If you already speak English, then the process of learning French or German is eased by the presence of old friends, or words that are either identical or very similar in form. So name in German is 'name'; the French for impossible is 'impossible'. Learning Thai is therefore a much greater challenge for the native English speaker, because there are so few 'old friends'. This is not to say that Thai has borrowed no words from English: it has, but the words are few and far between (notable among the borrowings are ฟรี 'free' and คอมพิวเตอร์ 'computer').
Thai is a tonal language that is closely related to Cantonese: chicken is ไก่ kài, which is pronounced identically to Cantonese 雞 gai except for the tone. Thai has also borrowed many words from Teochew: table is โต็ะ tó which is the Teochew pronunciation of 桌. Like Chinese, the vast majority of native Thai words are monosyllabic and differentiated by tone only. However Thailand was far more closely influences by India than by China, and so Thai, which is a tonal monosyllabic analytic language, ended up borrowing an Indic alphabet which was designed for writing a non-tonal polysyllabic synthetic language; and the changes necessary to achieve this transition were therefore not minor. Thai has many fewer consonants than Sanskrit or Pali (21 versus 44): Sanskrit has the series of dental consonants t th d dh which is written in Thai script as ต ถ ท ธ; however, in Thai this is pronounced t th th th. This would seem to result in a lot of redundancy (ถ ท ธ all code for the same consonant sound), but there is in fact less redundancy than might be expected because some of the redundant letters are used to code for tones. So, ถ is th with an innate low rising or low level tone, while ท is th with a mid or high rising tone. On the other hand, Thai has many more vowels or diphthongs than Sanskrit or Pali (46 versus 12), and therefore many vowel signs had to be invented in order to represent Thai vowels: e.g. Sanskrit e is written เ in Thai; the sound ɛ (pronounced like English 'air') does not exist in Sanskrit, so in Thai you make do by doubling the sign เ and write แ.
Thai has borrowed many words from Sanskrit and Pali, and both languages have a vocabulary that is almost entirely polysyllabic. Thai has generally coped with this by dropping consonants (and sometimes by dropping whole syllables) in much the same way that Chinese has. The resultant word is usually mangled and unrecognisable to any Sanskrit or Pali speaker, however the written word remains the same and how this is achieved is quite remarkable. A few examples will illustrate this point:- The Sanskrit name for a mythical race of giants called yaksa, has been exported via Buddhism to both Thailand and to China. In Chinese, this has been mutilated to become 夜叉 yèchā (the consonant group 'ks' is impossible in Chinese). In Thai, this has become ยักษ์ yák. Here Thai has an obvious advantage over Chinese: because its writing system is Indic, it is possible to write Indic words with perfect accuracy using the Thai script (the pronunciation is another matter). Whereas in Chinese it is impossible to reverse engineer the imported word to recover the Sanskrit original, in Thai the original spelling is preserved. Every Sanskrit or Pali word written in Thai may also be read perfectly as its Sanskrit original by substituting the original Sanskrit values for each letter. In Thai, yaksa is spelled 'yaksa' ยักษ but with a "cancellation" mark (called mai karan) over the final syllable ษ to indicate that it is not pronounced (thus making it yak ยัก). To take an even more extreme example, the Sanskrit word, bodhisattva is 菩薩 púsà in Chinese, but โพธิสัตว์ phothisat in Thai. There is a "cancellation" mark over the letter ว, but if you ignore the cancellation mark and read the word using the Sanskrit values for each of the letters instead (พ being read as 'b' instead of 'ph', ธ being read as 'dh' instead of 'th', and so forth), the original Sanskrit word is clearly and unambiguously recovered.
If you speak Teochew then Thai tones are easy. Standard Thai has five tones: 1 mid level, 2 low level, 3 high falling, 4 high rising, and 5 low rising. Teochew has eight tones: 1 mid level, 2 high falling, 3 low rising, 4 low short, 5 high level, 6 high rising, 7 low level, 8 high short. It is easy to see therefore that all the Thai tones already exist in Teochew, and it is easy to learn Thai if you already know Teochew. It is perhaps one reason (of many) so many Teochews settled in Thailand. Unfortunately the same cannot be said for Mandarin Chinese, where only one of the four tones is held in common (the high falling tone) and even then there are differences in duration and contour. Nevertheless it is far easier for someone who already speaks a tonal language to pick up Thai. The ability to pick up tones in speech appears to be related to acquiring perfect pitch: while perfect pitch may be acquired early in life, it is exceedingly difficult to pick up in adulthood.
Deutsch D, Henthorn T, Dolson M. Absolute Pitch, Speech, and Tone Language: Some Experiments and a Proposed Framework. Music Perception. 2004;21(3):339–356. doi:10.1525/mp.2004.21.3.339
Wayland RP, Guion SG. Training English and Chinese Listeners to Perceive Thai Tones: A Preliminary Report. Language Learning. 2004;54(4):681–712. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9922.2004.00283.x
A little boy of four, the son of a friend of Rob's, wanted me to teach him Mandarin. He was a bit of a scholar.
ReplyDelete"How do you say 'Leave your sister alone?'"
"How do you say 'Don't throw your sister's toys over the balcony?'"
"How do you say 'Don't run from the path?'"
He proceeded to mimick my translations almost pitch-perfectly , where adults trying to learn "how are you?" and "i'm fine thank you" struggle with the simplest inflections.
Funny, that.