Speaking the Thai language is a tricky affair for most native western speakers. There are several reasons why this is true. The first reason is that Thai is a language that differentiates between the genders of the speakers. Many western languages employ the use of gender, but the gender in these languages invariably points to the gender of the word in question, each noun having an assigned gender. The words in Thai are used by the speaker to denote the gender of the speaker, and it is actually easier to consider Thai language to be actually two languages in one; one language for male, and the other for female.
This is no doubt a considerable portion of the confusion, and with the questionable nature of the genders of many speakers these days, especially in Thailand, it is no small wonder that this situation would engender many curious confusions, pardon the pun.
A second, and perhaps even more powerful agent of confusion inherent in the Thai language is the tonal quality of the words themselves. Thai uses 5 specific tonal variants; those being low tone, middle tone, high tone, downward sweeping tone, and upward sweeping tone. It is my opinion that much of the confusion arises from the notion that western languages lack these qualities. They don't.
The western languages uses each of these tonalities in context, however, the unit of application of these qualities is the sentence, whereas in Thai, the tonalities are applied to the individual word.
We know, in the west, that a question ends with an upward swinging tone, and an assertion ends with a downward swinging tone. The low, middle and high tones are used, but in a much less formalized way. And in Thai, all of this attention is paid to the individual word, and not to the sentence at all. Hence, the tonality provides a duality of confusion, not only for the tonality of each specific word which, because of the fact that many identical words have different meanings based upon the tone used, but also for the lack of tonality with regard to the sentence construct. For example, questions in Thai do not end in an upswing unless the final word in the question ends in an upswing.
There are myriads of other considerations such as "how high is high" for the high tone, etc. While these are all relative, and context specific, the only real way to master this dilemma is to mimic a native speaker.
One invaluable learning aid, therefore, is the concept that each word is it's own piece of music. It is like any song we sing. The melody is the same, no matter what key you choose to sing the song, and if you sing the song correctly, the listener can identify it, and understand what you are saying.
Steven Cook |
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