Re: Interconversion of <R> and <L>

(I apologise if this is a duplicate - Richard.)

On 6 Jun, 20:29, "Jim Heckman" <rot13(reply-to)@none.invalid> wrote:

[I assume I'm missing some non-ASCII characters in the previous,
quoted paragraph. If you're going to use such characters, you
really shouldn't declare your Content-Type charset to be
"us-ascii".]

That's weird. I post from the Google groups web page, and that's
charset is UTF-8. I suspect the loss of underdotted 'l' is finger-
trouble.

Were *any* of the Indic retroflexes ever distinguished phonemically
from the dentals, in Thai?

I've not seen any evidence of a distinction being made in Thai, though
there may have been some people who imported the distinction - cf. the
recent discussion of nasal vowels in German.

Along the same lines, I've often wondered about the tone mark on
<sane1ha> /sa_L nee_L/ 'charm, potion'. The natural Khmer
development would be something like /sneeh/ in register 1, and I've
omitted the vowel development though ignorance. If the final /h/ had
simply been dropped when the word was borrowed into Thai, I would
expect a rising tone, as in <khmer> /kha_L meen_R/. However, if
it had been kept as a final obstruent, as an affectation of culture,
we would get the low tone, as indicated by the tone mark. (The
initial /s/ converts the /n/ to a high consonant, as in Khmer
consonant governance, a.k.a. register spreading, despite the
intervening vowel mark. That may just be an areal feature, as it is
also present in Mon and Cham.) It seems to be a rule that final ho
hip karan induces mai ek on the preceding long vowel if there is no
final, sounded consonant. The tone effects are the same with short
vowels, e.g. <grauaha> /khrO_H/ 'luck, omem, planet' <
Sanskrit _graha_. The nearest Tai precedent for final /h/ is the
final glottal stop in several dialects, including Siamese, though Thai
does have marginal final /s/ and even final /f/ under the influence of
English. Final /s/ is acknowledged by the dictionary of the Thai
Royal Institute.

Of course, to be pedantic, there is sometimes a distinction between
tho thahan(= dental Indic DA) and tho montho (= retroflex Indic
DDA). The latter is pronounced /d/ in some words, such as
'graduate', possibly in imitation of Khmer usage, where many retroflex
consonants have been re-used to make voicing and register distinctions
not naturally available.

While we're at it, when did the 'extra' letters -- that is, the
<kh>, <g>, <j> -> /s/, <t.> -> /t/ and <t> -> /t/ with an extra
'squiggle', and the 'extended' <p> -> /p/, <ph> -> /f/ and
<b> -> /f/ -- come into use? Have they been there since the
beginning, and if so what were their values?

As far as I can make out from the SEAsite page at
http://www.seasite.niu.edu/Thai/inscription/inscription1.htm , all the
extras except ho nokhuk have been there from the beginning.

The ones immediately following the consonants in varga positions 2 and
3 (this including fo fa and fo fan) represented fricatives. Those
after varga position 2 represented voiceless fricatives. I'm not sure
about the other set. Ultimately they go back to Proto-Tai voiced
fricatives, but I've not seen any evidence that when Thai was
committed to writing they were voiced rather than simply indicating a
breathy vowel. Poetry indicates that the consequent tone split
between high and low consonants was late (17th century?), but I would
imagine that there were long periods for which the allocation of
contrasts to just one of consonants, vowel register and tones is
essentially arbitrary. I've even seen word game evidence for
consonant plus vowel register being treated as a unitary phoneme in
Cham.

And what's the origin of the non-Indic <?> and <h> at the end of
the consonant letters? In particular, I've sometimes wondered why
a second <h> was needed.

I assume by <?> you mean o ang. That's the Indic independent vowel /
a/, re-interpreted as the glottal stop consonant, as in Khmer and
Burmese.

The second <h>, ho nokhuk, is a low consonant, whereas Indic <h> is
a high consonant, patterning with the original voiceless fricatives
and aspirates as far as tones are concerned. Thai words in ho nokhuk
fall into three groups - expressive / onomatopoeic words (like English
'Ha! Huh!'), doublets of words in <r> (e.g. /hak/ and /rak/ 'love')
and foreign loans. This letter does seem to be a later addition.

I don't know whether ho nokhuk is a deliberate modification of o ang
or a curly form of ro ruea. Note that Lao uses a modification of ro
ruea (lo lot in Lao, but wrongly called LO LING in Unicode) for the
low <h> - ho tam or ho hyan.

Richard.

.

Relevant Pages

  • Learn to Speak Thai in 1 Easy Lesson ...and then ten years of summer school
    ... consonant class each consonant belongs to. ... a particular consonant belongs to as it has an effect on the tone. ... Syllables in spoken Thai can only end ... A syllable that ends with a long vowel or a sonorant final consonant is ...
    (soc.culture.thai)
  • Re: A general question on learning languages
    ... I don't know about Thai specifically, ... Well, from my own experience of Thai, the complex vowel notation is not ... probably more because of the unfamiliarity of the entire tone thing than ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: Ancient writing systems
    ... latter uses a symbol to mark the position of each vowel. ... In Hindi, Punjabi and Thai, word-final consonant symbols without ... Most scripts of the Brahmi family indicate that a consonant is ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: Ancient writing systems
    ... 'diacritics' usually denote the consonant without any vowel. ... That last is also true of Hindi. ... a specific vowel, so it is not In Thai, there is the added ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Notation of Vowel Absence in Thai
    ... a consonant with no vowel or a consonant with one of ... (The vowel is graphically predictable if the ... Not really in the Thai writing system. ... mark does not have a vowel, not even in loans from English. ...
    (sci.lang)