Those little niggling words: part one – ‘na’

One thing that often really flummoxes students of Thai, particularly if they are not learning by immersion, are the little words that are frequently interjected into Thai conversation. I have already looked at kha and krap as words that make speech seem more polite (and indeed, are essential in some situations if one is not to sound rude), but these are far from being the only words of this nature.

One of the most common of these little words is na, and like kha and krap it does not have a direct translation. It is often, although not always, placed before kha or krap in speech, and is not used in formal written Thai.

Probably the best way to describe na is as a softening word; that is, it makes what one says sound less harsh and more mellifluous. For instance, chok dee na kha (good luck) not only trips off the tongue more easily than it would without the na, but also carries with it a slight entreaty, as if one were saying ‘I do hope you have good luck’ rather than simply ‘good luck’. Equally, nang thee nee na kha (sit down here) sounds less harsh when the na is added, as if one is saying ‘do sit down here please’. Remember, Thai has no commonly used direct equivalent of ‘please’ (the word garuna does mean ‘please’, but is not generally used in conversation, of which more in another post) so words like na are used for similar effect.

Although na is a gender neutral word, unlike kha and krap, it does tend to be used slightly more often by women, perhaps because the ‘softening’ it gives a phrase is seen as somewhat feminine. That is not to say, however, that men do not use it. Listen next time you hear Thai people talking, and see how often it comes up.

Goodbye in Thai

If a simple ‘hello’ in Thai is not always straightforward, saying ‘goodbye’ is even less so. While it is true that sawatdee kha/ krap may be used as a means of bidding farewell in addition to a greeting, it is quite a formal way in which to end a conversation, and is not generally used among close friends.

Fortunately for foreigners, one of the simplest and most common ways of saying ‘goodbye’ in Thai is merely to say ‘bye bye’. The English words have been readily adopted into the Thai language, and Thai babies and toddler learn how to say ‘bye bye’ in exactly the way as their English-speaking counterparts. To make it more polite, of course, one should really add kha or krap to the end.

Another common way of saying farewell, if you are leaving someone staying behind, is to say la korn na kha/krap (remember that ‘korn’ here is pronounced more like ‘gorn’ – see my earlier post on Romanization), which means something like ‘I’m off now’ (literally ‘I’m saying farewell first’). To which the response by anyone remaining would be a simple kha or krap in acknowledgement.

You can also say – especially on the telephone – khae nee na kha/krap - which means something along the lines of ‘that’s all’.  Or if you’re leaving a setting to which you intend to return, you might say wan lang ja ma mai na kha/krap (I’ll come back another day) or phrueng nee ja ma mai (I’ll come back tomorrow). Equally you might say something like jer kan wan lang (we’ll meet again another day) or chok dee na kha/krap, which literally means ‘good luck’.

Note, however, that I have not added any tone markings to the above, and that if you really want to try them out, you will have to get a Thai speaker to teach them to you first.

Manipulating Thai tones

When you learn Thai, you’ll always be told that the tone of a word is vital for its meaning. While this is true, it is equally true that Thais often manipulate the tone of words to give added emphasis.

I’ll give the example of the word khao (rising tone), which means ‘white’. Thais greatly prize white skin (to the extent that you can even purchase skin-whitening deodorants to ensure that your armpits are as light as the skin elsewhere on your body), and will often comment on how white one’s skin is (the Thai for ‘white skin’ is phiw khao – both words spoken with a rising tone).

To say someone has really white skin, one could say phiw khao maak (very white skin) or phiw khao jing jing (truly white skin), but what people often say is phiw khao (falling tone) khao (rising tone). Note that in this instance, the initial khao spoken in a falling tone doesn’t mean anything in itself – it is merely a manipulation of the correct tone  of the word khao (rising tone).

Similarly, if something is really good you might say dee (falling tone) dee (flat tone), or (something one often hears said of Thai women) if someone is particularly feminine they might be described as phu ying (falling tone) phu ying (rising tone).

Note that in all cases, the word is repeated, and that the first instance of the word is said in a falling tone, the second in that word’s correct tone.

Such tone manipulations are probably not something to be attempted unless you feel very confident with your Thai, but they are something worth looking out for in conversation, and storing up to repeat in the future, as they lend more authenticity to Thai speech.

English loan words in Thai

There can be few mainstream languages today that do not contain borrowings from English, despite the often desperate attempts by governments to ensure that languages be kept ‘pure’. Some of these words relate directly to new technology – it is easier, for example, to use the word ‘computer’ than to create an entirely new word – while others may be more subtle by-products of globalization.

In countries such as Thailand, where the ability to speak English is seen as enhancing one’s social status, peppering one’s speech with foreign loan words can often be seen by the young as being trendy – a sign that they are listening to the latest imported pop music, watching the latest American films.

Technology, as mentioned above, is one area in which Thais regularly use English words. However, it should be noted that the Thai words for television (thoratat) and telephone (thorasap), both taken from Sanskrit words meaning ‘far’ and ‘vision’ and ‘sound’ respectively, are commonly in use alongside their English counterparts. No Thai words have yet caught on for computing technology, however, and even where there is an acceptable Thai equivalent (as in the case of television and telephone, above, or with klong thai roop, meaning camera) the English words are more often those used, especially among young people.

Other words unrelated to technology that have become part of the Thai language include beer and guitar, and most young Thais will know, and probably use, words like ‘movie’.

However, another set of English words has been adopted into Thai but with the meanings altered. Most foreigners will at some stage come across the word faen, which derives from the English ‘fan’ (as in supporter), but in Thai has come to mean girlfriend/boyfriend/husband/wife. Indeed, use of the word faen avoids the difficulties inherent in the Thai equivalents for these words, which vary according to the social setting and can seem rude or inappropriate if used incorrectly.

Similarly, tom, from the English ‘tom boy’ has come to mean not any girl who acts in a masculine manner, but specifically the more masculine partner of a lesbian relationship (what in English we might call a butch lesbian). A dee, by contrast, from the English ‘lady’, is the feminine partner, or ‘lipstick lesbian’.

Hi-so, from the English ‘high society’, refers to Thailand’s monied classes (particularly those whose photographs constantly appear in glossy magazines), and this has been intentionally subverted by the popular rock band Loso, who make a feature of their common origins.

These are, of course, just a few examples of English loan words in Thai, and you will probably hear more if you are in Thailand. But even the scant examples shown above are testimony to the fact that loan words do not necessarily signal language death, but instead can lead to new linguistic creativity.

Thai and the problem of word counts

I’m sure many readers will have seen those pages of English text, presented as mind puzzles, in which the spaces between words have been deliberately omitted, and the reader has to make sense of what has been written. While possible, it can take some time to work out where one word begins and another ends.

Thai, however, is like that all the time. True, there might be spaces between sentences, and even (if you’re lucky) between phrases in a sentence, and Thais write in paragraphs just as Westerners do, but other than that, words are generally unspaced.

For someone from a written tradition of spaced words, this may seem impossible to comprehend. The Thai alphabet, they might think, looks completely alien to begin with, and having no spaces between words merely makes it even more incomprehensible.

While it undoubtedly takes some getting used to, and it helps if your vocabulary is large enough to know where one word ends and the next begins, it is not nearly as difficult as it might sound. Remember, in Thai you do not read in the strict linear way that you would in English – while it is written from left to right, vowel characters may be placed above, below, before, after, or even around the consonant character. As a result, it is often obvious, from the respective placing of the vowel and consonant characters, where a new word is beginning. Moreover, the lack of spacing can actually speed up the flow of the text, making it a much more fluid reading experience.

The only really difficulty arises from using computer software to get a word count of a Thai text, as unless you are using specialist software, the likelihood is that it will count one phrase as a single word. That is why when you’re translating Thai and asked to quote a word count, it is often better to give an estimated count based on the average number of words on the first few lines, or even to quote the word count in the target language.

Mai mai mai mai mai – negotiating Thai tones

Tones are so important in Thai, and seem to induce so much unwarranted panic among anyone attempting to speak Thai, that they seemed a topic too vital to ignore.

When a language is described as tonal, it simply means that one word can take on entirely different meanings, depending on the tone in which it is pronounced. In many languages, of course, we use inflection, so that, for instance ‘yeah right’ can either mean ‘yes, that’s right’ or ‘I don’t believe a word of what you’re saying’, depending on how the phrase is uttered. A tonal language, however, is different. Take the phrase mai mai mai mai mai, in the title above. Written in Roman characters, it looks like a meaningless string of five identical words. But now let’s add the tones: mai (high tone), mai (low tone), mai (falling tone) mai (falling tone, longer vowel), mai (rising tone).  The meaning of which is ‘new wood doesn’t burn, does it?’. Or take the word ma. Spoken in a flat tone this means ‘come’, but in a rising tone this means ‘dog’. You obviously have to watch what you say in Thai.

This is where so many foreigners give up. Because the meaning of a sound is entirely dependent on tone, they imagine that they won’t be understood if they say something in the wrong tone. In fact, much of our understanding of words derives from their context as much as the words themselves, so the chances are you will be understood, even if you get a word hilariously wrong. Thai pop music makes no concessions for tones (i.e. the pitch does not rise and fall where the pitch of the tones would), and yet is perfectly understandable to Thais.

Thai has a total of five tones: rising, falling, high, low and flat. Unfortunately it is very difficult to describe them accurately, so interested readers would be best asking a Thai person to demonstrate. Some Westerners claim to find it difficult to distinguish between the tones, but I suspect that this has as much to do with panic as with actual inability. Because of its tonality, Thai is a very musical language, and if you can hum a tune, you can hear and speak Thai tones. Even ‘tone deaf’ (to excuse the seeming pun) people must be able to learn, because there are surely tone deaf people in Thailand, and I’ve never come across a Thai person who cannot use tones correctly.

So how to learn? One of the best ways, boring though it may seem, is by repetition, repetition, and repetition. And then some more repetition, just for luck. That is the way that young children learn to speak, by listening and copying, and the more you do it, the more you’ll get the tones correct. Equally, the more you listen to Thai people speaking, the more you’ll gradually pick up the tones. It also helps if you learn to read Thai fairly early on in your studies, because words that look identical in English look very different when written in Thai, and that will help you remember the tones. Most importantly, however, don’t worry. Tones are used differently in different parts of Thailand (of which more in a later post), and tones can be bent to include inflection for particular emphasis. In other words, they are not absolutely set in stone. A foreigner who tries to speak the language, even if they get a few tones wrong, is in a far better position than a foreigner who doesn’t even try because the whole idea of tones scares them.

You, me and Thai – a look at personal pronouns

In an earlier post, I stated that even such an apparently simple phrase as ‘I love you’ could be very tricky to translate into Thai. In fact, the only uncomplicated word in this phrase is rak, meaning ‘love’, due to those little niggling things that grammarians refer to as personal pronouns.

For those not familiar with grammatical terms, personal pronouns are those little words that we used to refer to ourselves and other people, such as ‘me’, ‘you’, ‘I’, ‘we’, ‘she, ‘he’ and ‘they’. Now a Westerner might be forgiven for thinking that ‘you’ and ‘me’ are basic cross-lingual concepts, but the reality is far from the truth. Indeed, a French or German speaker, who alters the word for you (tu-vous, Du-Sie) depending on the relationship and the concomitant level of politeness required, might be better placed to grasp this than an English speaker, for whom (or at least for the majority of speakers), the pronouns ‘thou’ and ‘thee’ have long since gone out of fashion.

Foreigners are often told that the word for ‘I’ in Thai is dichan for a woman and phom if one is a man. However, these are quite formal terms, and are not often used between close friends. Indeed, dichan itself can sound quite stilted, so is often shortened simply to chan. To make matters more complicated, chan can also be used my men to mean ‘I’, and one frequently finds it cropping up in Thai pop songs in which a Thai man croons of his love for a woman. However, chan is only really used by males when talking to their lovers, and would sound completely out of place in other contexts.

Similarly, the word that foreigners are often told means ‘you’, khun, is very formal. While it is used in stock phrases such as korb khun (‘thank you’), it is otherwise reserved for formal settings.

So how do Thai people address one another? The simplest way is often just to avoid pronouns altogether. It is amazing how much of a conversation can be carried on in which the pronouns are simply deduced from the context. The greeting pai nai for instance, means ‘where are you going?’, but literally translated it is simply ‘go where?’. Thai can be a very economical language.

The second easiest way is to address people by their names, and to refer to oneself by your own name, so that if a boy named Keng wanted to tell a girl named Moo that he wanted go to the cinema with her, he might say ‘Keng wants to go to the cinema with Moo’. Such constructions may sound very strange to Western ears, but they are perfectly normal in Thai. Equally, you might address a friend as phuen, which simply means ‘friend’, or a teacher as khruu, meaning – yes – ‘teacher’.

Another common way to address people is to address them by a kinship title, respective to the relative age of the speakers. For instance, one might address someone slightly older than oneself as phi (older sibling), and that person in turn might address you as nong, or younger sibling. Other commonly used kinship terms include lung (uncle) and bpa (aunt). However, it is not always easy to guess someone’s age (although Thais, unlike Westerners, have few qualms about asking), and in some cases someone might address you by a senior kinship title to reflect social, as opposed to chronological, seniority. An example of this is an elderly fruit seller in a Bangkok market who insisted on addressing all his customers as phi, even when they were clearly decades younger than him.

When addressing children, or anyone significantly younger or less senior to oneself, one might call them nuu, which literally means ‘mouse’, and is a term of endearment by which most Thai children are referred. Thoe (pronounced a little like ‘ter’) is another affectionate word to mean ‘you’, and is particularly used by men speaking to their lovers or close female friends. Again, it is often found in song lyrics, in which ‘I love you’ is rendered as chan rak thoe.

Close friends, meanwhile, might use meung to mean ‘you’ and kuu to mean ‘I’, but these terms are considered very vulgar outside of closely defined contexts, and foreigners should probably treat them with the same caution they would red-hod chillies.

This discussion of Thai personal pronouns is by no means exhaustive – I have not even touched on words for ‘he’, ‘she’, ‘we’ and ‘they’ – and there are many more ways in which Thai people might address each other. The only really way to gain an understanding of the myriad of terms used is to go to Thailand, and to spend as much time as possible speaking with Thai people, until eventually they become second nature.

Origins of the Thai script

Before I talk any more about the Thai alphabet and writing system, let me take a step backwards to look at the origins of the Thai alphabet.

Although the advent of the Thai alphabet is a hotly contested topic, what is clear is that it has been in use for a relatively short period of time. The earliest script to be used in Thailand was adopted from that used by the powerful Mon kingdom, located in present day Burma (Myanmar). In around the 10th century, however, when parts of Thailand became inhabited by the Kom or Khmer, the script began to more closely resemble that of these new invaders. Both these scripts ultimately derived from Brahmanic scripts originating in India.

The earliest – and most debated – evidence of a distinctly ‘Thai’ script is an inscription supposedly written by King Ramkhamhaeng the Great, who ruled the northern kingdom of Sukhothai from 1277 to 1317. History has it that King Ramkhamhaeng was anxious to free the Thai alphabet from both Mon and Khmer influences, and that his famous inscription, etched onto a stone which is now placed in the National Museum in Bangkok, was a record of both his political and linguistic achievements.

The inscription, which has been dated to 1292, speaks of a land of prosperity: “In the time of King Ramkhamhang this land of Sukhothai is thriving. There is fish in the water and rice in the fields”, a land of justice and of the observance of the Buddha’s teachings.

However, the stone was apparently unknown until 1833, when it was supposedly discovered by King Mongkut, who at the time was a monk in a Bangkok temple. It is not hard to recognise the expediency of such a discovery for a Thai monarchy hemmed in from all sides by European colonialists anxious to get their hands on Thai soil. The inscription showed the Thai people to be a proud and cultured race with a long history of just and fair rule, rather than an ignorant people easily subjugated by foreign powers.

Scholars have also pointed to the apparent European influences of the writing system used in the inscription, and some have postulated that some or all of the inscription was in fact a 19th century fabrication. A number of archaeologists have argued that only the first 17 lines of the inscription are authentic, while others point out that although the stone has been correctly dated to the 13th century, there is no proof that the inscription itself was written then.

What is more certain is that the Thai script gradually developed over the centuries, and that by the late 17th century the Thai alphabet was very similar to that used until the present day.

Learning the Thai alphabet

‘What alphabet is it written in?’ is one of the frequent questions I am asked by people with little knowledge of Thai. Many Westerners, erroneously, assume that it must be written as a series of logograms, as with Chinese. Others merely take one look at written Thai, with its vast stretches of letters with few, if any, spaces between, and give up.

The fact is, however, that Thai is not in any way a difficult language to learn to read; in fact, I would venture that it is far more difficult for a Thai person to learn to read English, with its idiosyncracies of spelling, than it is for a Westerner to learn Thai. The fact that Thai looks very different from English should in no way be a barrier to learning.

Let’s take a look at the easy aspects of learning to read Thai:

1. It is written from left to right, just like Western languages.

2. It is largely phonetic (although there are exceptions), and thus when you see an unknown word you can generally work out how to pronounce it.

3. Although there are more characters than in the English alphabet (of which more below), some of them are obsolete or seldom used.

4. The writing system is highly rule-bound. Once you’ve grasped the rules, the rest is easy.

Having said that, there are, naturally, some difficult aspects:

1. There are no spaces between words, which means that until you’re reasonably familiar with the vocabulary, it can be difficult to know where one word begins and the other ends.

2. There are 44 consonant characters, 15 vowel symbols and four tone marks, which in turn can be combined to make a huge number of different sounds. This can initially be somewhat daunting (although nothing, of course, compared to having to learn 2,000 + characters in Chinese).

3. Vowels are not always written after a consonant; they may be placed before, after, above, below or wrapped around the consonant symbol. This may seem a little confusing at first.

4. It can take a little time to learn the rules – but again, think how long it takes to learn how to spell in English. Thai is easy by comparison.

5. To someone unfamiliar with the script, some of the letters look similar. Then again, many English letters look similar to one another, and my 18 month-old son knows a fair bit of the alphabet. Thai is certainly no harder.

In a later post, I will look at the origins of the Thai alphabet, and the controversies surrounding its first recognised appearance. Meanwhile, if any reader is even vaguely considering learning Thai, I would strongly urge them to invest in a course that includes lessons in reading and writing. Once you can read Thai, spoken Thai suddenly makes so much more sense.

The table below shows the consonants of the Thai alphabet, along with their Thai names (each Thai letter has a name, which comes in handy when distinguishing between two consonants with the same sound) and the meaning of the name in English.

ก	ก ไก่	ko kai (chicken)
ข	ข ไข่	kho khai (egg)
ฃ	ฃ ขวด	kho khuat (bottle) [obsolete]
ค	ค ควาย	kho khwai (water buffalo)
ฅ	ฅ คน	kho khon (person) [obsolete]
ฆ	ฆ ระฆัง	kho ra-khang (bell)
ง	ง งู	ngo ngu (snake)
จ	จ จาน	cho chan (plate)
ฉ	ฉ ฉิ่ง	cho ching (cymbals)
ช	ช ช้าง	cho chang (elephant)
ซ	ซ โซ่	so so (chain)
ฌ	ฌ เฌอ	cho choe (bush)
ญ	ญ หญิง	yo ying (woman)
ฎ	ฎ ชฎา	do cha-da (headdress)
ฏ	ฏ ปฏัก	to pa-tak (goad)
ฐ	ฐ ฐาน	tho san-than (base)
ฑ	ฑ มณโฑ	tho nangmon-tho (dancer)
ฒ	ฒ ผู้เฒ่า	tho phu-thao (elder)
ณ	ณ เณร	no nen (novice monk)
ด	ด เด็ก	do dek (child)
ต	ต เต่า	to tao (turtle)
ถ	ถ ถุง	tho thung (sack)
ท	ท ทหาร	tho thahan (soldier)
ธ	ธ ธง	tho thong (flag)
น	น หนู	no nu (mouse)
บ	บ ใบไม	bo baimai (leaf)
ป	ป ปลา	po plaa (fish)
ผ	ผ ผึ้ง	pho phueng (bee)
ฝ	ฝ ฝา	fo fa (lid)
พ	พ พาน	pho phan (tray)
ฟ	ฟ ฟัน	fo fan (teeth)
ภ	ภ สำเภา	pho sam-phao (sailboat)
ม	ม ม้า	mo ma (horse)
ย	ย ยักษ์	yo yak (giant)
ร	ร เรือ	ro ruea (boat)
ล	ล ลิง	lo ling (monkey)
ว	ว แหวน	wo waen (ring)
ศ	ศ ศาลา	so sala (pavilion)
ษ	ษ ฤๅษี	so rue-si (hermit)
ส	ส เสือ	so suea (tiger)
ห	ห หีบ	ho hip (chest)
ฬ	ฬ จุฬา	lo chu-la (kite)
อ	อ อ่าง	o ang (basin)
ฮ	ฮ นกฮูก	ho nok-huk (owl)

Southeast Asian languages – the Indian connection

I mentioned in an earlier post that the Romanization of many Thai words is dependent on their etymology, and in this post I would like to expand that theme to look at the etymology of words in Thai in relation to that of other Southeast Asian languages.

At first sight any mention of an Indian connection linking the languages of Southeast Asia might seem spurious, as not only are they most emphatically not Indo-European languages (i.e. languages whose basic structure and vocabulary derives from a postulated proto Indian-European language, which then diversified into most of the major languages of today’s Europe, India and Central and Southwest Asia), but they are not even related to each other.

Thai, for instance, is classed within the Tai-Kadai language family, while Khmer (Cambodian) is in the Mon-Khmer language group, Burmese is considered to be in a subset of the Sino-Tibetan language family, and Malay is regarded as an Austronesian language. As a result, the grammar and vocabularies of these languages show few similarities.

But to argue for no connection between them would be equally spurious. Take, for instance, the Thai word ‘nakorn’. Meaning ‘city’, ‘Nakorn’ is often found in the place names of Thai cities and towns, most famously ‘Krungthep Mahanakorn’ (the city known in the West as Bangkok – literally the ‘Great City of Angels’, although it’s full title is much longer). Then take the Malay word for state, ‘negara’. Someone unable to read Thai might argue that any link is in the imagination – surely the only similarity between the words lies in the shared first letter.

But not so. In Thai, ‘nakorn’ is spelled with just three letters – ‘nor’, ‘khor’, ‘ror’, or NKR. The consonants are here purely implied, and the final ‘r’ is pronounced ‘n’, as that is just the way ‘r’ is always pronounced in Thai at the end of a word. Now, however, let us put some vowels in. What about Nekara? Isn’t the similarity with ‘negara’ then obvious?

Or take the Burmese word ‘yadana’, meaning jewel. In Thai, an old word for jewel is ‘rattana’ (visitors will probably know the Rattanakosin area of Bangkok, the ‘island’ on which the Grand Palace is located). In the Arakan region of eastern Burma, ‘y’ is pronounced ‘r’, and it requires no great leap of the imagination to get from ‘yadana’ to ‘rattana’. The similarities between words in Thai and Khmer are even more difficult to avoid.

So where does this linkage come from? Mainly from the wave of Hinduization, and later Buddhism, that swept through Southeast Asia during the first millenium AD. This Indian influence not only extended to the religious realm but also to the political one, so that many of the rituals and protocols of Southeast Asian courts were ultimately derived from Indian Brahmanic practice.

Such changes in the religious and political life of the region had profound effects on the linguistic sphere too. Texts in both Sanskrit and Pali (the language of the Buddhist canon) found their way into much of Southeast Asia, and indeed Pali texts are used in Buddhist temples to this day. As a result, language, especially courtly and religious language, became coloured with Indian-derived words.

That is why, despite the fact that Thai and Khmer are in some ways very different languages, it is not difficult for the student of Thai to learn Khmer. It is also why, for keen linguists, it can be a very rewarding task looking at the etymology of Southeast Asian words, and imagining the way in which India once won the hearts and minds of that part of the globe.