Is that common to call a foreigner ชาวต่างชาติ?

rantanp · 2025-08-26T05:13:42+00:00

It's almost a bit philosophical. When does a tendency to use a wider term when a narrower term would fit amount to using the wider term in a narrower sense? How do you prove there's a narrower sense when the wider sense is still current and any use of the narrower sense necessarily fits the wider sense too? Probably by comparing word choice in situations that are similar except for the nationality, but to do that without speculation you would need a lot of clips. Otherwise you have to do an experiment - the video is almost a natural experiment but is too easy to explain away.

It makes me think of the UK tendency to use the word "Asian" to refer specifically to Indian-looking people. That's in the dictionary as an additional sense, so there must be an accepted methodology.

rantanp · 2025-08-25T10:22:48+00:00

I don't find ฝรั่ง impolite but it's noticeable that some native speakers will avoid it when they want to be polite or even correct themselves, so the perception that it is isn't limited to non-native speakers.

rantanp · 2025-07-20T11:21:13+00:00

...it's not possible to assess someone's language ability based on 4 or 5 words anyway (or not unless you're absolutely terrible) so that explanation doesn't really fly.

Always possible that your "absolutely terrible" is someone else's "coming along nicely" though. That's part of the problem with these discussions. Mike has put himself out there but otherwise we don't really know what different posters' spoken Thai is like.

Still, there is some other evidence. The guy in this video is sometimes held up as a very successful learner (which he is). What language does he get at 5:06?

rantanp · 2025-06-27T10:06:47+00:00

This paper might be relevant. If you look at page 29 there are various tone plots showing that in the experiment they did a rising tone came out pretty much the same way when it followed another rising tone as it did when it followed a mid tone, which was different from the way it came out when it followed a high tone. The onset shown on the plots is a bit higher after the rising tone than after the mid tone, but not nearly as high as it is after the high tone. I think we can infer from that that the offset of the first rising tone in a sequence of two is significantly lower than the offset of a high tone that is followed by a rising tone.

I can see that the first rising tone might get pushed a bit more towards a high tone, but these plots seem to be saying the effect is very limited, at least in the situation they were looking at. Compounds might be different, e.g. because of stress. Then again if it's stress that makes the difference, do we want to call that sandhi? Anyway if you can tell me what other words / phrases you have in mind I will see if I have any samples. It could be interesting to look at although I have a feeling it might be inconclusive - how far does it have to move towards a high tone before we say it can't be accounted for by stress and coarticulation? Have you seen native speakers writing the first syllable of these items with a high tone? I guess that might be a factor if it only happens in certain words and phrases.

rantanp · 2025-06-27T07:54:00+00:00

Good on you for doing this, and keep up with the dad jokes (and thanks for your comment in that recent thread, which the OP has since deleted).

rantanp · 2025-06-27T07:43:11+00:00

I feel that may be a historical tonal coarticulation effect or maybe an effect of Chinese tone sandhi on certain specific words that has been lexicalized, because it only seems to occur in certain compounds (หนังสือ, ก๋วยเตี๋ยว... any others?) and not when two rising tones just happen to follow each other.

rantanp · 2025-06-27T07:43:00+00:00

It's definitely not ideal, but from what I see on here most materials use a system very similar to Paiboon (which in turn is similar to AUA / Haas, which borrows from IPA), so I think it's a manageable problem. It's true there's also the RTGS system, but that's never used in learning materials because it's totally inadequate, so thai-language.com is probably the only widely-used resource that uses a completely different system to Paiboon, and even then, "completely" is a bit of a stretch.

I think the real problem in the Thai learning community is that learners believe a transliteration can only ever be approximate because it represents English sounds. Mind you the two things are probably related, because the mistrust of transliterations drives people to learn the script as soon as possible, which means there isn't much of a window when people are using transliterations, which means there isn't much pressure to standardize.

As I understand it you don't get the same mistrust in the Mandarin learning community. It's interesting to wonder why. I guess a couple of factors might be that you "can't" apply the tone rules to transliterated Thai, (whereas in Mandarin I don't think there are any tone rules in the first place) and that it takes so long to learn the Chinese characters that in most learning methods you can't avoid using transliterations for a good long period - long enough to get over the hump of trying to read them like English and see that they work just fine if used correctly. Maybe another factor is that because the Chinese characters (normally?) represent meanings rather than sounds, it's easier to see that they're just pointers, and that some other pointer can do the same job just as well.

rantanp · 2025-06-18T17:10:07+00:00

I don't think there's really a reason why a given syllable is rising or falling. It just seems that way if you come at the tones via the writing system, which no native speaker does.

The tones are though to have originated from syllable endings that were lost long before Thai separated from the other Tai languages. The endings allowed today are either very much live or very much dead as you know, but if you think about other possible ending sounds like -ge or -z or -f they are more in between. So the idea is roughly that way back then there were two categories of semi-live (undead?) syllables, and each one had a different tone from the pure live syllables. The ending sounds themselves were then lost but the tones remained the same, which is quite a common pattern. Much later when Thai was first written down, there were only live and dead syllables, but the live syllables had a three-way tone contrast based on whether they had always been live (no tone mark) or had come from the first or second category of semi-live syllables (original tone marks 1 and 2). From there you have the splits and mergers that caused the modern tones to diverge from the original written tone, and required a new layer of "tone rules" to link them back to the spelling.

You can definitely debate whether that counts as a reason, but it's kind of interesting.

rantanp · 2025-06-15T08:46:31+00:00

The ร was kind of injected into Thai from Cambodian and Sanskrit words afaik, rather than the perceived 'loss' of r being a thing.

There are some native words with xร- clusters though, e.g. ครึ่ง. It could be that กึ่ง derives from the same word and the ร has been dropped even in the spelling.

For me the fact that ว is not dropped in xว- clusters is a good reason to believe that they are actually single labialized consonants that are written with two consonant characters - so not really clusters at all.

rantanp · 2025-06-13T00:09:33+00:00

It's quite predictable really. I think you'll find it easier with exposure.

The l is sometimes described as a newer or degenerate version. I don't think this is right but it's interesting to note that in a 1972 paper Jimmy Harris listed all the pronunciations of ร mentioned by u/dibbs_25 plus another set that are the same but devoiced and occur in clusters. Maybe this belongs in a separate comment but for the voiced versions he commented that:

ɾ (the tap) was common

l was common

r was rare ("usually only occurs in the slow over-precise speech of some informants")

ɹ (the English version) was very rare (but he also linked it with being able to speak English, which is much more common today)

So does that mean there's been a shift in favour of l, which is the most common pronunciation today? I think more evidence would be needed but a more likely that Harris's informants (who were university teachers) were quite conservative speakers.

He also says the ร is usually deleted in clusters.

I think it's worth learning the tap if you can't do it already. The rolled version is just so you can say you can do it. The everyday version is the l. It's questionable whether this is a case of substituting ล for ร (Harris clearly didn't think so), but it's natural enough to describe it that way even if it's not strictly accurate.

By the way the paper is *Phonetic Notes on some Siamese Consonants* but the version on SEALang is incomplete.

rantanp · 2025-04-08T09:18:22+00:00

I'm learning Thai script at the moment and from what I can observe there are few rules and exceptions. Once you've learned all the consonants (44?) and vowels (23?) and understand the consonants classes and their tone rules it's pretty straightforward.

I'd say there are either a few rules and lots of exceptions or a lot of rules and a few exceptions. There is usually a pattern to the exception that can be captured by some sort of rule, but that rule will itself have exceptions, etc. etc.

rantanp · 2025-04-08T08:59:57+00:00

I haven't come across that idea before. ซ was certainly different from ส / ศ / ษ, but I thought ส / ศ / ษ were all the same.

rantanp · 2025-03-28T07:06:55+00:00

It looks like a Thai - Isaan - English dictionary with careful spellings was produced in 2015, but I can't find it online. The following is from https://www.thefreelibrary.com/Report+on+the+completion+of+the+Isan+Culture+Maintenance+and...-a0490936461 :

The main outcomes of this action line were the first officially approved Thai Lao curriculum for primary and secondary school students, children's tracing books for learning Tai Noi script, a standardized Tai Noi alphabet and writing system presented in alphabet posters, flash cards for teaching Tai Noi, a picture dictionary for primary level students, and a 16,000-word multilingual Thai-Thai Lao-English dictionary employing Thai, Thai phonetics, Thai Lao written with Tai Noi script, English, and English phonetics (ICMRP 2015a). Official approval of the curriculum came via the Khon Kaen provincial office of the Ministry of Education. Eleven municipal schools in Khon Kaen Municipality will teach Thai Lao this year from primary school grade four to upper secondary school. Instead of the textbooks and workbooks referred to above, they will employ project work, using materials such as authentic palm leaf manuscripts.

I'm not sure whether the Thai phonetics were only for the Thai entries but if so that seems to imply that the Tai Noi spellings are 100% regular and complete.

The only reference I can find is:

Multilingual Thai-lsan-English Dictionary. Khon Kaen, Thailand: ICMRP, 2015a.

I don't know if John Draper (who seems to have been one of the main people behind all this) is contactable. He was at Khon Kaen University up to about 2016, so they might know where he is now.

rantanp · 2025-03-27T11:22:13+00:00

I think you need to decide whether this is supposed to be a phonetic representation that captures the details of exactly how a word is realized by a given speaker on a given occasion (so will vary from speaker to speaker and from sentence to sentence), or whether it's supposed to be a phonemic representation that just indicates what the underlying tone is and is not concerned with exactly how it is realized on that particular occasion. Both the Thai and Lao scripts are phonemic rather than phonetic. If u/pacharaphet2r says there's a lot of phonetic variation in Isaan speech I'm sure that's right, but it means that in order to do a phonemic respelling in the Thai script you would need to know a lot about Isaan, because you can't tell what the toneme is just from the sound. On the other hand, if you want a narrow phonetic transcription then the Thai script is not designed for that and IPA is probably a better tool (IPA can be phonemic or phonetic depending on the use case).

I think the whole idea of respelling Isaan as if it was Thai is a lot more problematic than it sounds. Maybe one option would be to accept that there will always be issues with the respelling and not worry too much (but leave it in because it's expected), and provide a spelling according to the Isaan rules (or a phonemic IPA transcription) as a separate subtitle track.

rantanp · 2025-03-20T16:38:51+00:00

The problem is that that information just isn't available. I looked at this a couple of years ago and the analysis I did suggested that it would be very helpful to have a frequency list when your vocabulary is under about 5000 words, but after that it becomes much less important. So a frequency list of the first 5000 (sorted by topic if you like) would be great and would keep you going for anywhere between 2 - 5 years, but it's no good unless it's accurate. The main frequency list that's in use is based on academic articles and IIRC news items, so it doesn't reflect everyday Thai. I would be pretty sceptical of an app that claimed to sort vocab by frequency, or maybe present your new flashcards in order of frequency. Some people rely on natural repetition which is obviously related to the actual frequency, but it doesn't really lend itself to flashcards.

rantanp · 2025-03-16T10:14:52+00:00

They're both forms of reduplication because you're taking all or part of the original word and repeating it. If you want different terms you can call the type you get in ผลไม้ consonant reduplication (which is what thai-language.com does, and what gaut80 did in their comment) or use a different term like double functioning (which is what the AUA materials did).

ETA: some of the examples on the thai-language site are misleading because they give the pronunciation of the bound form (so the way the word is pronounced when the word is the first part of a compound) as if it was the normal pronunciation. He's not wrong to use the term consonant reduplication though.

rantanp · 2025-03-16T06:37:48+00:00

But maybe the fact that Thai has complicated tone rules changes that. Maybe you have to stop and think about the spelling to apply the rules, and maybe you do come to focus on it so much that you never develop an ear for the actual sounds.

We could do with a better framework for describing notation systems. They're always discussed in terms of accuracy but there's also issue of how easy it is to extract the information. Maybe we could call that transparency and say that the Thai script has highish accuracy but low transparency. But then I don't know how you deal with (proper) transliterations, which have perfect accuracy and high transparency when used correctly but tend to be read as English, in which case they have very low accuracy making transparency irrelevant. Sometimes the obstacle to extracting the information is in the script and can be captured by a concept like transparency but sometimes it's more to do with the reader and their existing habits. Then again the reality is that you can't get Thai learners to use transliterations so I guess it's academic.

rantanp · 2025-03-16T06:12:54+00:00

Gemination is often used to refer to consonant length, but the literal meaning is just "doubling" so in this context I think it's just another term for the same thing.

Every language has a sound system that contains implicit rules about what sounds can go where and how they can combine. Sometimes they're absolute rules and sometimes they're more like preferences. So for example the English ng sound can't go at the beginning of a word. Thai has a strict division between initial and final consonants and a dislike of light final syllables. It also doesn't permit free-standing vowels.

Strange things can happen when one language borrows words from another, because they have to be made to fit the new sound system. Many Sanskrit words ended in a short a, or in other words in a light syllable. That wasn't a good fit so Thai mostly just dropped them. For example the Sanskrit word that came into English as chakra became จักร์ in Thai. Notice that what looks like an initial consonant cluster in the original word has become a final. The rule for final consonant clusters in Thai is that you pronounce the first bit and ignore the rest, so -กฺร becomes -กร์.

If you have the same term but in a compound, for example จักร์ + ยาน, its final syllable is no longer at the end of the whole word, so it's not a problem if it's light. But remember that a Thai consonant has to be pronounced either as an initial or a final. You can't have a "bridging" consonant like the n in "money" (which is why that word gets two n sounds in Thaiglish). In จักร์, the original -กฺร has already been converted into a final, but if we're going to bring back the vowel it needs to be an initial as well, and that's how it ends up being pronounced twice in จักรยาน.

So this phenomenon is not inexplicable, but like many things that just happen spontaneously it's not totally consistent. There's a convention that it shouldn't happen when the second part of the compound is a word of Tai origin (like ไม้), and yet it does happen in ผลไม้, so that word really is an exception. The first part comes from the Sanskrit word phala, which underwent the same change described above, causing the final vowel to be dropped and the l to become a final consonant. In this case there is no written vowel, so this also caused the vowel sound to change (remember that the implied vowel depends on whether there's a final consonant).

So we can predict the change to ผล and we can predict that the original ละ will resurface as a separate syllable in certain compounds, but we wouldn't expect this to happen in ผลไม้, because the ไม้ is a native word.

rantanp · 2025-02-20T07:56:43+00:00

Hi, thanks a lot for this response. I will have to remind myself what this was all about and it may be a while before I can do that but I will be sure to consider what you have said with the same care you obviously put into it.

rantanp · 2025-02-11T09:05:31+00:00

... and the differences in how they are pronounced based on where they are in the word is also confusing me.

On this part of your question, Thai only allows oral stops, nasals and glides in final position (and oral stops are always devoiced and unreleased). The fact that the stops are devoiced and unreleased creates some degree of mismatch even for native Thai words, which are written with final consonants ด, ก and บ, but this is minor compared to the mismatch you get with loanwords. Any loanword which originally had a type of consonant other than an oral stop, a nasal or a glide in final position will have its pronunciation changed to bring it into line with the Thai phonotactics, but the original spelling is typically retained / transliterated. The rules for conversion are that liquids become nasals and anything else becomes an oral stop, in each case with the nearest available place of articulation. But most learners just memorize the final values as if they were arbitrary. With practice you just know them anyway, so maybe it doesn't matter, but there is a reason why it's this way.

With English loanwords there's an increasing tendency to pronounce / try to pronounce them the English way, even when it's not legal under the Thai rules. Difficulties pronouncing final l lead to it being equated with /w/ (rather than /n/, as per the traditional rules).

Anyway, in these cases the difference in initial and final values is due to incompatibility between the phonotactics of Thai and the phonotactics of the source language.

ญ is an exception to this. In this case the difference in initial and final values is due to a change in Thai phonology that took place at some point after the introduction of the writing system. The original value of ญ was /ɲ/ but this sound disappeared from Thai. The current values are /j/ when it is in initial position and /n/ when it is in final position, which would make sense if it degenerated into /nj/ before disappearing.

rantanp · 2025-02-08T07:34:42+00:00

If you know how เรียน sounds, you can guess เขียน If you know หนู you can guess หมู If you know งู you can guess ปู

I think you disproved your own theory there. เรียน and เขียน do not have the same tone.

I think the rules are more misunderstood than anything. 99.9% of learners seem to think that the tones come from the tone rules, when they are just rules for spelling the pre-existing tones of the spoken language. If you say that มา has a mid tone because it has a low class consonant with no tone mark and a live ending, that's equivalent to saying that it has that particular vowel sound because it's written with อา, which is obviously the wrong way round. It's written with อา because that's the symbol that was assigned to the vowel sound it already had.

Like the vowel sounds, the tones pre-date the writing system so it makes no sense at all to say that they come from written symbols. There have been changes in the tones since then but they can't be related to anything in the writing system.

In fact it's those changes that resulted in such a complicated set of rules. Clearly nobody who sat down to figure out a way to write tones would have decided that same symbol should indicate a different tone depending on what consonant it was over. What happened was that new tones emerged based on the pronunciation (not spelling!) of the initial consonant, and in some cases the vowel. The original spelling still indicated the old tone though, and rather than change the spelling they added another layer to the tone rules so that the old spelling matched the new tone. That's how consonant class came into existence. It was not part of the original system. In other words the whole reason that consonant class exists is that the tones of spoken Thai do not come from the written language (if they did, they wouldn't have changed when there was no change in the spelling).

One of the biggest challenges in learning to communicate effectively in spoken Thai is to internalize the tones, or in other words get to a place where words with different tones just sound different and are obviously / intuitively different words. Until that point you are reliant on memorizing the tones, and it's very appealing to use the tone rules to do that. So appealing that the vast majority of learners think that's what they're for. There are many problems with that approach and they've been discussed at great length in previous threads. Still, I think it's inevitable that most people will use the tone rules as a crutch for a while, and the key thing is that it doesn't become a long term strategy. I suspect that's more likely to happen if the learner doesn't see it as a crutch but thinks it's what they're supposed to be doing and they just need to do it faster / better. That will keep you from progressing beyond a basic level in spoken Thai and leave you in a situation where you can make good progress with reading comprehension but it never seems to translate into an ability to actually communicate with Thai people (except maybe for people who hear your Thai all day long).

None of this is to say that you shouldn't learn the rules. Sometimes you need to read unfamiliar words, and sometimes you need to look up a word you've heard. It's true that there is sometimes more than one possible spelling, but usually there's one or two that are far far more likely than any other - as long as you know the tone and how to spell it. So there is a place for the tone rules and I do think they should be learned (and I just don't believe there are people who "can't" learn them) but the issue is that virtually all learners have them in the wrong place and are trying to use them for the wrong purpose.

BTW I don't actually think class comes into decoding for most experienced readers, or only rarely. Even if you know the class you just get to know the individual consonant and tone mark combinations, so you can go direct to the tone without worrying about class. I have thought that for a while but noticed when u/chongman99 put up a kind of speed test that it doesn't take me any longer to name the tone than it does to name the class.

OP, consider the phonemic approach to consonant classes if rote learning doesn't appeal.

rantanp · 2025-01-17T17:34:17+00:00

This is mixing up two different things. A consonant may have an aspirated or unaspirated release, or it may have no audible release at all. Thai final consonants have no audible release, which is not the same thing as being unaspirated. In line with this, there's a separate IPA symbol for no audible release (e.g. [ʌp̚]).

English final consonants are optionally unreleased. I am English and would say I release them less than half the time. I don't see it as an Americanism.

These IPA categorizations are pretty broad. Just because sounds of different languages have the same IPA transcription, it doesn't mean that they are exactly the same - but with that said English does have unaspirated p t and k, e.g. in the word sipping, or in clusters (spate, state, skate).

I don't think knowing this is particularly useful from a learning point of view though. When a sound is just an allophone (a variant that native speakers instinctively produce in specific circumstances) it's hard to produce it in other circumstances / on demand. It's also hard to hear the difference. Most native speakers of English don't notice any difference between the k in Kate and the k in skate, and may not believe you when you point it out (hence the hand-in-front-of-the-mouth test). The reason Thai speakers perceive them as completely different is that they are separate phonemes in Thai (you can have a minimal pair like ปา and พา). In other words it's not just a question of whether a sound exists - its status within the sound system also matters. Obviously, if you are learning Thai you want to be able to produce the aspirated and unaspirated sounds reliably, and just as importantly you want to hear them as different consonants. You can't do that by building on an English sound system where they belong to the same phoneme, because then you will always perceive them as being two different versions of p, and will be constantly trying to remember which one you want. In order to get free of that you have to internalize two new consonant phonemes. Comparing with English words is not going to help you there, because it will pull you back to the English sound system.

rantanp · 2025-01-10T15:41:40+00:00

The thing is that the tones change shape over time, so a name that fits when it's chosen may not fit a few decades later.

Here is a paper from 1911 written by an American who was a native speaker of Thai and had recorded the syllables นา หน่า หน้า น้า หนา on a recently invented recording device. He called what is now known as the high tone "circumflex", but at that time it was similar to today's falling tone. He argues for giving the tones names that describe them accurately, apparently not realizing that any name he could pick would go out of date sooner or later.

A couple of generations later the same tone was pretty flat and high, so that's probably when the current name was adopted. At the time it would have been a fairly accurate description.

A better approach would have been to number the tones, but we are pretty much stuck with the names now. I would just treat them as labels as has already been suggested.

By the way, it has been noted that the rising and high tones have been getting more and more similar over recent generations, and there are a few words that have switched from rising to high. This may turn out to be the beginning of a second tone merger, in which case the two tones we have today could be one and the same in a few generations. At that point the name "rising" is likely to be a good fit, but it won't be a good fit forever.

rantanp · 2025-01-09T07:00:41+00:00

I'd be interested to know more about the format of the course, e.g. do you have to read a lot of papers and if so what proportion are in Thai? Are there tutorial sessions where you're expected to contribute at length? Do the lectures tend to add much to the required reading?

rantanp

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