So this blog
entry might indeed be the first one that really reflects the title of this
blog.
We knew when
we started that the language was going to present special challenges. While on
the one hand I’m very pleased to say we seem to be doing pretty well with
speaking, writing, and reading; we are encountering some idiosyncrasies that we
could not have foreseen.
Thai has 44
consonants and 32 vowels. The vowel sounds are pretty straightforward and
pretty consistent. The “ee” sound is always “ee”. The “oo” is always “oo”.
There are also compound vowels: “ai”, “aow”, “ooah”, and “eeah” among others.
The problem is not consistency. The problem is identifying which letter they
modify. Vowels are not letters so much as they are symbols. An “m” consonant
with an “ai” becomes “mai”, with “eeah” it becomes “meeah”. And they can be a
variety of places; some vowel symbols appear over the letter they modify, sometimes
behind, sometimes in front of, and sometimes surrounding the letter (front,
back, and above all at the same time). But their sound is consistent.
The
consonants, however, aren’t always so. 25 of those 44 consonants have a
different sound when they appear at the end of a word than they do when they
are at the beginning of a word. Fifteen of them – including various “s”, “t”,
“sh/ch”, and (admittedly) “d” – have the ending sound of “d”. There are eight
letters that have some initial form of “t”.
But the letter
that confounds me the most is ร. It’s letter name is pronounced (more
or less) “rraw” (like a hard rolled German “r”), and that is it’s sound in the
word. Except… when it’s not.
When ร
has ท (“t”) in front of it, the two – what you would think
would render “tr” – actually become an “s” sound. When ร
follows ศ, ส, or จ; it becomes silent and has no effect
on the word whatsoever. When two ร ร are clustered together between two
consonants, they become the vowel sound “aw”. If there is only a leading
consonant and the ร ร is at the end of the word, they
become “ahn”.
Any questions?
