Linguistic Diversity Challenge: ภาษาไทย!
Hi friends! I’m happy to finally have the time to start the Linguistic Diversity Challenge I was tagged in so many months ago. I’m going to focus on languages in Asia that tend to receive less attention in the langblr study sphere, and hopefully we can all learn some cool things together.
I’m starting off the week with the Thai language (ภาษาไทย), mostly because it’s the language I’ve most recently started studying. I was drawn to it because of its beautiful script, and I’d found a few Thai bands that I really enjoy.
Thai is spoken by over 50,000,000 people across the world, with many of its speakers living in Thailand. It is said to have first originated in between modern-day Vietnam and China, and it is linguistically related to languages spoken in northern Vietnam, Laos, and Myanmar (this last paragraph is honestly almost word-for-word what’s written on thai-language.com, and I can’t pretend to have a better overview of the Thai language than them. Check out this link to learn more!).
In English, the Thai language is simply called Thai. However, “thai,” or ไทย, is actually an adjective that means “of or pertaining to Thailand.” The word for the Thai language is then ภาษาไทย (phaa saa thai), with ภาษา meaning “language.” You would pronounce this somewhat like paw saw tai, with extra aspiration on the p and t (which is denoted by the h after certain consonants).
I had a lot of trouble first starting out learning the Thai alphabet, but it ended up being much simpler than I thought (even though I’m still struggling with it a bit). The hardest thing for me was learning how to read a Thai syllable, but I found this guide on thai-language that lead me through it (I actually recommend this website for so many reasons - it has comprehensive lessons on the Thai language, Thai culture, and a built-in dictionary).
In Thai, there are 21 initial consonant sounds (spoken at the beginning of a syllable) and 6 final consonant sounds (spoken at the end of a syllable). Consonants are divided into groups of low-, mid-, and high-class, which affect the tone of the spoken syllable. There are five tones in Thai, which can be depicted like this:
[Image: Tones in thai: falling, high, mid, rising, and low. From thai-language.com.]
Vowels also affect the tone of a syllable. There are eighteen simple vowel sounds in Thai, a short and long duration of the nine basic vowels (these are also called monophthongs). There are also three diphthongs (also each having a short and long duration), and these 24 vowel sounds make up all the vowel phonemes in Thai. Glide endings are also an important aspect of Thai vowel sounds, and we can see one in the adjective we learned earlier, ไทย.
The most interesting thing I’ve encountered so far while studying Thai is how a syllable is read. In Thai, the vowel can be written before, above, under, or after the consonant, but you still pronounce the initial consonant first (if there is an initial consonant). The thai-language website introduced me to a helpful chart that we can use to understand a Thai syllable, which looks like this:
[Image: Anatomy of a Thai syllable from thai-language. Includes the initial consonant, vowel, final consonant, tone, and vowel duration.]
Let’s look at the word เตียง (dtiiang, bed) as an example. We transcribe this word as “dtiiang” in English, because that is our best approximation of how it’s pronounced—the actual letters used in Thai, though, are not written in that order. The consonant “dt” is ต, and the vowel sound เ ีย, or “iia,” surrounds it. The final consonant sound ง at the end of a syllable is pronounced “ng.” Here is the anatomy chart thai-language provided for เตียง:
[Image: The anatomy of the single-syllable word เตียง.]
As you can see, although the sounds come in the order dt-iaa-ng, they are not written quite like that. It takes practice to learn how to read Thai syllables, and I’m honestly still struggling with it, but over time I imagine it will become as natural as reading words in English (that’s the goal, at least!).
I hope you’ve enjoyed learning a little bit about the Thai language with me! If you’d like to hear some music by Thai artists, I’ve really been enjoying Gym and Swim and YONLAPA. I haven’t watched any yet, but I’ve heard there are some really good Thai dramas, a few of which I think you can find on Viki. I’ll try to post some updates on my Thai language study, but… I am not very good about posting updates lol. Maybe that’ll change in 2021…?
And that’s day 1!! I’ll be posting about Ainu tomorrow, so look forward to that!
