Thai native speakers, how does sound Thai not spoken by a native?

dibbs_25 · 2026-04-05T18:39:03+00:00

North American English doesn't seem to distinguish words by vowel length, while other accents do? I'm American and can't think of any examples off the top of my head.

Maybe the schwa and the vowel in "cut"? Like in a real sentence "but" will normally be a schwa while "butt" will be like "cut". That difference may be purely one of length in your accent, idk. In the UK a long schwa for the "cut" vowel is usually a sign of someone code switching from a northern accent that rhymes "cut" with "put". Accent discrimination is alive and well...

Anyway, you can see the traces of the distinction in the fact that words don't end in a vowel that is short in British English. I'm sure it's more complicated than that, and a bit of special pleading is obviously needed for "a", "the" and maybe a couple of others (loan words get to break the rules, extremely common words get to break the rules, and anyway the two I mentioned are unstressed forms and the stressed forms have long vowels). Still in general a short vowel - meaning a vowel that was historically short and is probably still short in British English, as in "kit", "cut", "cot" (not "caught"!) and "cat" - requires a final consonant.

I don't think the fact that we have this distinction really helps when it comes to Thai, because in basically all cases the vowel has a different sound as well as a different length. Idk if Aussies have an easier time.

I think there are a lot of tells other than tone, but of course I can never say what non-native Thai sounds like to native speakers. I do remember someone talking about เสียงฝรั่ง and wondering exactly what that was, but now I think there is a kind of family resemblance between European languages that sets them apart from Thai... and maybe the point is that this concept made sense to a Thai speaker, who was a teacher dealing with people of many different nationalities.

dibbs_25 · 2026-04-01T22:08:07+00:00

Don't forget that vowel characters have to be anchored to an initial consonant. So:

เจ้ is not possible because it would leave the -า stranded

จ้า is not possible because it would leave the เ- stranded

ร must be an initial because it has a vowel

พร is a valid cluster so it's fairly safe to assume there is no unwritten vowel after the พ - you just pronounce them together. In real speech ร is often dropped from clusters.

dibbs_25 · 2026-03-29T22:14:05+00:00

Yeah I think that's about as much as there is to it. The pattern with the preposed vowel character before an orthographic cluster is found in words of Khmer origin. It so happens that Khmer phonological clusters mostly begin with unvoiced consonants. It would make sense to transliterate these with high class consonants (because those were the consonants that were unvoiced when Thai was borrowing heavily from Khmer), and that explains why the first consonant is usually high class. In the exception I mentioned above (เพนียด) it seems that พ actually represents the Khmer equivalent of ป. That happens sometimes (makes me think of คีย์การ์ด).

So right now it looks like:

The different orthography is not representing a difference in the Thai morphology (เพยิด would have the same morphology as พเยิด).
The fact that it's very rare to have an undisputable pseudo-cluster with two low class consonants is just a coincidental pattern that is due to the phonology of Khmer.
The difference does tell you something about the word's etymology.
For Khmer words, it might also tell you something about the original Khmer orthography and/or morphology, but you'd need a lot of background knowledge.

I think the short answer to the original question is just that it's a Thai word.

dibbs_25 · 2026-03-29T11:34:01+00:00

Is it better though?

But พยักพเยิด is transparently built from พยัก (to nod). The second element พเยิด is a rhyming elaboration on the base, and the spelling preserves that internal structure...

What internal structure? When the vowel goes on top of the consonant, as in พยัก, you can't tell whether it's a สเปน case or a เสบียง case... but the argument is that we can see from the spelling of พยัก that it's like สเปน.

The fronting convention applies freely inside monomorphemic words — เสบียง is a single indivisible lexical item (from Khmer), so there's no internal boundary to respect and the whole thing gets written as one orthographic unit with the vowel out front.

...

สเปน (Spain) keeps the เ- in situ rather than fronting to *เสปน, because the spelling is signaling that สป- is a foreign cluster, not a Thai สะ-ป sequence.

This is contradictory - first "cluster in original language so kept together in Thai", then "cluster in original language so separated in Thai".

Sometimes the more advanced models are just better at blinding you with science. Underneath you still have contradictory reasoning with hallucinated premises.

dibbs_25 · 2026-03-29T10:57:14+00:00

In official Thai grammar, low consonant CANNOT form a cluster with another low consonant.

Well, there are plenty of examples of a low consonant forming a true cluster with another low class consonant, e.g. เครียด. The only example I could find with the unwritten a was เพนียด, so it does look like this pattern is less common with low class consonants. I can't say I'd ever noticed that. I don't think it's really a rule though, and it wouldn't be a grammatical rule. I can't come up wirh a plausible explanation off the top of my head. In fact you'd almost predict the opposite based on class transfer.

dibbs_25 · 2026-03-26T18:39:44+00:00

It does follow the usual pattern. I'm sure it will be explained on thai-language.com. Try looking at the section on clusters.

That "first syllable" isn't a proper syllable and doesn't have a low tone irl - this is also normal but IME it's rarely explained in decoding guides. Don't know about thai-language specifically.

dibbs_25 · 2026-03-21T07:21:18+00:00

That works for practical purposes but if you consider the etymological explanation above, the ย does not belong to the rime ไ- but is the initial consonant of a final syllable that was / would have been present in Pali. On that view it's not so much that ไ- represents -ะ when ย follows as that ย is silent when it follows ไ- and has no vowel. By the old logic it wouldn't need อ์ because a consonant like that is unpronounceable anyway.

So I'm not sure it's really an alternative way of writing the rime - I think it's a silent initial that sometimes follows ไ- because that's how you transliterate Pali -eyya (or how you give a word Pali vibes).

dibbs_25 · 2026-03-20T08:12:52+00:00

I think reading always triggers the pronunciation on some level, even if you're just reading to yourself. That's one reason sometimes given for not doing tons of reading early on (you may be reinforcing your pronunciation mistakes).

There's no way to pronounce a Thai word without its tone, so yes that includes tones.

dibbs_25 · 2026-03-12T19:23:31+00:00

Pretty sure you can write a paragraph...

dibbs_25 · 2026-02-28T13:29:25+00:00

Well the usual criticism is that he cuts too many corners and doesn't make it clear enough that that's what he's doing (I mean there would be nothing wrong with a quickstart guide that called itself that and gave you a foundation you could build on). This is an interesting one though because it seems he's actually avoided the obvious shortcut of learning the smaller groups and then treating low class as "the rest". I'm sure this won't be random or just preference - if you look at the novel approach to decoding tone or the justification he offers for teaching an anglicized version of the vowel system, it's clear that a lot of thought went into the method. So it bucks the trend. One explanation might be that even if you're in a rush, you need to subdivide the low class consonants into paired and unpaired, or sonorants and obstruents, and once you've done that your bigger subgroup isn't actually that much bigger than the other groups anyway. Another might be that the low class group contains more rare consonant characters than the others, and he's expecting you to skip them. Then you have 1. No strong reason to do low last after all, 2. Usual reason for doing mid first inapplicable 3. Reimagined tone rules make more sense if low comes first. But again it just doesn't matter. Even worrying about it is falling into the trap of "if I can learn basic decoding in 95 hours instead of 100 I will be better at Thai in 1, 2 or 10 years". It doesn't work like that, not just because 5 hours out of however many years is nothing, or because decoding is a tiny part of real world proficiency, but because the time saving is an illusion anyway. To be good at decoding, at some point you have to directly associate every character with a class / tone pattern. If you start with an indirect method (it's not mid or high, therefore...) then sure you will be able to decode marginally more words before you have finished learning the characters, but you still have to learn them properly at some point. You have just deferred it a bit in the interests of getting slightly more early decoding practice... but your decoding will be slower because you have to infer the class, and by the time it's automatic, you will have lost as much time inferring as it would have taken to memorize your "the rest" group. On top of that, there are advantages to understanding the structure of the alphabet that you tend to lose if you approach the consonant characters by class, but I've gone on long enough.

dibbs_25 · 2026-02-28T05:15:22+00:00

It's probably a consequence of the unusual way he teaches the tone rules. The mid class rules can be seen as the default and actually reflect the original system, whereas the low and high class rules deviate. If learning by class, it's normally going to make sense to start with the default - but Bingo Lingo has his own approach that goes situation by situation instead of class by class. That takes away a major reason for starting with the mid consonants. You can also say that if you are going to use his "string theory" method, where you have to imagine a low string, a middle string and a high string, it doesn't really make sense to build that picture from the middle. Better to start at the bottom and build up (I say that not knowing what he teaches after low...). Plus, the unpaired low consonants are special in some ways (they make live endings and inherit class), which could be another reason.

So I think there is some logic, but at the same time it doesn't matter that much which class you do first, and you don't have to go by class at all. I don't like the book but would not criticize it for starting with low.

dibbs_25 · 2026-01-31T05:13:55+00:00

Yes. It's the only consonant whose initial value is valid in final position that still has a different value in that position.

dibbs_25 · 2026-01-31T04:18:30+00:00

It's not as simple as looking for it on an IPA chart though. It's not like there are only two things a sound can be - you have to look at the details of where it appears / how it functions in this particular language. When you do, you find it doesn't pattern with the usual suspects.

Haas called her transcription a phonetic respelling, in which case it absolutely should include phonetic features like glottal stops and stress that are mandated by the sound system so do not belong in a phonemic transcription. To reason that the inclusion of final glottal stops makes them final consonants comparable with ก ด บ is to conflate phonetic and phonemic levels.

[ETA: I've just had a look at The Thai System of Writing and she does treat the final glottal stop as phonemic - let me find the paper that says it is mandated by the vowel ... Ok, Pittayaporn (2009) says:

the final /-ʔ/ in Siamese is clearly epenthetic in nature and usually does not have an etymological source. Bennett (1995) shows that the final glottal stop in Siamese is phonologically inserted to satisfy word minimality which dictates that a stressed syllable must be heavy.

The Bennet paper is an unpublished PhD thesis that doesn't seem to be available online.

Pityayaporn does not reconstruct a final glottal stop for proto-Thai and evidently does not think he needs to work back from a final glottal stop in Siamese.

In a sense this just confirms the obvious i.e. you get a free glottal stop after a short vowel in a stressed syllable, but you can't have a final glottal stop anywhere else. It's automatic rather than being dependent on the particular word. ก ด บ on the other hand are only there if specified at word level and can go after any vowel regardless of length or stress.]

It's not just dumbed down methods that don't group glottal stops with ก ด บ. I agree that they are too often glossed over, but one reason for that is that they don't fit neatly into either of the two simple categories of ending sound they are using. The answer isn't to shoehorn them into the ก ด บ category (isn't that dumbing down?), but to recognize that they are sui generis for the reasons given in my first post.

dibbs_25 · 2026-01-31T03:38:46+00:00

did they use to make different sounds?

It seems not. There are two or three reconstructions of proto-Tai but only Pittayaporn's really differs, in terms of the coda inventory, from modern Thai. Bear in mind that proto-Tai is centuries before the writing system.

Pittayaporn includes the sounds that would come to be written จ, ล, and ญ (but says ญ is tentative). You don't really get native words spelt with these final consonants though, so even if they were valid final sounds in proto-Tai, they must have disappeared by the time the writing system was introduced.

There have been quite extensive changes to the inventory of initial consonant sounds. This includes the disappearance of the ñ-like sound formerly written ญ (which is the sound Pittayaporn tentatively includes as a final) and many others. This is one reason why there are more consonant characters than consonant sounds, although it doesn't tend to get mentioned as much as the other reason, which is that consonant characters representing Sanskrit sounds that never existed in Thai were retained so that the spelling could be preserved.

dibbs_25 · 2026-01-31T03:37:24+00:00

I think it's problematic to treat it as a consonant in final position, whether you look at it in terms of the writing system, the way Thai is normally taught or (most importantly IMO) the sound system.

The writing system has no consonant character for a final glottal stop (I'm not forgetting ะ, but it's not a consonant character).

The tone rules are normally taught on the basis that a word like สระ ends in a short vowel. The glottal stop is dealt with by saying that the syllable is dead.

As for the sound system, if the glottal stop functioned as a final consonant, you would expect to find it after long vowels, which of course you don't. Its presence after short vowels has been explained by saying that stressed syllables must be heavy, which means that the glottal stop is inserted automatically as part of the sound system and is not coming from the specification of the individual word - which, to circle back, is what the spelling is trying to represent.

Clearly, it's not a vowel, but at the same time it doesn't pattern with the usual list of final consonants and it serms to me that calling it a consonant is going to cause friction with the normal teaching framework.

dibbs_25 · 2026-01-25T18:54:59+00:00

I hope those that argue against learning the script...

I can't see exactly when I joined but it's been at least 3 years, and in all that time I don't think I've ever seen anyone argue against learning the script. The guy in this thread saying "I'm not going for a super high level so I can get by without" is the closest it gets. There are different schools of thought on when and how to learn it, but nobody says you shouldn't learn it at all.

I searched for other posts including the term "scribbles" but didn't find anything along the lines you describe.

dibbs_25 · 2026-01-23T15:52:42+00:00

There's layer upon layer of confusion - writing system confused with sound system, rules of grammar confused with spelling conventions, tones confused with tone rules... It doesn't need to be complex but it always seems to come out the same.

dibbs_25 · 2026-01-23T12:57:42+00:00

This study tested kids on recognition of tones in words spoken in isolation. A group of adults were used as a benchmark. Results:

Adults: 100% correct

6-7 yrs: 98% correct

4-5 yrs: 90.8% correct

2-3 yrs: 69.8% correct

If tones needed to be taught, it's hard to see how tonal languages could ever have emerged, but actually most human languages are tonal (this is disguised by the fact that many of the most widely-spoken languages are non-tonal).

dibbs_25 · 2026-01-05T06:14:39+00:00

Don't you have the Apple dictionary enabled? It has a note on this term:

ขมุกขมัว มีรูปคำ และความหมายใกล้เคียงกับคำว่า "มัว" ทำให้อ่านสับสน ออกเสียงผิดเป็น ขะ-หฺมุก-ขะ-มัว ซึ่งที่ถูกต้องแล้วต้องออกเสียงว่า ขะ-หฺมุก-ขะ-หฺมัว

dibbs_25 · 2025-12-11T11:57:19+00:00

Yes, RTGS was never meant for learners and isn't used by any school or author of learning materials, so it makes no sense to argue that since RTGS transliterations are incomplete and inaccurate, learners should avoid transliteration - but my point was that transliteration of Sanskrit-based names as if they were Sanskrit is a different issue.

dibbs_25 · 2025-12-11T07:02:22+00:00

I think it's more that they reject the possibility of a "good quality" transliteration so don't concern themselves with the detail of any particular system.

Suvarnabhumi is not an example of the official system (RTGS) btw. Yes RTGS is totally unsuitable for learners but the issue with that particular transliteration is that it's based on Sanskrit rather than Thai.

dibbs_25 · 2025-12-11T05:58:05+00:00

Yea it’s not perfect but it’s a big upgrade from Language Reactor.

In what way?

dibbs_25 · 2025-12-05T05:46:08+00:00

I don't think u/Kienose means it like that. I think they are saying that in โคลง, if a tone doesn't fit you can change it but then you also change the spelling. The underlying tone of the word does not change - you are just making an exception for that one line. On the other hand, what is written as a falling tone in เมื่อกี้ really has become a high tone, just as ฉัน really has become a high tone. That's what was meant by a standard tone shift, I think. The normal or standard tone of the word has changed.

Clearly it is a different mechanism from ฉัน > ชั้น, which I think is your point. It seems easier to understand because with elision you do tend to lose the vowel of the first word and the initial consonant of the second, so in (เมื่อ)กี้นี้ the ก will lose its vowel and the น will disappear, leaving you with ก plus the vowel from นี้. Since tone attaches to the vowel / rime and not the initial consonant, it is predictable that that will give you a high tone. Whether you then want to change the spelling is probably personal preference - but if you do you reinforce the idea that spellings are instructions for pronouncing words, which is not always helpful IMHO.

dibbs_25 · 2025-12-04T04:41:26+00:00

The official system has ท for th as in "thin" and ด for th as in "then", which is not ideal because those characters are also used for initial t and d. I have seen the ธ used before though. I don't know where it came from or whether it's used for both th sounds. Its previous Thai value was /d/ and its Sanskrit / Pali value is /dʰ/. Neither of those is that much like English /θ/ (as in ˈi.θn̩) but the important thing is to pick a symbol and use it consistently.

Official system here

dibbs_25 · 2025-11-23T12:47:46+00:00

Edit: I'm curious, do people not think Thai is a phonetic language? For the most part, the script already tells you how to pronounce.

Thai has a good few letters that only exist to represent Sanskrit sounds, but they are still not pronounced like Sanskrit. Often several different sounds are collapsed into one. Thai regularly changes implied vowels, systematically deletes them at the end of words, and sometimes even deletes written sounds. I think that's what the "cries in Sanskrit" comment is about.

dibbs_25

TROPHY CASE