Thailand (Lonely Planet, 13th Edition) - China Williams [665]
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VOCABULARY DIFFERENCES
Like most languages, Thai distinguishes between ‘polite’ and ‘informal’ vocabulary, so that tahn, for example, is a more polite everyday word for ‘eat’ than gin, and se-sà for ‘head’ is more polite than ho·a. When given a choice, it’s better to use the polite terms, since these are less likely to lead to unintentional offence.
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SCRIPT
The Thai script, a fairly recent development in comparison with the spoken language, consists of 44 consonants (but only 21 separate sounds) and 48 vowel and diphthong possibilities (32 separate signs). Though learning the alphabet is not difficult, the writing system itself is fairly complex, so unless you’re planning a lengthy stay in Thailand it should perhaps be foregone in favour of actually learning to speak the language. The names of major places and food items included in this book are given in both Thai and roman script, so that you can at least ‘read’ the names of destinations or dishes, or point to them if necessary.
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TONES
In Thai the meaning of a single syllable may be altered by means of different tones – in standard Central Thai there are five: low tone, mid tone, falling tone, high tone and rising tone. For example, depending on the tone, the syllable mai can mean ‘new’, ‘burn’, ‘wood’, ‘not?’ or ‘not’; ponder the phrase mái mài mâi mâi mi (New wood doesn’t burn, does it?) and you begin to appreciate the importance of tones in spoken Thai. This makes it a rather tricky language to learn at first, especially for those of us unaccustomed to the concept of tones.
Even when we ‘know’ what the correct tone in Thai should be, our tendency to denote emotion, verbal stress, the interrogative etc through tone modulation often interferes with producing the correct tone. Therefore the first rule in learning to speak Thai is to divorce emotions from your speech, at least until you’ve learned the Thai way to express them without changing essential tone value.
The following is visual representation in chart form to show relative tone values:
The list below is a brief attempt to explain the tones. The only way to really understand the differences is by listening to a native or fluent non-native speaker. The range of all five tones is relative to each speaker’s vocal range so there is no fixed ‘pitch’ intrinsic to the language.
low tone – ‘Flat’ like the mid tone, but pronounced at the relative bottom of one’s vocal range. It is low, level and has no inflection, eg bàht (baht – the Thai currency).
mid tone – Pronounced ‘flat’, at the relative middle of the speaker’s vocal range, eg dee (good); no tone mark is used.
falling tone– Starting high and falling sharply, this tone is similar to the change in pitch in English when you are emphasising a word, or calling someone’s name from afar, eg mâi (no/not).
high tone – Usually the most difficult for Westerners. It’s pronounced near the relative top of the vocal range, as level as possible, eg máh (horse).
rising tone – starting low and gradually rising, sounds like the inflection used by English speakers to imply a question – ‘Yes?’, eg shm (three).
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PRONUNCIATION
The following is a guide to the phonetic system that’s been used for the words and phrases in this chapter (and throughout the rest of the book when transcribing directly from Thai). The dots indicate syllable breaks within words, including compound vowels.
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Consonants
The majority of consonants correspond closely to their English counterparts. Here are a few exceptions:
Vowels
TRANSLITERATION
Writing Thai in roman script is a perennial problem – no wholly satisfactory system