They fundamentally sound different.

If we wanted to spell tanon like ถะ-น-น; then it would come out as ta - break - non instead of how it is actually spelt and said tanon (run together). So...we can hear which way to spell something.

As for ผอบ well I wouild have been screwed on that one for sure; same as words like samur confused me at the beginning. Not as many exceptions as in engrish though methinks.

[my benny rai]

Thanks for your replies. Much appreciated.

PRHPS W SHLD CHNG NGLSH ND DRP LL TH VWLS T CNFS TH THS.

(Perhaps we should change English... )

;-)

What about using a Talking Dic? Are they any good for learning the invisible vowels? That is, do they transliterate the Thai words into English? What is the range of a typical Talking Dic?

[Richard W]

Random example:

มัธยม = มัด-ทะ-ยม (The syllable-final letter ธ is a clue that it's Indic and has the extra implicit syllable)

The way I look at this rule is as follows. If you pronounced the word without the unetymological vowel, how would people know that you knew that it had ธ and not ด?

Compound words are sticky. Phys Ed in Thai is called พลศึกษา [พะ-ละ-สึก-สา], and while [พน-สึก-สา] may be a valid-seeming guess, the clue is the Indic origins, which you might notice from the ศ and ษ letters, as well as ศึกษา being two-syllable. พล is pronounced [พน] on its own, but becomes [พะละ] in its combining form.

The behaviour of first elements ending in ร and ล is variable. Sometimes you have two different forms for a first element, e.g. the Indic-Thai hybrid ผลไม้ [ผน-ละ-ม้าย].

There is some regularity to the occurrence of the ออ vowel in open syllables. Firstly, it occurs regularly as the implicit vowel in the names of lettes (note that ก็ and the preposition ณ have different vowels), and secondly it occurs in the theoretically unpronounceable word-initial combinations ทร [ทอ-ร] (when not simply equivalent to ซ) บร [บอ-ร] and หร [หอ-ร] (when not simply equivalent to ร with a change of tone class).

I'm not sure that there is a rule for why บดี is pronounced [บอ-ดี]. Note that in all these examples of more than one syllable, the vowel ออ is unstressed and therefore normally pronounced short.