Talk:Thai language

Personal pronouns used when speaking of or to เพศที่สาม (Kathoey) people

I was sure this page would cover this topic and am surprised to find it does not. I'm out of my element and have no sources so anyone involved with this article: what and how are personal pronouns used with transgendered people, who are common, in Thailand? Alatari (talk) 07:17, 22 February 2014 (UTC)

In Thai generally the pronouns of second (you: polite khun or familiar thoe) and third (he/she: khao) persons are not gender specific. So there is no issue. The first person (I) pronoun most often is phom for males and (di)chan for females and a transgender can make the choice at will. But even more noticeable is the differentiation in the polite particle, that is attached frequently at the end of a sentence, which is khrap for a male speaker and kha for a female speaker. Again it is the transgender's choice which one to use at any one time. −Woodstone (talk) 07:59, 22 February 2014 (UTC)

So it is easy for the person speaking to the trans person to not offend by sticking with khun and khao. Is there a modern etiquette guide for Thai that includes trans in the discussion? I'm assuming you are a fluent Thai speaker/reader. If so then maybe it could be used for a source on a sentence covering this issue. Alatari (talk) 11:50, 26 February 2014 (UTC)

Thai speakers according Ethnologue

As it was stated above, Ethnologue has 20 million for Thai. However, it also has "Thai, Northeastern" with 15 million, "Thai, Northern" with 6 million and "Thai, Southern" with 4.5 million. Those can't have been included in "Thai" since they have 25.5 million combined. The exact figure for Thai is 20.2, add 25.5, we get 45.7 million, about 68 percent of population. Sounds reasonable? 85.217.15.79 (talk) 19:57, 14 March 2014 (UTC)

"Thai" here means Siamese, not whatever happens to be within the modern political boundaries of Thailand. Isan is Lao, not Siamese. We could throw in Lao, Shan, and Zhuang as well, but that's not a language. — kwami (talk) 22:19, 14 March 2014 (UTC)

Huh? I said nothing about those. 85.217.15.79 (talk) 17:37, 23 March 2014 (UTC)

Script needs a lot of improvement

I know virtually nothing about Thai. But the Script section is very poor. I suggest that the most important facts be presented first. Here they aren't presented at all! It uses an alphabet. It is written left to right, top to bottom. There are no spaces between words. There are 44 consonants, two of which are no longer used. There are traditionally 21 vowel sounds recognized. Vowels appear adjacent to a consonant base letter. Vowels may be composed of between 1 and 5 symbols. Vowels can go above or below the base (and the vowel may be [incorrectly?] referred to as a diacritic) or to the left of or right of the consonant; and frequently combinations of these places. If a vowel has parts before and after the initial consonant, and the syllable starts with a consonant cluster, the split will go around the whole cluster. Diphthongs are treated the same as vowels [ if I understand ??? ]. There are four tone markers. There are [how many? 6? (space, comma, period, quotation marks, parentheses, kho mut)] common punctuation marks and 10 symbols for the digits 0 - 9. The Transcription and Transliteration subsections should, imho, be combined with more details of the difference between ISO 11940 and 11940-2 discussed (in a clearer fashion). The other point, that the letter order doesn't necessarily correspond to the pronounced order perhaps should be mentioned.216.96.78.28 (talk) 18:57, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

Consonants

It would help to have guidance on at least two consonant sounds: Palatal tenuis plosive and palatal aspirated plosive.

Kortoso (talk) 01:17, 23 January 2016 (UTC)

We have a whole article dedicated to describing that sound (/t͡ɕ/). See Voiceless alveolo-palatal affricate. There should be a playable sound file there as well. The other (/t͡ɕʰ/) is just an aspirated version of the same sound.--William Thweatt ^TalkContribs 03:41, 23 January 2016 (UTC)

Please note, I'm a beginner at editing/talking on Wikipedia, and also very much an amateur linguist.

Palatal vs alveolo-palatal

On this page the initials [tɕ] and [tɕʰ] are listed along with [j] in the Initial Consonants Section as palatal. However on the Thai_alphabet page, initial consonants section, these two consonants are classed as alveolo-palatal (differentiating them from [j]).

Can anyone explain why this is? Is it an error? I don't understand why the page devoted to Thai language would make fewer distinctions than the page on the Thai alphabet.--Kitjohnson9 (talk) 07:03, 10 April 2017 (UTC)Kit Johnson

I took the liberty of adding a new header and adjusting the indenting accordingly.

Relatively very few languages contrast alveolo-palatal consonants and palatal consonants so, for the sake of convenience, alveolo-palatal, palatoalveolar and palatovelar consonants are commonly grouped under the simplest description (i.e. just palatal consonant). It is not an error, just linguistic convention. The place of articulation is encoded in the IPA symbol itself regardless of how specifically a table may be labeled. For example, [t͡ɕ] is the voiceless alveolo-palatal affricate, while [c͡ç] is the voiceless palatal affricate. In this case, the Thai alphabet page is just being overly specific.--William Thweatt ^TalkContribs 07:55, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

Dialects table

Thai Dialects

Dialect	Provinces
Krung Thep	Krung Thep, Nonthaburi, Samut Prakan, Chachoengsao, Chonburi
Ayutthaya	Ang Thong, Ayutthaya, Krung Thep, Chai Nat, Kamphaeng Phet, Lopburi, Nakhon Nayok, Nakhon Pathom, Nakhon Sawan, Nonthaburi, Pathum Thani, Phetchabun, Phichit, Saraburi, Samut Prakan, Samut Sakhon, Samut Songkhram, Uthai Thani, Chachoengsao, Chanthaburi, Prachinburi, Sa Kaeo, Trat, Kanchanaburi
Suphanburi	Sing Buri, Suphan Buri, Chonburi, Rayong
Sukhothai	Kamphaeng Phet, Phichit, Phitsanulok, Sukhothai, Kanchanaburi, Tak, Uttaradit
Thonburi	Thonburi
Western Thai	Phetchaburi, Prachuap Khiri Khan, Ratchaburi
Khorat	Khorat

i copy template from lao language's article and identify thai dialects by provinces --Joe Wetwitoo (talk) 19:13, 3 November 2016 (UTC)

Do you have reliable sources for all that, or did you just make it up?--William Thweatt ^TalkContribs 20:17, 3 November 2016 (UTC)

i translate from thai article--Joe Wetwitoo (talk) 23:26, 5 November 2016 (UTC)

What is the purpose of this article?

(Copied from Talk:Thai grammar, which now redirects here.)

It is smaller than the grammar subsection of the Thai language page, and that subsection links here as though to give more detail. Chris Young (talk) 07:13, 14 February 2011 (UTC)

This article is quite useless in its current form. It seems like an attempt to describe Thai grammar using terminology from Indo-European grammar, which is rather cumbersome, as the two are very different. Rather than stating how Thai grammar functions, it lists "oddities" and "quirks" of Indo-European grammar that Thai does not have, such as cases, perfective/imperfective, grammatical gender etc.

Overall the article doesn't provide any real information, beyond saying what Thai grammar doesn't have. Consider, for instance, the sentence: "There are no definite articles in Thai like "the" in English, however Thai has an indefinite article which is distinct from "one"." The focus is on what Thai doesn't have, but it doesn't explain what it does have. The indefinite article that is distinct from "one" (I presume "one" here refers to the number "one") isn't even mentioned, nor are we given any clues as to how it is used.

Similarly the sentence "In a noun phrase construction "and" is different from "with"." doesn't state how they are used differently.

Following the negative strain of the article, I would suggest that the article be deleted, and when the grammar section of the article on the Thai language becomes long enough, it can be moved here. V85 (talk) 13:48, 2 September 2011 (UTC)

I agree with the last comment. This article does not provide anything different from the "Thai language" page, and the wikipedia standard is to provide grammatical information on the page for a language. A separate page could be added for, e.g., Thai syntax or Thai morphology. 19:08, 18 March 2013 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Deeperanalysis (talk • contribs)

What do people currently think? If no-one is developing this page, I would say delete it and redirect it to the grammar section of the main Thai page. W. P. Uzer (talk) 22:07, 22 November 2019 (UTC)

Seeing no objections, and having checked that everything here (and much more) is also present in the main article, I'm going to change this page to a redirect. Of course, if anyone wants to develop it into a more extensive article that goes beyond what's in the main article, they're welcome to restore it. W. P. Uzer (talk) 10:26, 15 December 2019 (UTC)

About the letter "ฑ"

"ฑ" this alphabet/letter have 2 sounds. 1. “[tʰ]” when it appear in a live syllable, ex: คฑา “[kʰa˧.tʰa:˧]”. 2. “[d]” when it appear in a dead syllable, ex: บันฑิต “[ban˧.dit̚˨]”. Juidzi (talk) 13:20, 17 April 2020 (UTC)

Tonal Contradiction

Under "Checked syllables" in the phonology section, it says that short vowels from English loanwords take a falling tone in checked syllables, but neither syllable in this word [meːk̚˦˥.ʔap̚˥], which is labeled as a "falling" example, has a falling tone. So, there seems to be conflicting information regarding checked tones in this article, which ought to be cleaned up. AnyGuy (talk) 19:11, 21 May 2020 (UTC)

Looks like the wrong symbol was used. The second syllable is supposed to be falling and the phonemic column does seem to have a falling tone there, so I've change it. PointlessUsername (talk) 19:51, 21 May 2020 (UTC)

I'm a bit surprised that this (tones of loanwords from English) is covered at all. AFAIK there has never been any formal rule on this, and it's not really consistent. The coverage does seem rather like original research. --Paul_012 (talk) 07:49, 23 May 2020 (UTC)

Finals: larger set of consonants mapped onto smaller set of final consonants?

From the section on finals I gather that, basically, various consonants bearing some articulational similarity are mapped onto a one of the possible final consonants (and that goes for several of the final consonants): in the final consonants table there are (on average) quite a few more Thai letters per box than in the previous consonants table. This is, however, not stated (clearly enough for me, that is) in the text. Is my understanding correct? (I am not knowledgeable on Thai.) If my understanding can be confirmed, I could clarify the text a bit.Redav (talk) 14:57, 26 November 2021 (UTC)

I guess that's one way of seeing it, but I'm not sure "articulational similarity" and "mapped" is the best way to describe it. The sounds they produce in final position are just considered identical. --Paul_012 (talk) 12:34, 27 November 2021 (UTC)

Please forgive my wording: "to map to" is mathematics jargon; "to transform into" (which here includes the meaning "to remain") may be a better alternative. By articulational similarity I mean "with the same or a similar place of articulation". [At the moment of writing my remarks, I was not aware of other kinds of ways or manners of articulation, like voiced, unvoiced, ejective, stop, trill, click, unreleased stop, etc., (although I certainly knew about them) but those are not what I meant.] Without having checked all Thai letters - which I am not and may never be able to read - the final consonants table looks similar to the initial consonants table but "crushed", "compressed" or "collapsed" from seven into three rows, so that only three (nasal, unreleased plosive, approximant) out of seven (nasal, voiced / tenuis / aspirated plosive, fricative, approximant, trill) ways of articulation remain or appear. It looks as if the majority of the letters in each column of the initial table reappears in the same column of the final table (though I have managed to recognize that at least one letter from palatals column crosses over to the alveolars column). It therefore seems to me that most often a consonant in final position retains its place of articulation, even if its manner of pronunciation may change. And in getting reduced in number, several or many of them acquire identical pronunciations, just like you say. The "mapping" or "collapsing" is just more involved than the simple devoicing that occurs in e.g. Dutch. In Dutch, final devoicing maps voiceless "t" onto voiceless "t" and voiced "d" onto voiceless "t" as well, which means they get the same pronunciation when in a word-final consonant cluster (where cluster is understood as consisting of one consonant or several subsequent consonants). Another way to look at this process in Dutch, and maybe processes in Thai as well, is that in final position, certain consonants change certain (but not (necessarily) all) of their characteristics as compared to when they occur elsewhere, even though the underlying phonemic value remains (at least in Dutch). I wonder if my understanding with respect to Thai is correct.Redav (talk) 02:55, 28 November 2021 (UTC)

Your understanding seems largely accurate. I'm not sure if adding a similar explanation to the article would venture into OR territory. Scholarly sources probably exist that discuss this; I guess it would be best to reflect their wording, if available. --Paul_012 (talk) 08:10, 29 November 2021 (UTC)

Thai dialects

The first pose below was copied from Talk:Krung Thep dialect (Special:Permalink/1100145615). --Paul_012 (talk) 12:22, 24 July 2022 (UTC)

@Paul 012 and Potapt: Besides deleting (or fixing) this article, I think it would be a good opportunity to have a look at Thai language#Dialects, which is equally problematic, the list of dialects is completely unsourced. I have tried hard to find Thai dialect studies, but the only paper I found is this one, annex A: [1]. I wonder if you are aware of any good papers we could use to properly describe Thai dialects with reliable sources. If we can not, this page and the list of Thai dialects should be deleted. Glennznl (talk) 11:59, 24 July 2022 (UTC)

I've long noted the problems with the additions by Somsak Ung (and a few others), but haven't attempted to properly research the issue yet. There seems to be a lot of mix-up of terminology, whether the varieties discussed are dialects or accents. But on the accent part at least, I'm aware that there's plenty of discussion regarding the origins and influences of and between the Bangkok and upcountry (เหน่อ noe) accents. Sujit Wongthes has been a strong proponent in the popular press of the Bangkok accent being influenced by Teochew theory, but it is far from uncontroversial. There must be extensive exploration of the topic in the Thai literature, but I'm not familiar with it. The textbook ภาษาไทยถิ่น by Wilaisak Kingkham (ISBN 978-616-556-104-4) should provide basic coverage of the topic, but it seems to only be available in physical libraries. --Paul_012 (talk) 13:09, 24 July 2022 (UTC)

Also, it would be nice if Somsak Ung would join this discussion and take note of how to make contributions within Wikipedia's policies. --Paul_012 (talk) 13:36, 24 July 2022 (UTC)

I have never found reliable sources that discuss Thai dialects in the way this user does. Maybe they exist but I don't know. A couple of years ago I asked this user to add references to what seemed to be their original research on Thai Wikipedia (including this topic), but somehow the conversation went off-topic and they wouldn’t answer me where exactly they got the information. The section on dialects has been tagged with “More citations needed” for more than a year, and I think we have waited long enough already.

@Paul_012: From what I can grasp from their content, I think this goes beyond the “Bangkok accent being influenced by Teochew” theory. In this case, it seems to me that it is also postulated that Standard Thai (as taught in school, as supposed to be used on media and in formal speeches, etc.) is actually based on the so-called Ayutthayan varieties, while the so-called Krungthepian varieties are spoken mainly by Thai people of Chinese origin living in Bangkok and vicinities. --Potapt (talk) 21:39, 26 July 2022 (UTC)

Perhaps an exception should be made? There might not be any sources at all, at least in English. Rolando 1208 (talk) 04:34, 22 November 2022 (UTC)

@Rolando 1208: I don't think an exception should be made. Perhaps the dialect section was completely made up by some user. --Glennznl (talk) 07:48, 22 November 2022 (UTC)

[kʰ] -> [kʰ~x]?

i noticed a recent change in the phonology table, adding [~x] to [kʰ] as an allophone. is there any data or article to back this up? where did it come from? paper2222 (talk) 20:22, 23 April 2023 (UTC)

I can't currently dig into the history, but I'd suggest to go ahead and revert. --Paul_012 (talk) 07:09, 25 April 2023 (UTC)

the allophone was randomly added by a logged out user

but, if you say so paper2222 (talk) 16:44, 26 April 2023 (UTC)

Should the Kra-Dai "teeth" chart be removed?

Charts like these are intended to demonstrate and visualize the relatedness of languages, but this chart has numerous flaws that detract from its ability to do so:

1. The romanization is not internally consistent

PYWAN = *pjwan¹ (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Proto-Kam-Sui_reconstructions)

FJƏN = *fʰjən (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Proto-Hlai_reconstructions)

LPAN = *l-pənᴬ (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Kra/l-p%C9%99n%E1%B4%AC)

2. The romanization obscures relevant phonetic information, making some of the sound changes unbelievable when they would otherwise make phonetically-motivated sense

3. Not all shown words are cognates when the image implies they would all be descended from *lipan. Numerous words are descended from Proto-Tai *χeːwꟲ "fang" rather than Proto-Tai *wanᴬ "tooth"

4. I can only find contradictory evidence for the existence of a few listed words:

Jiamao CHAN =? saŋ¹ (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Jiamao_vocabulary_lists)

Ong Be WAN =? tɔn¹, tɐn¹ʼ, tən¹, tin¹ (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Proto-Be_reconstructions)

Tai Lue SEU =? xew³ (or Lu SIAO =? xew³ Maybe the same language listed twice?) (https://www.webonary.org/dailu?s=tooth&search=Search&key=en&semantic_domain=&search_options_set=1&match_whole_words=1&lang=en)

Sui HIW =? vjən1 (https://web.archive.org/web/20180612162325/https://abvd.shh.mpg.de/austronesian/language.php?id=736) 似た牌愛魔 (talk) 14:55, 21 September 2023 (UTC)

@似た牌愛魔: Thanks for looking into that. I would prefer the image to be fixed, but if that is not feasible, it should be deleted. --Glennznl (talk) 15:09, 21 September 2023 (UTC)

Image for "Thai Langauge"

I am changing the image for "ภาษาไทย" (Thai language) in infobox to use the recently created artwork File:Thai_Language_(in_Thai).svg instead.

The supporting reasons are (1) the original work is in Tahoma, and the font does not fully capture the appropriate structure of Thai alphabets (as it is designed with the aim to disambiguate texts displayed on low-res displays), (2) the original artwork is a bitmap file.

--Sirakorn (talk) 10:30, 12 December 2023 (UTC)

Released glottal stop?

"All plosive sounds, except the glottal stop, are unreleased" does this mean that the final glottal stop is released in Thai? I think that is notable information that should be elaborated on further. Stockhausenfan (talk) 11:09, 8 July 2024 (UTC)

That was recently added without explanation by an IP. Reverted. --Paul_012 (talk) 14:33, 8 July 2024 (UTC)

"Th-TH" listed at Redirects for discussion

The redirect Th-TH has been listed at redirects for discussion to determine whether its use and function meets the redirect guidelines. Readers of this page are welcome to comment on this redirect at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2024 October 27 § Th-TH until a consensus is reached. Cremastra (u — c) 01:36, 27 October 2024 (UTC)