Danny's Weblog
Thai tones and tone sandhi
In a couple of previous postings I talked about the "downdrift" which I had observed in Thai:
- [http://www.panix.com/~dannyw/weblog/Asia/Thailand/Thai-language/thai-downdrift01.html]
- [http://www.panix.com/~dannyw/weblog/Asia/Thailand/Thai-language/thai-downdrift02.html]
I also briefly referred to "the exact rules for downdrift, as a function of the sequence (or environment) of tones". Indeed, while trying to establish any rules for the pitch variations I observed, I assumed that it was the environment of each syllable which determined the tone (as opposed to the Thais trying to frustrate the foreigner).
Yesterday I ran into the standard term for this effect: "tone sandhi". The word "sandhi" describes the general phenomenon that speech sounds are affected by their environment – for instance, that "input" is often actually pronounced "imput". Tone sandhi of course means this phenomenon occurring in tones. It is well understood in Chinese and beginners are taught the rules as soon as they are taught about tones, but although the phenomenon is definitely present in Thai it is not well defined. Wikipedia: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_sandhi]
So far I have found no comprehensive description of the effect in Thai, even an unsatisfactory one. Again, it seems that the Thais themselves are not aware of it (eg NECTEC), except I suppose for their specialists at Chula.
2009 Jul 23 [ Thu ]More on Thai downdrift -- measured pitch in "Thai for Lovers" phrases
A few days ago I described the phenomenon of downdrift and its relevance to Thai: [http://www.panix.com/~dannyw/weblog/Asia/Thailand/Thai-language/thai-downdrift01.html]
I have since run an analysis program on a few samples from the tape recording I have of the "Thai for Lovers" book (which I recommend): [http://www.amazon.com/Thai-Lovers-Nit-Ajee-Jack/product-reviews/1887521666/ref=cm_cr_dp_all_helpful?ie=UTF8&coliid=&showViewpoints=1&colid=&sortBy=bySubmissionDateDescending]
You can click on the diagrams to hear the audio. I don't have permission to distribute these recordings and I hope this is covered by fair use. If Nit and Jack want me to stop they can email me.
I apologize for the poor phonetic transcription. I did not figure out how to use phonetic characters initially. The green curve is amplitude, on a log scale. The blue/cyan curve is pitch, on a linear scale (er – I think).
The following phrase means "you are very handsome" (spoken by a female). Note that the first syllable is middle tone, then low tone, then falling tone – that is, using the normal terminology. However, the actual pitch curve (shown in blue) shows that the pitch of the first syllable is steadily falling, with no clear break as it falls steadily into the next syllable.
I naturally thought I had this tone thing all figured out. Then I looked at a couple more examples. Here's one for the phrase "you are very beautiful" (spoken by a male) (oops, I forgot to put the English in the diagram):
The first tone is middle, then rising, then falling (in normal terminology).
Note that the "s" sound at the start of "suay" doesn't have much amplitude and the pitch is rather poorly defined, so the tone really starts at the vowel where the amplitude is back up. In both these diagrams, the software doesn't try to define a pitch where the amplitude is below some threshold.
This sample doesn't really show downdrift, though, does it. However, it does seem to show that the low level of the low tone affects the pitch of the subsequent tone – perhaps some sort of "tone terracing": [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_terracing]
But what's really striking is the pitch of the rising tone in "suay". Not much sign of rising pitch there, eh!
It's quite a lot of effort to analyze even brief phrases like this, especially when you don't know what you're looking for. Several times I thought I had a rule, only to find it broken. It may well be that female speakers, for instance, have downdrift, but non-katoey males do not.
It occurs to me that even the NECTEC guys, who are Thai themselves, may not have any insight on this, and may have simply averaged the tone samples, obscuring tone-terracing or similar effects.
Right now my picture is this:
1. My earlier insight that tones are largely *generated* by jaw movements is somewhat tangential to this, except in that it puts physical limits on pitch variation. That is, you can't utter a vowel and instantaneously change pitch during that vowel: you're limited by how fast you can move the jaw, so the pitch has to move fairly smoothly.
2. Clearly, Thai is not a "register tone" language, where tones are always at a particular pitch, even taking into account that different speakers have a different pitch range. Instead, tones are determined by the *variation* in pitch during the tone, although that variation itself seems to be strongly affected by the environment of the syllable.
3. In "Prosodic Features and Prosodic Structure" by Anthony Fox, as I quoted before, he says:
In checked syllables with short vowels, only high and low tones occur; in checked syllables with long vowels, only falling and low tones occur
It occurs to me that if I can put together a theory on how Thai tones are generated and perceived, it should be able to predict the above, if only by predicting that other tones cannot be reliably perceived.
If I can convince myself I have a theory, I'll post it. But I'm pretty doubtful. I wish I had access to a Thai with some phonological training that I could collaborate with.
2009 Jul 14 [ Tue ]Thai tones and downdrift in "Thai for Lovers"
I have never felt satisfied with the descriptions I have read of tonal languages. For instance, I didn't understand how tonal languages conflict with following a melody when songs have to be sung in a tonal language. I would have commented much more forcefully if I was really sure I could utter and detect Thai tones with reasonable accuracy.
A couple of days ago I was listening to a recording of "Thai for Lovers – A complete guide to the romantic culture of Thailand" by Nit and Jack Ajee. This is a very well-made book, as I have commented before. I would recommend it to anybody who is interested in learning Thai conversation, not just to people who plan a physical relationship with a Thai person. I was using the recording to once again try to learn to distinguish Thai tones.
I was initially depressed by my inability to detect the "right" tones, but then I started to think there was something wrong with the tones themselves. In particular, I started to think that I was hearing "downdrift": [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downdrift]
Downdrift is the tendency of the tones in a sentence of a tonal language to drift downwards. I had a vague memory of downdrift but only in connection with African tonal languages, not Thai. But when I started to look around, it turns out that there are sources which confirm that Thai is subject to downdrift.
For instance, here is a link to a NECTEC article (dated 2000) on text-to-speech synthesis for Thai text: [http://www.cp.eng.chula.ac.th/~boonserm/publication/ijufks_tk2001b.pdf]
Btw, don't worry: all the articles I give links to here are in English, although the translations may be rather imperfect.
Downdrift is referred to several times as a feature which needs to be built into a speech synthesizer to improve the quality of the speech output. On page 5, there is a figure which shows a good example of downdrift:
Here's another link. This one is a NECTEC article on doing speech recognition in Thai [http://www.cp.eng.chula.ac.th/~boonserm/publication/ijufks_tk2001b.pdf]
Now this has an extremely interesting chart which contrasts the pitch as a function of time for each of the five tones:
However, it's followed by an even more interesting graph which shows how the pitch varies between the same words uttered as a complete natural sentence, and the same words uttered in isolation:
While searching for "thai downdrift" I also found this book "Prosodic features and prosodic structure" by Anthony Fox (accessible via Google Books) which confirms that Thai downdrift is not a crazy invention of those wacky lads at NECTEC. The following observation [2009-08-13: from that book] has nothing to do with downdrift but I found it quite interesting, and it might be easier to remember this than try to figure out the required tone from the spelling:
All of this stuff on how tones are actually produced is really contradicting what the books for foreigners say. That chart showing tone contours alone: none of those really matches the standard descriptions. Btw, that chart doesn't come from somebody's golden ear: those are based on actual, if averaged and smoothed, measurements of "F0", the fundamental frequency detectable for each syllable.
It also makes me think about the advice you would hear sometimes: "don't try too hard to get the individual tones right, just try to copy how the Thais say it". I think the real meaning of that was "we know our description is almost useless" – as I thought at the time. Also, I now feel quite a bit more sympathetic towards the Thai people who were unable to explain how to reproduce or recognize tones.
Anyway, I'm pleased that I correctly detected downdrift; it makes me think I may be able to make some more progress in correctly detecting tones. However, I cannot find a reference which specifies the rules for "assimilation", ie the exact rules for downdrift, as a function of the sequence (or environment) of tones, so I assume my progress will be limited.
I may get around to measuring the pitch on a couple of examples from the "Thai for Lovers" recording so that you can see what I mean.
This is a link to reviews of "Thai for Lovers" at Amazon; if you feel like buying it, make sure you get both the book and the CD – I couldn't be sure if the book was provided with the CD or not: [http://www.amazon.com/Thai-Lovers-Nit-Ajee-Jack/product-reviews/1887521666/ref=cm_cr_dp_all_helpful?ie=UTF8&coliid=&showViewpoints=1&colid=&sortBy=bySubmissionDateDescending]
I had not looked at these reviews before and was quite interested in the comments. I can see why people would say that the tapes are too fast and are not set up to provide repetitive drill for learning phrases. On the other hand, tapes which are designed for that format tend to need 50 or 60 hours of content. I actually got the book years ago when no CD was available and transferred the audio from the tape (or was it tapes? I think there were two C60s) to my hard disk. That allows me to fairly easily repeat snippets, compared with having to struggle with a tape deck.
I wish MP3 players were available with a user interface that was satisfactory for learning languages. Most of them don't even have fast forward and rewind buttons. Even most computer software is clumsy. You can use a general-purpose audio program like Audacity; currently I'm playing with Transcriber: [http://www.etca.fr/CTA/gip/Projets/Transcriber/]
Transcriber has quite a nice interface for adding text labels to segments of audio. I'd like to convert the transcription to subtitles or lyrics or something but haven't found an easy way yet. The Transcriber website leads to this survey of annotation tools and resources, which seems worth exploring: [http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/annotation/]
Some of the comments at Amazon on "Thai for Lovers" are allegedly from Thais who claim that the Thai is low-class. I wish my Thai were good enough to be sure of that. What I can say is that the Thai script appears to be correctly spelled, that the phonetic transcription is quite consistent, and that the translations appear to be idiomatic; for instance the translation for "I had a good time with you" was "yùu gàp kun sa-nùk mâak", ie "be-located with you fun much". In other words, at least one actual Thai must have okayed all this. (One of the comments at Amazon suggests that the "Nit" of this book is the same person as "Benjawan Boomsan Becker", who is credited with the "Thai-English English-Thai" dictionary from Paiboon Publishing, which I am very happy with.)
I invite any Thai who feels that the Thai in this book is low-class to produce a similar volume for dealing with middle-class Thais.
2009 Jun 05 [ Fri ]Some thoughts on Thai, on reading a shirt tag
I scanned a few product tags when I bought some stuff in Thailand, on general principles – this kind of ephemera is impossible to get when you're outside the country (although the need for it is probably less now that so much stuff is searchable on the internet).
This is a fragment of a tag that was attached to a shirt I bought, probably at Big C in Pattaya about 2 years ago.
I was looking for something else today and happened to notice this scan: there are a few interesting points for the foreign student of Thai.
1. The shirt is referred to as a "sɪ̂ə ʧə́ət" (I hope your browser understands those characters, which are not Thai but part of the "IPA Extensions" in Unicode). The literal meaning of those two words is "clothing shirt".
As far as I know, neither of those words is a quantifier. That seems a little strange to me. I would have expected something like "item-of-clothing one shirt".
2. Also the word for "shirt" obviously comes from the English. That's understandable, though: Thai culture surely came up with words for clothing items which are an inaccurate match to the current Western clothing types.
The Thais made the right choice here. My (Cambodian) girlfriend still tries to use "shirt" to express things like "jacket" and "blouse", because the Cambodian word "អាវ" covers all these possibilities. Presumably the Cambodians don't use the English word in Cambodian the way the Thais do.
3. The phrase "คละสีรุ่น" was hard to translate. I normally like the "Thai-English English-Thai" pocket dictionary by Benjawan Poomsan Becker a lot, but in the case of the first word "คละ" I was unable to find it in the Thai-script section; on a hunch I found it in the phonetic-Thai section. It means "several"; I had a hunch that it did, although for some reason I thought it was a Cambodian word that I remembered!
Much worse was the "สีรุ่น" bit – "sǐi rûn".
The first word of course means "color", but what about the second? I found it easily in Google, but I could not guess the meaning from context. My best guess is that it just helps the meaning of "color": the first word is always used to identify *individual* colors by forming combinations like "color red". Still, I don't know how the Thais got there from the basic meaning I found in the dictionary, which is "time" or "period".
4. The bottom line means "fabric cotton". At least I *think* it does: that second word is pronounced "cotton". I couldn't find it in the dictionary.
I believe it has something to do with something I've remarked on before: the word that you find for cotton in the dictionary: "ฝ้าย" (fɑ̂ɑi) can really be used for any cotton-like fabric, certainly including blends like polycotton.
I think that the Thais try to use the English word to distinguish actual cotton, but it seems to be too late: whether you use the Thai word in Thai, the English word in Thai, or the English word in English to ask about a shirt, the Thai person will always answer "yes" (or "yet" in IPA).
5. I just thought of something else: the manufacturer's name and the product code are in Latin characters only. Of course this is because such products are international and their designations need to be unique and explicit in every country.
Still, it's worth considering what that has to mean for the whole chain of suppliers and retailers in Thailand. Every checkout girl and stock boy needs to be able to read these codes routinely at a glance (although I suppose in many cases the barcode scanner helps). Imagine trying to teach Thai script to such people in the West.
2009 Apr 13 [ Mon ]Using Google for Thai and Khmer words
In a photo of one of the demonstrations against the current Thai government, I happened to notice a small sign which I could just about read (as opposed to the large signs where I have no idea what half the characters even are). It seemed to just say "Trat", like the town/province in southern Thailand. [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/telegraph/multimedia/archive/01382/protests_1382426c.jpg]
The London Telegraph captions the pic "Red Shirt anti government demonstrators face off the army lines outside the Pattaya Exhibition and Convention Hall Photo: EPA"
It didn't seem to make any sense that someone was holding up a sign with just the name of a town, so I vaguely wondered if some hapless taxi driver was trying to meet a client in that mob! Idly I tried to find it in Google, and couldn't. I figured I must be misreading the last letter, so I tried various possibilities, but still nothing seemed quite right. I gave up.
Later, it occurred to me to try to find Trat itself, so I found it. It looked just like my first guess at what was on the sign. I plugged it into Google, and indeed Google again could not find it. Actually, Google had found it, but for some reason only two out of the first ten hits actually found Trat. The rest found "rat" (pour, spill, top).
I think this sort of behavior is liable to be very common when we ask Google to search for words in Thai text, because both the webpages *and the text we're looking for* don't have whitespace at word boundaries. ...Hmm, at least I don't *think* it does. I wonder if Thai internet users are actually inserting some sort of nonprinting space at word boundaries in search terms? Anyway, I was looking for a *single* word.
If you want to try it, here it is in Unicode: ฅราด
...Wow, my editor points out it needs 12 Unicode bytes, to express just four Thai characters.
Cambodian (Khmer) suffers the same problem. Here is a simple word in Khmer which you can search for: តង
Google returns a bunch of hits which mostly refer to sentences which contain those two characters at the end of one word and the beginning of the next. Google also has an actual flub on one of the hits: a PDF file – whose sample text for some reason is displayed with all the jerng characters displayed on the normal instead of lower level – shows those two wanted characters followed by a bantaq diacritic, which by Khmer/Unicode spelling rules *must* belong to the preceding character... Hmm. I suppose that's fair enough. They're ignoring diacritics for the search, which matches their behavior for French, German etc.
2007 Jul 11 [ Wed ]Visit to Pattaya
I hadn't been back in years. The English-language newspapers are full of gloom and doom, but it looks much the same to me. This is supposedly the low season, but it seems close to the high seasons I remember.
I have given up trying to pay the 5B Thai price for songtaews and now pay the 10B price, which was the price for farangs when I got here back in 2001. I still don't dare to ask the driver "bpai pattaya tai mai khap?" because he will drive straight there and then demand a full single-user fare, unless you know enough Thai to really argue, which I don't.
I found that a Thai dictionary I had left behind had the quantifiers listed for almost every noun. That's a really good feature which is not in any of my other references. Drat, I can't remember the title and I can't find it on the internet. Maybe later. Amazingly, the hotel I use had kept that dictionary, along with the rest of my luggage, safe for about 3 years!
My impression is that the girlie bars are now *more* daring than they were when I left. But since my gf might be reading this I'll say no more.
They do seem to be cracking down on copied software. But the first person I asked told me where to get it. A software CD is now 150 baht, and a software DVD is now 400 baht. I can't remember what they used to be in Thailand, but I do know those prices are well over twice the prices in Cambodia, and the selection in Pattaya is worse. For some reason they don't seem to worry about copied movies.
Happily there is now an "IT City" in South Pattaya, so I didn't need to take the bus to Sriracha as I have before. All kinds of hardware, including an entire floor with probably a hundred different (but dizzyingly impossible to distinguish) phone stores. I was very tempted by a DVD/CD/MP3 player for 999 B, but in the end contented myself with a mini tripod for 150 B.
Clothes are much more available and better value than Cambodia. Still, the underwear I bought labelled L is a European S. Remember that shoe sizes – even metric sizes – are not standardized (anywhere in the world). (For instance a British size 9 is not the same as a US size 9 – not that you can really rely on two US size 9's really having the same fit, even from the same manufacturer.
I bought a quite nice office shirt for 199 B, and it was labelled wwith both neck and sleeve measurements. I can't remember *ever* seeing that in Thailand before.
I didn't see *any* famous-name watch knockoffs here. They're all over the place in Cambodia. All I see here is junky-looking "fashion" watches for tasteless girls.
2006 Sep 20 [ Wed ]Thaksin has been deposed
French TV tells me that the Thai army has taken control and declared amrtial law while Thaksin was away in New York, so it seems he is no longer in charge.
I just find it hard to understand why people are rejoicing. Are you really happy that the military has the power to depose prime ministers in Thailand? How do you think Thaksin came to power? Who gave him power? Aren't they the same people that control the military?
At the very best we can expect to see Thaksin hanging upside down fronm piano wire. Almost all other outcomes are no fun at all.
2006 Mar 23 [ Thu ]The movement to get Thaksin out
Thaksin is the prime mininster of Thailand. There is currently a strong protest movement trying to get him to resign; he has called a snap election in response.
I don't exactly see why so many people have focused on the issue of getting him to resign. The visible problems, such as his financial empire being held on paper by obvious straw men, are built on his Thai Rak Thai party and the utterly pervasive culture of corruption in Thailand. Evidently, they would be completely untouched by the removal of a single individual.
Some letter writers have made interesting points about Thai politics: in particular, the parties are organized based on naked self-interest, rather than any sort of theory about how countries should be organized. Clearly this means there is nothing to stop the leader of such a party carrying out any policy whatever, including policies blatantly based on self-interest (for instance the law on foreign ownership of Thai corporations was changed a day before the recent sale of Shin Corp went through).
Also clearly this has echoes in the US and England. Clinton] was famous for his "triangulation" strategy, where he urged Democrats to change their policy to the middle ground in order to maximize votes. This left the Democrats with no discernible ideology, and Clinton with a free hand. The Blair situation is similar, except that the Labour party had started from a much more ideological position.
It also seems that the Thai public have never shown any distaste for what seems to me to be Thaksin's most heinous crimes: his murder of thousands of "drug suspects". I don't remember the details, but Thaksin made a lot of comments during that period which seemed pretty clear admissions of guilt, but there was absolutely no outrage over it: indeed it seems ot have been very popular. In addition people in the South have suspected the Thaksin administration of carrying out most of the terrorist attacks there, but this sentiment seems to have no echo outside the affected area.
It may be that the "influential figures" who put Thaksin in power have decided to update their figurehead. I feel very, very suspicious of all these generals and other busybodies who have popped up lately urging Thaksin to resign. I have a lot of sympathy for the argument that the Thaksin government is in power based on the Constitution and several elections, and Thaksin should remain in power until a constitutional process can be followed.
On the other hand, as I said, *every* political figure in Thailand is utterly corrupt. If Thai Rak Thai were to lose the election – actually not very likely – its replacement ministers would be just as bad as the TRT. There is not even very much chance that Thaksin and his buddies would be brought to trial then; after all those responsible for the massacre of demonstrators during previous bouts of "people power" were never brought to justice.
Calls for the king to propose an interim government are fatuous, and based on the usual Thai idolatry. It has been governments formed from the king's recommendation which got the Thais into this mess.
As I've said before, I stayed away from Asia for many years because I feared one-party states, secret police, torture, and phoney wars. Then they came to me.
2006 Feb 02 [ Thu ]Good Wikipedia articles on Thai
I ran into this while looking at Cambodian: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thai_language]
I am kicking myself for not checking Wikipedia before I created my Thai Tone Chart. Wikipedia has a very good section on Thai which comes close to my own efforts. Oh well, at least now I can check it.
Among the other links is a list of Thai particles: [http://www.geocities.com/siamsmile365/thaiparticles/thaiparticles.htm] which is the first place I've seen "nia" listed.
2006 Jan 15 [ Sun ]My new free PDF booklet "THAITONES" for reading Thai tones
Download here: [http://www.panix.com/~dannyw/pdfs/tonechart.pdf]
When I started learning to read Thai the tone system was introduced shortly after the character set. I gave it a shot, but I found myself completely overwhelmed with trying to remember all the different details necessary to deduce the correct tone for each syllable. I gave up.
However, I continued to practice reading Thai, and I always had in mind to get back to the tone issue. A couple of years ago my good buddy Jack gave me a copy of a table he had copied from another book. I was very interested as the table seemed so compact, but I actually still did not understand it.
Recently I tried again, and got a fuller explanation from Jack. This time I figured it out. It may have helped that I now find it much easier to *distinguish* Thai characters than when I started!
The basic idea that you need to understand to use my chart is this: while the tone marks do not *directly* imply the tone, they *usually* do (ie, except for low-class consonants). So you can call each mark by the *usual* resulting tone, ie:
maai eek LOW
maai thoo FALLING
maai trii HIGH
maai jattawaa RISING
(Incidentally on this webpage I am using casually romanized Thai, but on the PDF I used my phonetic font "PKD" .)
Then in my chart the boldface "High" means a resulting high tone, whereas an ordinary "High" (in the "Add tone mark?" column) means "you can add the maai trii / high tone mark to get a high tone".
This allows a tremendous simplification of the tone rules. Several books require four to eight pages of different rules. This table shows that there are really only ten separate rules you need to learn.
I've provided a list of consonants in each class on the main tone table itself for convenience. I've also provided full tables of consonants, including their names and features, and vowels.
I did not include the two obsolete consonants and those funny characters that you only ever see in the word "angkhit".
It was not easy to fit everything in. In particular, Thai script tends to commandeer wide vertical margins which waste a lot of space. I had to do a lot of nudging.
If you find any errors please let me know. I am particularly concerned about the vowels, especially those including "waw wairn" and "yaw yairk". My textbooks were vague, contradictory and plain wrong about vowels. It also worries me that the "waw wairn" is also used for consonant clusters. Does anybody know which rule takes precedence there?
Incidentally, I *still* don't think beginners should try to absorb the tone system immediately. But if – like me – you can already read some Thai but have never figured out the tone systems, I'm pretty confident you'll love THAITONES.
A few notes on the layout: I chose the largest size that I felt was convenient to fit in a shirt pocket. I believe you should carry this chart at all times for several weeks and actually use it on real Thai to convince yourself it works. The size is actually 85 x 125 mm per page, which fits neatly in a plastic protector which appears to be intended for holding copies of one's passport. This makes it slow to reach the inside pages, but normally only the main tone chart needs to be referred to, which is on the "back cover".
I have found that the plastic protector actually tends to adhere to the laser print over the course of a week or two, making it hard to remove the booklet without damaging the print (and leaving a partial image on the plastic). You may want to apply some sort of gloss spray to the booklet first.
When you print it out, *make sure that the printer is set for the actual paper size*. Allow Adobe Reader to auto-center it (which of course screws up if Adobe is misinformed about the actual paper size in the printer). I have checked it out on A4 paper but I believe it will still be usable on letter size, although crop marks may disappear. Make sure that Adobe prints it out at 100%.
Cut out the 4 pages with a 5mm margin on all sides as indicated by the crop marks. I use a roller cutter for nice clean straight cuts inside the sheet edges, but scissors will do. Then fold into four, with the consonant and vowel tables on the inside (which is why they look upsidedown on the PDF).
It is also possible to print the page twice, so that you wind up with two copies on a single sheet of paper. You need to experiment (and, if you're anything like me, waste several sheets of paper) trying to figure out how to feed the sheet the second time so that things wind up in the right place. Additionally, you will probably discover that the registration of your computer between passes is quite inconsistent. It really needs to be better than 2mm in all dimensions to avoid blatant misalignment. Anyway, I find that folding the paper adds stiffness to the booklet which I consider preferable.
2006 Jan 06 [ Fri ]Using my new PKD font for Thai
A few weeks ago I announced my new phonetics font PKD: [http://www.panix.com/~dannyw/weblog/Asia/Cambodia/Khmer-language/pkdannounce01.html]
It contains phonetic characters which allow you to easily represent the sounds of English, Cambodian and Thai. You access the non-ASCII characters simply by using the shift key, so the system just handles them as upper-case: you can easily send them through email etc without mangling them.
At the time I did not describe how to use the font with Thai. The previous announcement included a link to a description of how to access the consonants and vowels used for Cambodian, and these are sufficient for Thai, so in this posting the issue that I am addressing is some issues with the vowels, and of course the tones.
My principle was that I wanted to have one character for one sound, even though a single phoneme might have two sounds in different circumstances. Actually, phonetic systems are more complex than they might appear and this is a fundamental problem. It is very evident, for instance, in comparisons of British and American English, and you need to think about *both* forms of English when you put together a pronunciation guide intended to be useful for speakers of *either* language.
This principle has the effect of making me want to use a different form of the "a" vowel for the short and long sounds in Thai. This is *not* what other guides to Thai do. Indeed, I was not really aware of this issue until I was putting together this font and did some comparisons of the various texts. What they do is simply define the "aa" sound as being what we usually call in British English a "long" a sound, as in "car" or "Bach", whereas the "a" sound is not just a short version of this but a fundamentally different sound as in "cat" or "happy" (sometimes represented in English dictionaries as something like "ae", and which oddly enough the Thais themselves represent in turn with the same vowel as in the "pen" of "mai pen rai").
There is also an issue with the "o" sound. I like to reserve the "o" for the sound of "Roma" rather than "hot". (And it's essential to distinguish them in Khmer.)
With that out of the way, how are the tones represented?
I simply designed the font so that the letters L, M, H, R and F produce symbols for the low, medium, high, rising and falling tones respectively, and which are positioned over the *previous* character. This is easy to do in a font editor, and works particularly well because of course *all* my characters are lower-case. (I provided an explicit common-tone symbol, but of course using it is optional.)
For instance, the sentence "mai chai song naa, soong na khap!" ("not 'brothel', 'two'!") can be represented with tones as:
mAFi chAFi sOFG naMa, sOROG naH khaHp!
If you already have the font installed, you can see the result below; otherwise it will look the same as the "source code" above:
(Hmm; now that I look at this, it would seem I actually want to have a long "aa" sound here for the "naa". Oh well: at least with PKD we can argue about this.)
The only issue with this concept is alphabetization, ie sort order. After thinking about it for a while, I realized that I wasn't even sure what sort order I *wanted*. I took a look at Becker's excellent Thai/English dictionary, and could not even really make out what the effective sort order was. The Thais themselves think of them in the order low, falling, high, rising because the corresponding (in most cases) tone marks are named using the Sanskrit words for one, two, three, four; but they do not seem to think of the common tone as "tone zero".
I used to think that I wanted the order to be low, rising, common, falling, high, because that seemed like a logical progression, but I am now less confident that I know exactly where the tones really start and end.
Also, I think I would actually like to see the short and long vowels together, instead of being separated as they would usually be by English alphabetic order, because if I do not know a word already I find it hard to detect whether the duration is intended to be long or short.
Anyhow I concede that the sort order produced by using a simple sort (ie in MS Excel) on my font is pretty strange. On the other hand, because the "source code" for text in my font uses plain A-Za-z, it should be exceptionally easy to write a routine which produces a massaged version of each word that *does* sort the way you want. Um, I haven't actually done that yet (Excel Basic – blecch).
2005 Jul 17 [ Sun ]
Thailand PM Thaksin seizes absolute power
In a posting just a couple of days ago I speculated that Thaksin's real reason for fomenting an Islamic insurrection in southern Thailand was the drug trade, more than suspending civil liberties.
Well, he immediately (perhaps right before I posted!) suspended civil liberties. Thailand is now operating under a form of martial law. Previously, Thaksin had only seized absolute control of the state and local governments. He now has absolute power. "Standrecht!"
Still, my point remains. He could easily have generated an insurrection using the *existing* low-intensity conflict on the border with Burma. Instead he chose to build up a phantom menace in the South, despite the risks of involving international Islam. The fact that he made extra effort, and took unnecessary risks, to do so means he must have seen some advantage. That advantage is controlling the southern border just as he does the northern border.
2005 Jul 16 [ Sat ]The real reason Thailand PM thaksin is fomenting an Islamic insurrection
Last night I suddenly figured out the real reason. I had been assuming he was doing it in order to suspend civil liberties in Thailand, much as HMG used "IRA terrorism" to make people think it was still needed. That may indeed be part of the reason.
But now it seems so obvious: just as successive Thai administrations have brutalized and marginalized their minority populations on the *northern* border to keep them in a state of continuous conflict – and thus give plausible deniability for massive transfers of drugs and sex slaves, as well as creating warlike conditions in which reporters can either be scared off or disappeared – Thaksin wants the same thing now on his southern border; except this time the drugs will pour *into* the neighboring country instead of *out* of it.
No doubt his cronies in Malaysia will make billions too, just as the Burma regime and Thai police and military have in the north.
It all makes perfect sense, assuming Thaksin is utterly unscrupulous and despises everyone except Chinese Thais. QED.
2005 Jun 19 [ Sun ]Tones affect consonants in Thai, so...?
A couple of years ago I speculated that Thai is a "tone-priority" language: [http://www.panix.com/~dannyw/weblog/Asia/Language-misc/consonants02.html] by which I meant that tones are so important to meaning in Thai that they are pronounced canonically in all instances, necessitating that the *consonants* be adjusted to fit in.
It has recently occurred to me that this raises the possibility of an interesting experiment. One could record Thai, then digitally edit out *all* of the vowel. Conceivably Thais could reconstruct the vowel, tone or both, from the surrounding consonants alone! (You would need to use nonsense syllables to avoid providing other cues, of course... although I have found that if you ask a Thai to say a certain word with a different tone – thereby creating a nonsense syllable – he tends to lock up. My impression is that they *store* the correct pronunciation of actual words as a gestalt. Sometimes they can't even tell me what tone a (real) word is supposed to be!)
2005 May 05 [ Thu ]Letter to Bangkok Post gives insight into Thai racist attitudes
In the Bangkok Post "Postbag"section for 2005-05-02, a Thai writes a very non-racist letter: [http://www.bangkokpost.com/020505_News/02May2005_news18.php]
I am copying it below because I think it is important and links to BP articles frequently stop working. The Post titled the letter "We are not told the whole story".
Concerning the "Commentary" published on April 28 on the exploited Burmese workers in Thailand in the aftermath of the tsunami, recently I had the chance to look up information on the same subject. One of the facts I came across was that apparently no Thai media organ apart from the Bangkok Post has published anything on this issue. Most of the information I found was from foreign sources.
Is this any different from what the Japanese did with their history books? I mean, as a Thai, I absolutely had no idea what happened to our neighbours. The information given to me was about how the government provided aid to foreign tourists and locals.
When I read about what our local authorities and employers have done to the Burmese workers and the international NGOs who came to help them, such as arresting, deporting and beating them, it made me sad. It is also depressing to think that we have to be told about what is going on in our country by others outside of it.
I was taught to take responsibility for my actions and accept their consequences. I hope the respective figures in government and at the local level in this issue were taught the same and do not disregard this problem like others in the past, thinking that Thais are gullible and forgetful. Because we are not.
NAREEYA CHVAJARERNPUN
What is so interesting here is the information that what is being done to the Burmese is not being *promoted* in Thailand. If racist policies were being executed in order to pander to existing racism in Thai people, or indeed in order to foment it for some reason, one would expect many stories to appear in the press about the Tsunami having revealed Burmese illegal immigrants who had been taking jobs from Thai people and living like pigs. Instead, the information is apparently being suppressed.
That raises the question: if the racism is not being executed for political reasons, what in heck *is* the reason?
It may be that there is some sort of racism in the ruling circles of Thai politics/military which has never spread – or *been* spread – into the Thai population at large.
My own guess is that the Thai ruling classes want to make sure that the neighboring countries hate Thai people, presumably so that it is more difficult for Thai people to flee to those countries when persecuted, but that's sheer speculation.
2005 Apr 06 [ Wed ]Royal Thai romanization system -- Wikipedia entry
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Thai_General_System_of_Transcription]
2005 Apr 03 [ Sun ]Where to find the official Royal Thai romanization guide
While reading the thai newsgroup (nntp://soc.culture.thai) I found the following:
From: kongaead@my-deja.com (Bent Jensen)
Organization: http://groups.google.com
Date: 30 Mar 2005 18:51:48 -0800
Subject: Re: Royal Thai General Transcription System
"IanT" wrote ...
> I'm trying to get a copy of the "Royal Thai General Transcription System",
> I've searched the web without any luck. Does anyone have a copy or know of
> anyone who might have access to one.
You can have a set of copies of it made at the library of the Royal Thailand Institute located in Soi Asoke opposiote Soi Cowboy but a little further down the soi. I think the house number is 138. The library is upstairs.
I once did that. The young library lady looked like a question mark when I asked for the translitteration system of the Royal Thailand Institute. So I found it myself on the shelves in the Transactions of the Institute, year 1939. (A revision probably can be found in a more recent volume.)
It's occurred to me that since the Bangkok Post insists on *using* the Royal romanization they might have a page describing it.
2005 Mar 28 [ Mon ]Interesting free software for romanizing Thai
What this is supposed to do is take Thai text in Thai characters – either using the Win98-style special Thai character sets, or there is also a version for W2K/XP-style Unicode character sets – and produce a romanized (not translated!) version.
[http://www.arts.chula.ac.th/~ling/tts/download.html]
I heard about this on the Thailand newsgroup. Several posters have tried it and can't get it to work.
Even if it does work, it is mainly intended to create romanized text in the absurd royal romanization format, although there is some kind of option for representing eg vowel length more explicitly. Still, I would like to look at the docs to see how they handle eg detecting word boundaries.
About 5 MB download. When I tried I got about 1 kB/s, so I gave up; may try again later.
...Hmmm... since writing the above, it occurred to me to try this URL: [http://www.arts.chula.ac.th/~ling/tts/] It brings you to a form where you can try the software on the fly with test phrases.
Fortunately my internet-cafe machine had Thai keyboard option, and I think the Iris font is a standard Thai font. This is how I was able to type in Thai:
Start - Programs - Accessories - System tools - Accessibility - On-Screen Keyboard
Select Settings – Font - Iris UPC Bold 18 pt
Click on the web form to get focus, but the on-screen keyboard will continue to display what you can type. In particular, when you press the shift key, the keycaps all change over.
Left-click on the "EN" indicator showing the current keyboard setting is English, and left-click on "Thai" in the popup menu. (Your keyboard software may not be set to keep the indicator on your bottom toolbar, in which case you will need to go into Control Panel. Also, the keyboard switching is more complex in XP and I don't have an XP here to check the details.)
Type in something in Thai – I picked "mai pen arai", possibly slightly mis-spelled – and press Submit. Initially I left it set to Royal Thai romanization.
After a wait of about a minute (!) it responded with a reasonable guess: "mai pen a rai". Incidentally, the results page url is: [http://www.arts.chula.ac.th/ling/cgi/tts/tts.pl] ie the form seems to be calling perl: interesting.
(Hmmm... I suppose it's conceivable that it's set to respond "mai pen a rai" whenever it can't figure out the actual answer: that would certainly be a very Thai response...)
It occurred to me I had forgotten the acent mark on the "mai" and I fixed it, but that didn't change the output.
I just tried IPA and it seemd to produce something reasonable too, with what appears to be a circumflex denoting a falling tone. Cool!
2004 Nov 23 [ Tue ]The ironies of religious faith in Thailand
The Bangkok Post for 2004-11-23 had an article "Paper cranes 'meaningless'", about a Thai plan to have volunteers create millions of paper cranes and drop them from airplanes all over the South. Apparently the significance of offering paper cranes in the Buddhist faith is some sort of plea for solidarity. To me this sounds utterly cockamamie, but at least it does not involve invading a sovereign state and killing a hundred thousand civilians by best estimate, unlike some countries I could mention, so I can't complain.
The Moslems however, the supposed target of this largesse, *have* been complaining. According to the article, one said the following:
Islamic teachings have always been against subscribing to beliefs that did not answer to rationale [sic].
To restore peace in the South, Muslims would recite the Hayad prayer to Allah, he said
There's something very sad, but also pretty funny, there.
It reminds me that the Thais are often referred to as a very tolerant people. It seems to me that their tolerance involves tolerating things *which they really do not like at all*. In some ways that's a more significant and rational form of tolerance than that practiced in the West, where we're supposed to actually *respect* various Semitic mystery cults which require the mutilation of penises, sexual abstinence and loathing, etc. The BP article above was written by a Thai, and (perhaps very professionally) does not remark on the utterly, abysmally clueless lack of understanding and sympathy for each other's faiths shown by the Buddhists and Moslems involved.
Oh well. I suppose it shows that Thaksin's decision to play the terrorism card was correct.
2004 Aug 23 [ Mon ]Flying Bangkok -- Phnom Penh
This is some notes from my trip by air from Bangkok to Phom Penh a few weeks ago. I was actually staying in Pattaya so I needed a long taxi trip to the airport.
Taxi guy was only five mins late. No problems although he was a smoker and smelled of smoke a lot after he nipped out for five mins for a quick cig. Also, he drove jerkily, which was surprisingly tiring. And worst, he left me at Terminal 1 after I asked him "are you sure?" because I'd already seen signs for terminal 2, and indeed he was mistaken – or maybe he just wanted to pick up a fare who was standing at terminal 1.
The only good thing about him was that when he asked for something out of the glove compartment I correctly guessed "pa yen" was a scented towelette.
It was hard to find checkin 10 (but at least my flight was designated 10 on the monitors). Because of fences and "security" I had to go a very long way around – no signs.
I was issued an orange "Bangkok Air" sticker which I had to wear, which I hate. I assumed it was a security thing, but now I wonder. There were arrival card, customs card and visa app available at the checkin – never saw anything on the plane. I took the cards, left the visa app.
Paid 500 B at little window – no explanatory signs. This is a fee which everybody leaving the airport must pay. I suspect most people leaving Thailand for the first time are unaware of it. It must bring a lot of business to the money-changers.
They found my penknife at the X-ray machine before the gate, but just said put it in the bag.
My boarding pass said Flight 0504 board 1420, but at the gate it said flight 502 1430 – didn't specify boarding or departure time. I scratched my head & figured they had a lot of flights. After a few mins (at 1435) I went up to the checking counter to ask and they said "boarding now!". So I was the first to go out to the bus.
Bus pulled away 1448, at plane 1451, Boeing 717 Sukhothai/Bangkok Airlines. 1454 in seat 15D (wing, aisle). Cabin warm. As usual, the seatbelt buckle was on my kidneys, not my hip. (Have they changed the design now or what?)
The safety info in English was heavily accented: "oxygen" like "awshem". No instruction to turn off cellphones (while they hunt for cells).
Re cellphones: even when you aren't using them, they intermittently announce themselves to the local cell. On a plane, at altitude, they may well be too far from any cell, and anyway the plane is moving from one cell to the next in seconds. So every cellphone that's on is probably hunting for a cell at its maximum rate, at its maximum power level (under normal circumstances they automatically trim power to the minimum necessary, in order to improve battery life). But nobody seems to care... so maybe that whole thing is just nonsense anyway.
1512: announced tech problem. Plane turned back from the runway to the terminal (or wherever it started I guess, a busride from the terminal).
Flight card says Boeing 717-200.
1527 Captain announced problem solved – they checked something on internet?? (hard to understand his accent)
1538 Takeoff
"Smoking" in Khmer: gar piisaa barey
1542 Seatbelt sign off
Things to swap: money, cellphone SIMcard, maps, phrasebooks
I had a humidity meter on board – see previous posting. [http://www.panix.com/~dannyw/weblog/Asia/Miscellaneous/humid01.html]
On arrival realized I'd forgotten to fill out the cards.
Nobody took the customs form., just waved through.
1646 In taxi. There is a booth saying 7 USD to town. They gave me a piece of paper and said pay the driver. I don't know if you can get a cheaper deal by bypassing the booth. The drive was OK: for once he actually *did* know where my hotel is.
Also, it occurred to me that although the bags were "sealed" so that it was hard to take stuff out of the main compartments, it would not have been difficult for someone to stuff a bomb in the bags *after* the x-ray and sealing, because they didn't "seal" all the side compartments.
2004 Aug 11 [ Wed ]A little more info on tattoos in Thailand
I was chatting to a girl with tattoos the other day so I asked her why she had gotten them.
She's 19. Unusually, she comes from Chonburi, ie the state that Pattaya is in – usually they come from Isaan.
I didn't get a very good idea of what her motivations were, but she said she'd been having arguments with her parents and couldn't stand living with them any more, so she'd come to Pattaya. There she had hooked up with an English guy in his forties, himself with tattoos, and he had encouraged her to get many more. She said she actually had had one tattoo before meeting him – now I come to think of it, I'm not sure if she meant before leaving her home – which was a smallish, nonsexual image on her shoulderblade.
Now she has a large snake or something on one calf, and swearwords in other places.
I pressed her about how irrevocable tattoos are in Thailand, and about what sort of guy she was looking for, but she evaded my questions. I don't know what that means, but usually the girls are happy to cry on your shoulder where possible, so I'm guessing she's not very upset. She did say she's not looking for a Thai man.
She said she'd broken up with her English boyfriend because she'd had some sort of dispute with a Thai girl, who had told a friend she'd trolled for farangs while the boyfriend was away in England, and the friend passed it on to the boyfriend, who didn't believe she'd been waiting for him.
It certainly is very difficult to believe girls in Pattaya. Actually, I am frequently amazed that people will lightly tell you that they lie to third parties, without realizing that you will reasonably conclude that they will with as little compunction lie to anyone else including you.
2004 Aug 07 [ Sat ]Aids testing in Thailand: text of Nation article
On 2004-07-23 I made a posting referring to an article in the Nation newspaper (of Bangkok) about details of current Aids testing. As I expected, the link which worked then to reach the story no longer works. I had downloaded a copy and provide it here.
Original (now dead) link: [http://www.nationmultimedia.com/page.news.php3?clid=27&id=117750&usrsess=1]
What I said before:
"Instead of being about the usual political stuff, it had a wealth of information about the actual significance of the AIDS test results people get in Thailand. In short, you are *much* more likely to get a false positive. " [...than you are in the West]
All voices not heard at Aids conference
Published on Jul 23, 2004
The 15th International Aids Conference in Bangkok had the noble theme, "Access For All". According to the conference promoters: "We will ensure that all voices, all experiences and all concerns are represented."
Unfortunately the truth falls short of the hype. All voices were not represented, and access for was not granted.
Let's take the issue of HIV testing. In the US, most of Europe and Australia, a person is not considered HIV infected until a minimum of two criteria have been satisfied - testing positive first to a screening test, which is usually an ELISA test, and then to a confirmatory test, which is almost always the Western Blot.
In the US, in fact, if the ELISA is positive, it is usually repeated, then if positive again the Western Blot is run.
And if that's positive, the US Centres for Disease Control (CDC) recommends that the entire set of tests be run again, on a new blood sample, to reduce the chances that the tests could be reacting to one of the over 70 common conditions that are documented to cause false positives.
In Thailand, on the other hand, people are routinely pronounced HIV positive based on only two screening tests: two ELISAs or an ELISA and a GPA. The mores specific Western Blot is used only if the two screening tests disagree. This has many problems. The ELISA and similar tests were developed to be supersensitive, as a means of screening blood donations. This means they are more likely to be falsely reactive to almost any condition that causes antibody proliferation in the blood.
These conditions can be as common as the common cold, flu, herpes, pregnancy or past pregnancy, drug abuse, numerous viral and bacterial infections and many others. Moreover, according to Dr Praphan Phanuphak, an Aids specialist at Chulalongkorn University, in Thailand both tests are usually run on the same single blood sample, which means that if there is some condition causing a false positive, nobody is bothering to wait for the condition to clear and then get a second sample to be sure before declaring the unfortunate person positive.
The US CDC, in its role as Aids advisor to the Thai government is not raising its voice in objection to what is a dubious and very cavalier procedure for branding Thai people HIV positive
Why is there one HIV positivity standard for westerners, and a different, more lax one, for Thais? The answer generally given is that the Western Blot (WB) test is too expensive for poorer countries. But, according to Dr. Phanuphak, the WB costs only about US$30 (Bt1200) in Bangkok. So, while the AIDS establishment wants to ensure "access for all" to highly toxic AIDS drugs which, even in Thailand, cost hundreds to thousands of dollars a year, per person, they are not willing to provide access for all to a $30 test that could acquit Thai people of being HIV positive in the first place.
In a study conducted in Russia, 30,000 people tested positive on the ELISA. Of these, only 66 could be confirmed by a positive Western Blot. (Voevodin, A. 1992, HIV screening in Russia, Lancet) In a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1988, 60 to 70 per cent of twice-positive ELISAs were not confirmed by Western Blot (Burke, et al). In a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, 30 to 80per cent of twice positive ELISAs were not positive on the Western Blot. (Sloand et al, 1991).
Medical literature has many studies that have reached similar conclusions.
In Thailand where the Western Blot is used, It is generally only used as a "tiebreaker" if the two screening tests disagree. But even then, the test is evaluated differently in Thailand than it is in the West.
According to Dr Wiwat Rojanapithayakorn of UNAids, only two of the 10 bands (which are supposed to represent HIV proteins) on the Western Blot test must be reactive to the person's blood in Thailand in order to declare a person positive. In the US, generally three or more bands are needed. In France and Australia, usually four bands must react before a person is called positive. Whether called positive based on two screening tests, or on a Western Blot, a HIV positive Thai person could conceivably emigrate to the West and become HIV negative.
As a group of scientists from the University of Western Australia, Eleni Papadopulos-Eleopulos, Dr Valendar Turner, Dr David Causer and Dr John M Papadimitriou, concluded: "Many HIV positive Thais would not be HIV positive in the West."
No Aids expert has ever provided any logical justification for these differing HIV positivity standards.
Since the countries that pronounce people positive without a Western Blot (in Africa, even without any test at all) are generally developing countries, one suspects that HIV positivity is politically, not medically defined.
As testing positive ruins a person's life, one must ask, who decided that Western lives are more valuable than those of Thais or Africans? Under whose influence have these dubious testing procedures been implemented, and why has nobody in a position of responsibility challenged them?
Testing positive for HIV antibodies produces staggering psychological stress and turmoil in a person, which by itself is proven to suppress the immune system and make a person more likely to get sick.
It is well documented that many people commit suicide shortly after being declared HIV positive. Nobody should be branded with the stigma "positive"and have their lives crushed on relaxed criteria that would not be allowed in richer countries.
Marcel Girodia
Special to the nation
When I googled for "Marcel Girodia" today I found a few references, including one posting of the entire above text, but as it was inside a web forum I thought it would be a mistake to merely provide a link to that as it is probably transitory.
Btw the name "Marcel Girodia" rang a faint bell, but it turns out I was thinking of Maurice Girodias, who founded the Olympia Press in 1953.
2004 Aug 03 [ Tue ]Standards for romanizing Thai text
There was a letter in the Bangkok Post on 2004-07-29 which referred to the "Royal Institute's Romanization Guide for Thai Script (available at certain university bookstores)". The letter had a cute remark, something along the lines of "the King felt that tones were unnecessary because it was always possible to understand a word without them". I would have liked to quote the phrase directly but the Post's search system can no longer find such articles without making you sign up and pay money, so the heck with them.
Anyhow, today I did a Google search, and this link popped up:
[http://www.links.nectec.or.th/www-new/uploads/upload/040035/cocosda99.ps]
Note that this is a Postscript format file; you can use Google to look at the text version (as I did), although Google does not try to represent the Thai characters in any useful way.
Later: Google has another link to a Word-format version (you probably need Thai fonts, including something called SILSophialPA which is missing from the machine I am using, where Thai Word 97 is installed): [http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~ananlada/roman_1.doc]
Regrettably it does not contain an English version of the romanization guide, but it does contain a lot of discussion of difficulties in automatically producing any phonetic rendering of Thai script. I have to say I find it very irritating when teach-yourself guides burble about "don't worry if it seems difficult; just keep trying and soon it'll be easy!"; this text makes it clear just how tough it really is. In particular, it refers to the "segmentation" problem, ie determining where each syllable begins and ends: something which, as I recently said, I have only just begun to feel somewhat at ease with. (But there are still words like "haang sappasinkaa" which make my brows knot.)
The document does make a brief reference to the idea that the romanization should correspond to the *written* form in Thai rather than the *spoken* form. I imagine this is where forms like "sawasdee" come from. I have become somewhat more open to this argument now that I realize how important it is in English (for instance, if English had not standardized on certain spellings, we would have had as many forms of written English as there are dialects). Still, although I would have put up with almost any form of romanization if it had established itself as the standard, I think as a learner that principle would be very regrettable.
Likewise, I think it is just amazing that Nectec's proposed romanization scheme omits tone information: "the tones are omitted since the system will become too complicated". Tones are actually relatively *easy* to represent if your character set includes the common European accented vowels, as most do. It almost makes me wonder if Thais always have at the back of their minds that they need to preserve Thai as a secret code which keeps out farangs, and if they ever were to produce a form of romanization which was adequate to represent Thai it would drive out Thai script and weaken their secret code. But that would be paranoid.
Another issue that occurs to me when I read the Nectec document is that they clearly didn't get it edited by someone with native English. That suggests that practically none of their *software design* is done in partnership with English speakers. That is probably why they are still pushing their ridiculous machine translation schemes.
Amazon lists the romanization guide as 26 pages for 9.95 USD – phew!
2004 Aug 01 [ Sun ]New attractive lights on Pattaya Beach
For all I know these lights have been in place for months, but I just noticed them: in addition to the regular low lights dotted along the sidewalk, there are now tall lights (I guess around forty feet high) with several arc lights aimed at the beach itself.
As I walked by recently there were several families and other apparently harmless groups paddling in the waves as late as nine pm. That's a considerable contrast with conditions before the lights were in place, when that stretch (between Big C and the Hard Rock Hotel) was populated by tall, brash "women of the second variety" who tended to sit as far as possible from the lamplight (and by wobbly Germans sitting with a small bottle of Schnapps).
As well as simply illuminating the beach, the effect of the lighting is really pretty. I took several photos (using a tripod of course) but I want to dink around with them before I upload them. Somehow the lights make the water glow blue as if there were actually lighting *in* the water. It's not garish; at least looking out from the sidewalk, it took me a while to work out where the illumination was coming from. Maybe the lights are more of a problem if you're out in the water.
The meaning of a tattoo on a girl in Thailand
As I understand it, no respectable girl in Thailand gets a tattoo, even one not normally visible. So a girl who gets a tattoo is really *advertising* the fact that she's disreputable. What could possibly cause her to do such a thing?
Sometimes I wonder if the girls are *forced* to get a tattoo for some reason. Perhaps she complains to her boyfriend that she doesn't like doing sex for money, and says she's going back home: so he makes her get a tattoo so she can't live with her family again. Perhaps he marks her with his special "brand" so she can't switch to a different pimp.
When I've talked to the girls about it though, they don't say anything like that (and they're adept at spinning sob stories). They say something like "teehee, I was drinking with the girls and two of us got tattooed". But even if they're drunk, what could make them take such a step? It's not like sailors, who are almost expected to get tattooed while drunk. The tattoo is really going to limit their opportunities.
Also, my impression is that the tattoo doesn't really *help* them pick up farangs. I suppose there are some younger guys, especially those who themselves have tattoos, who may be attracted. (I see plenty of young guys with tattoos.) But I don't think it's a major plus for those guys – I hardly think they would be *put off* by a girl with *no* tattoos. But tattoos actively *put off* many men – *especially* the ones that the girl really wants to encounter – the ones who haven't been to Thailand before and think she's someone special. ("I on'y work bar one mont'!")
My guess is that the motivation is at least partially magical. I haven't run this idea past any Thais yet as it's hard to discuss in simple language, but certainly the Thais are prone to many magical/mystical beliefs and practices. I think it's very analogous to the practice in classic Western magic of taking a "true name". This name – chosen by the practitioner herself and normally kept secret – is what allows the Western practitioner to cast spells (since otherwise her ordinary name is merely what *other people* call her), but it also allows her to be a magical *target*. Until she takes a "true name", she can be magically attacked only directly (in her presence, basically). Her "true name" acts as a handle, or pointer, in programming terms, so spells of arbitrary complexity can be cast at any time and correctly reach their target.
Similarly, the tattoos simultaneously warn "I am not a fresh little bunny from Isaan who will fall for your foolish words!" and beg for mercy: "I am a low person unprotected by society, and I know my life is to be mistreated by callous men, and that good men will know my word is worthless".
In a way they are communicating that they are fully initiated in their new role: a "rite of passage".
Responses: 2
Name/Blog: Joe
URL: Sleepy703@yahoo.com
Title:
Comment/Excerpt: I frequent websites about body modification. I came across this website last year and the artist "Lil' Joe" explained that most [sober] Thai customers desire tattoos with magical/supernatural significance to enhance their souls. http://joetattoo.cjb.net/ It's been a while since I've been to his personal site, apparently he's moving servers because many pages aren't currently up. I do recommend you check back to see his perspective on the tattoo industry in Thailand. Enjoy.
Name/Blog: The Boss
URL:
Title: Practical significance of tattoos
Comment/Excerpt: I imagine you're right that the particular *design&* of a tattoo is chosen based on mystical considerations (as opposed to affiliative, the norm in Western culture). I was addressing a different point: why have a tattoo *at all* -- how can the mystical aspect possibly be *strong enough* to trump the practical ones? What makes them *need* a tattoo when they did not choose to have one before? []
More on Thai shoe sizes
A couple of days ago I admitted I had not understood Thai shoe sizes: [http://www.panix.com/~dannyw/weblog/Asia/Thailand/shoesizes01.html]
In it, I said I thought the Berlitz Thai guide had a conversion table. I have now checked the Berlitz book, and can't find one: however there *is* one in the BBC "Thai Phrasebook".
| England | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 |
| Thailand | 36 | 37 | 38 | 39 | 41 | 42 | 43 | 44 | 45 |
I also found an interesting guide to the international shoe size issue: [http://www.i18nguy.com/l10n/shoes.html]
and a nice guide to shoe and clothing sizes, including a discussion of the logic behind them: [http://www.veganline.com/shoe-sizes.htm]
Looking at these guides one has to wonder about the accuracy of the information in the BBC Phrasebook. It looks very similar to a sort of mixture of the English *male and female* sizes relative to the "European" system. Also, it does not explain the fact that I have found at least two pairs of Thai shoes labelled "size 8" which seem to fit me quite well. That doesn't match up with *any* other system listed on those pages.
2004 Jul 26 [ Mon ]
Buying shoes in Thailand
I had not been eager to buy shoes in Thailand because when I browsed the stores I saw very few marked in farang sizes. Recently – because the selection and prices are so bad in Cambodia – I needed to buy some more in Thailand.
I was surprised to realize that my feet seem to fit Thai shoes which are marked *2 sizes* smaller. I guess that's why I got the impression there were no shoes in farang sizes!
Additionally, the metric sizes *also* seem inconsistent – or at any rate to have wide variations between brands/models.
So my suggestion is, rather than saying to the girl "do you have size nine?" "mii ber gao mai khap" you just say "do you have this in my size?" "mii bairp nii samrap phom mai khap".
I have a vague feeling the Berlitz Thai guide has a list of clothing conversions but I'm not sure where I stashed my copy.
A bus trip from Pattaya to Sriracha: "IT City"
Pattaya is a great place but it doesn't have much selection of computer hardware: pci cards, RAM etc. So sometimes I take the bus to Sriracha. (I could have sworn I already wrote up a previous trip, but I can't find it; maybe I forgot to upload it.)
The buses go along Sukhumwit and I usually wait at the stop near the end of Central St. It's on the western side of Sukhumwit, of course, to go north, under a pedestrian bridge across Sukhumwit and next to some sort of middle school. In Thai, Central is called "Thanon Pattaya glang".
When you show up there are some sort of touts standing around who yell at you to hurry up as if the bus is about to leave, but as far as I can see that's only for their amusement. Usually I wait five minutes or more before it actually leaves.
As you approach the bus (from the rear) it doesn't seem to have a sign for Sriracha, or anything else explicit like a route number. I think maybe it says Bangkok, or something like that, in Thai. I forgot to check out what sign is on the *front* of the bus. My recollection of other buses is that they do have useful destination names, handwritten in Thai on large cards. So I always have to ask the touts. This more or less works, but it's wise to ask somebody (eg your hotel) first how to pronounce Sriracha. (I wish dictionaries would include common proper nouns like this, and first and last names like Nit and Thaksin Shinawatra.)
You climb in past the driver without paying; a collector will come around later. The bus is usually nowhere near full at this stop, but will fill up later. As I am a hairy smelly foreigner Thais avoid sitting next to me until the bus is full.
The place I was going has a big sign on it saying "IT City" but Thais do not seem to recognize that name, at least those that collect bus fares. I have tried calling it "Sriracha, Computer Plaza" and that worked a couple of times, but not on this occasion. Eventually I think he just figured "ok, somewhere in Sriracha" and charged me 40 B. (Going back when I said "Pattaya, thanon Pattaya glang", the charge was 30 B.)
The bus is comfortable with airconditioning and plush seats. There is a baggage shelf and I suppose there is a baggage compartment at the side. There is also a rear entrance. I guess the driver opens that door when he can't stop the bus with the front door adjacent to the stop and the would-be passengers have to rush from behind the bus. I couldn't figure out any convention for getting in or out at one particular door. If you're getting out you need to go forward to the front door. The fare collector will chivvy you forward, but if you go past the driver's back you are standing on steep steps with no handrail at all. If you take too long to struggle out at the stop the people at the stop will start pushing in. Take great care to avoid clobbering people's noggins with your backpack etc, or stepping on their toes. Be ready to say "khaw toat khap". If you can't manage this, just say "I'm sorry!" in English, rather than remaining silent and avoiding their eyes.
The fare collector was hard to understand. At one point he started yelling something, and I thought he meant I had to get out (although I was pretty sure we were a long way from Sriracha) and I struggled forward, but when I got there he waved his arms again and blurted more incomprehensible Thai. As soon as I had left my eat it had been taken, but a young girl beckoned me to sit next to her. I essayed a remark that I didn't understand what the fare collector had said, and she said he was Cambodian.
As usual there was a very long stop, around 20 minutes, just S of Kasetsart University. I could see no particular reason for it, although a group of passengers got on a couple of minutes before we finally pulled out: perhaps the bus waits for a connecting bus to arrive.
The overall trip takes 50 minutes or so. I was beckoned forward again closer to my destination, and this time I was happy to do so. I tried out my Cambodian on the fare collector, and consternation spread across his features. He said nothing. I'm pretty sure he was not Cambodian. From his face I would guess he was actually Burmese. I mentioned it to a couple of people later who agreed it would make sense for a Burmese to pretend to be something else. I would have thought there would be enough border Thais around speaking Cambodian to make such an imposture impossible.
IT City is a large multistorey building like a mall. There's an Office Depot in the basement level. Above that is what they figure is the ground floor, then there are 4 floors above that. There are escalators, but when I was there the escalator down from the top (mostly bare and shuttered) floor was shut off, and on several of the escalators the handrails were not moving. (This is common at Pantip Plaza also.) I didn't see any songthaews waiting for customers, so I don't know what people do if they buy a bulky item.
The software and DVDs looked a little dusty and sparse, although there were a dozen or so touts offering "sexy movie". The electronics parts store in the basement has rearranged its shelves so that now you can't get to its racks of spare parts. I suppose they still have things like individual resistors and capacitors available but I was disinclined to ask for specific items without a chance to browse.
There is a whole floor of shops selling cellphones. I have no idea how Thais manage to choose which of these outlets to favor as they are literally indistinguishable in most cases (I know because I made a mental note to go back to one store but was then unable to find it). On a previous occasion I had gone there looking for a SIMcard reader and after struggling through layers of incomprehension and incredulity established they had never heard of such a thing; this time I saw a couple for sale.
Above that floor are floors with computer and video game products. On floor 3 there is a large store apparently called "IT City" which has a reasonable selection and prices: they were the cheapest I found for SD memory chips.
There are some other products on sale such as DVD players, but for such things I would suggest Big C or Lotus in Pattaya.
The decor displays a website name prominently: www.tukcom.com. When I later checked it out, I got a page saying "parked at Godaddies.com". Godaddies sells cheap website registrations, and has a lot of ads for hosting which I curiously followed: the prices seem very cheap but I noticed their *own* SSL certificate is not trusted by IE5. In order to see their page without accepting them as a certification authority I had to click on a security dialog about thirty times – phooey.
There are various restaurants and coffee bars in the building. I paid 45 B for a pack of little cakes and a Coke. The little cakes were quite nice and I was thinking as I sat there how much better value it was than Phnom Penh. I didn't see any English-language papers on sale.
I left having bought nothing but a couple of CDRW minidiscs. (I don't like leaving a 70-USD memory chip at a photo lab for printing, so I use CDRWs.)
There is a bus-stop sign at the southern end of the property's frontage on Sisowath. Seeing the signs on approaching buses, I saw one which said – if I remember rightly – Rayong and Sattahip, in Thai. I got in and said "bpai Pattaya reu" and the driver motioned me into the bus.
It was fairly full but I still got a seat. There was no lengthy stop and I had no problems getting out at Pattaya glang. The bus stopped a couple of hundred meters north of the pedestrian bridge, apparently because of construction work near the junction.
If you need to get a songthaew back west along Central, this may be difficult. At some times of day two or three will wait near the hardware store on the southern side of Central. Try and figure out which one is leaving next, and (if necessary) ask them if they are going to go down Beach Road or towards Big C. You will probably have to wait ten minutes or so while they hope to get a full load of passengers. Later in the evening the supply of songthaews seems to dry up, and you wonder if there will ever be one till the morning. So if you are lugging bulky items, you need to call a friend to pick you up. (There are various taxi agencies, eg on 2nd Rd just N of Soi 8, who might be able to set something up if necessary. Perhaps they could pick you up at IT City, too.)
2004 Jul 23 [ Fri ]
Aids testing in Thailand
The Nation today (2004-07-23) had a very interesting article under one of the most boring headlines imaginable: "All voices not heard at AIDS conference".
The link is here, but it may well stop working soon: [http://www.nationmultimedia.com/page.news.php3?clid=27&id=117750&usrsess=1]
Instead of being about the usual political stuff, it had a wealth of information about the actual significance of the AIDS test results people get in Thailand. In short, you are *much* more likely to get a false positive.
I'm going to save a local copy of this as it's so important, and if the Nation blocks access to the page after a couple of days I plan to post the entire thing.
2004 Jul 22 [ Thu ]The real reason why rich Thais go gambling
It has occurred to me before that the real reason why rich Thais often go gambling was in order to have a pretext for receiving large sums of money – many newspaper stories have quoted politicians accused of corruption as claiming to have received the money as gambling winnings. (In all of time, has anybody ever really come out ahead at a casino??)
The following Slashdot poster makes a similar point about *on-line* gambling systems (as part of a thread on Russian criminals trying to extort money by menacing websites):
Why gambling sites? (Score:2) by nut (19435) on Thursday July 22, @07:52AM (#9768486) [http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=115270&cid=9768486] ( [http://www.bruce.ashton.net/)]
What I think is interesting is the fact that these (alleged) extortionists have been targeting online gambling businesses. Why these businesses particularly?
I'm going to put forward a theory based on some completely unsubstantiated rumours I have heard. A mate of a mate of some bloke in the pub tells me that a lot of online gambling sites do at least a sideline in money laundering. That is, two people log onto the site, one 'loses' a large amount of money, the other 'wins' a similar amount of money at the same time.
It might be that they were picking on businesses they thought wouldn't be too keen to talk to police.
In a way this restores my faith in human nature. I was thinking that all this gambling proved that a sizeable fraction of humanity was pretty stupid. I am encouraged to think that there is actually a sensible purpose behind some of it.
2004 Jun 25 [ Fri ]The problem of land reform in Thailand
Many years ago, around the Vietnam War, the Western press had the habit of referring to communist insurgents as "agrarian reformers", so much so that the term is now mostly used ironically.
However that did not make the basic issue go away. The problems are very grave:
1. Ordinary people feel very sentimental about the idea of village life and still see it as an ideal.
2. Village life involved the cultivation of land by individuals without any system of land ownership. Each family cultivated as much land as it could and anyone could use land which was uncultivated.
3. As a result most land has no clear title; systems for registering title are rife with incompetence and abuse; villagers who may be allocated property are unused to legal systems and are routinely swindled. (For instance, a common scam in Thailand is to offer a landowner a small sum to use their land as surety for bail. Lo and behold, the defendant skips and the land becomes the property of the bail bondsman – who rubs his hands with glee.)
The issue of land ownerhship seems to be about the only one which can bring common Thais to protest against the government. Such cases are in the newspapers in a steady stream. The problem is that the government carefully defrauds only one community at a time, so there is never sufficient fury in the overall population to make any necessary changes in the system – the outcome of which, in every case, is to deliver hitherto public land to the rich for the lowest possible price (and pauperize the local people whose daughters go to work in Bangkok as "maids").
On the other hand, I honestly cannot see a practical way out of this. It is impossible to administer land held in common anyway, and there is no arguably fair way to redistribute it into privately-held parcels. For instance, a current news story has villagers complaining that a landowner who is demanding that they get off "his" land got the land transferred to him secretly on a technicality years ago, while they cultivated it. Since the Thais' system for registering land ownership is utterly corrupt – like everything else – something like this is bound to happen *every* time a parcel of land is redistributed.
When I see people driving an SUV in Phnom Penh I assume they made their money through fraud and robbery. I guess Pol Pot went through the same steps of logic...
Responses: 9
Name/Blog: Tom Cat
URL: tom.cat@middleclasshouse.com
Title: That pesky mouse
Comment/Excerpt: Your comments about > are just spot on! By the way, I want all your readers to check out my new website at
Name/Blog: Tom Cat
URL: tom.cat@middleclasshouse.com
Title: That pesky mouse
Comment/Excerpt: Your comments about > are just spot on! By the way, I want all your readers to check out my new website at
Name/Blog: Tom Cat
URL: tom.cat@middleclasshouse.com
Title: That darn mouse again
Comment/Excerpt: It looks like your darn website ate my html, when I just wanted all your readers to know about my great new website at TOM CAT!!
Name/Blog: Tom Cat
URL: tom.cat@middleclasshouse.com
Title: Drat your writeback filter!!
Comment/Excerpt: If only your website didn't eat my html, I could allow all your readers to just click on this link: http://www.tomcat.com/redir.asp?3EA918874B029 and they would immediately get the Scob virus! No, no forget I said that.
Name/Blog: The Boss
URL: http://www.panix.com/~dannyw/weblog/
Title: Above postings not real
Comment/Excerpt: I created the above postings myself when I was trying out some simple attacks on the trackback module to test it. Not to worry.
Name/Blog: The Boss
URL: http://www.panix.com/~dannyw/weblog/
Title: Another test
Comment/Excerpt: Cookies not working yet?
Name/Blog: The Boss
URL: http://www.panix.com/~dannyw/weblog/
Title: Cookies still dead?
Comment/Excerpt: Don't seem to be downloading cookies...
Name/Blog: The Boss
URL: http://www.panix.com
Title: Still no cookies!!
Comment/Excerpt: Yes my cookies module still sits there as dead as vaudeville.
Name/Blog: The Boss
URL: http://www.panix.com
Title: Another silly msg
Comment/Excerpt: Cookies, yum. []
Thaiwebsites.com -- search engine and web directory
...for English-language websites about Thailand.
I saw this recommended in the Bangkok Post, or perhaps the Nation, a few days ago.
It seems OK, although of course it wants to make money.
For instance, here is the result of a search for "thai language": [http://www.thaiwebsites.com/language.asp?mode=language]
2004 Apr 22 [ Thu ]General review of books for people learning Thai
I started this document a long time ago and have been too lazy to bring it up to date. I thought I'd post it anyway, but I backdated it to the beginning of this year, rather than having it appear in the current postings.
[http://www.panix.com/~dannyw/weblog/Asia/Thailand/Thai-language/thaibooks1.html]
2004 Apr 19 [ Mon ]A woman's life
A few days ago someone sent me a long log of a chat session between a Thai girl and her jealous English boyfriend. It made me feel sad for her, that she would try so desperately to retain the affections of such a twerp.
That same day I found this poem, which seemed to me to sum up this poor girl's life:
How sad it is to be a woman; Nothing on earth is held so cheap. She bows and kneels countless times; She must humble herself even to the servants. His love is as distant as the stars in heaven. A hundred evils are heaped upon her. Her face will follow the year's changes. Her lord will find new pleasures.
I tried searching for it. It appears to be an abridged version of a poem titled "Woman" by Fu Hsuan, around 300 AD: [http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/core9/phalsall/texts/c-poet1.html]
Oh well. The girl is clever, certainly more than me. Eventually she may get what she wants. But she has never known security, or dignity.
2004 Apr 02 [ Fri ]The Thais and their strange fear of deet
Thailand is an ecological catastrophe at many levels. Certainly, all kinds of food and personal products like toiletries cannot be relied on for safety in even the most general terms like "does the brand on the label mean anything?" or "is this stuff the same stuff as last week?"
So I was surprised when my girlfriend was scared of using my mosquito repellent with 10 per cent deet.
Later I figured out the issue. In most places in the US they only get mosquitoes for a few months of the year, and anyway all the houses have bug screens so you have hardly any exposure: you use deet when you go hiking, or when you watch the fireworks on July 4th, and that's about it.
But in Thailand they get mosquitoes year-round, and not many can afford AC all day. So the Thais would need to apply deet every day, so they'd wind up with far higher annual exposure.
Incidentally, here's a tip about mosquitoes: they seem to get particularly active when it rains after a period of dry weather. I guess the females figure it's a good time to lay eggs in the basins of rainwater which the Thais thoughtfully provide for their ancestors, so they need some human blood, preferably the high-sugar farang kind, to bulk up for breeding. Anyhow, keep an eye open for those circumstances and lather up with deet while you're sitting in the hotel waiting for the rain to stop.
2004 Mar 28 [ Sun ]Free software to learn Thai typing
"The Nation" 2004-03-28 gave the following link: [http://download.thaiware.com/program8/ThaiType.exe] (1,159 kB)
However, thaiware.com returned a page of Thai text that I think said you can't link directly into a download page, you have to search from their home page. I tried that; it took a long time (about 2 minutes!) for the page's "search" button to appear (so I clicked on "submit program" but that's for software authors!) and then it couldn't find "thaitype"!
So I googled and found this, which looks similar: [http://www.users.bigpond.com/gurce/thai/type/] You don't need any special Thai-language setup to use this. It includes a grahic showing the Thai layout on your keyboard.
I haven't tried this but it looks cool.
2004 Mar 27 [ Sat ]Ineffectual ratcatchers
There was an article this week in I think "The Nation" laughingat Bangkok's ineffectual ratcatchers – I forget the actual numbers but it was something like "a budget of 50 M baht and they kill a lousy 4000 mice all year!"
When you actually kill mice, typically you use poison which does not kill immediately (so that other mice/rats don't observe the stiff next to the bait and draw their own conclusions). So the targets creep off to wherever they hide when they get a stomachache, which probably means you never see them unless you decide to track down the god-awful smell.
Actually, poison doesn't really work anyway. It's popular among commercial pest removers because it has visible results, but in the long run it does no good whatsoever (which also makes it popular among commercial pest removers). What *actually* helps is tracking down how the vermin are getting at food and water, and making sure they can't. That takes a while, and doesn't give the department a body count that looks good to the Pentagon, um I mean the press. (Although of course it's much better for *human* health to keep vermin out of the human food chain – yecch – not to mention keeping deadly poisons away from the human food chain – yow.)
So it's conceivable that this department is actually doing a good job. Of course, in Thailand... not!
2004 Feb 08 [ Sun ]Learning to read Thai: analogy to declarative computer languages
Most computer languages, like Basic, C and Perl, are procedural. You tell the computer each step to carry out, and then it does it.
But there is another kind of computer language: the declarative language like Prolog, or SQL. In this kind of language you tell the computer what the *rules* are for its behavior, then *it* figures out the optimum way to act in conformity with that specification.
When you learn to read Thai, the rules that they give you are like the specifications in SQL. Crucially, they *don't* automatically give you a sequence of instructions to follow.
Because Thai is normally written without spaces between the words, it's a considerable task merely to be able to parse a paragraph into words. Here's my own *procedural* parser:
1. Examine the first character. (Thai uses many diacritic marks so the definition of the term *character* is actually not obvious. I guess I mean "that bunch of stuff which takes up one character position".)
2. Compare the character to a table of words. If the character matches note a word boundary and continue.
3. If not, append the next character and go to "1".
Of course this is cheating, but it probably works quite well. It would work much less well in other languages where nouns, verbs, and for all I know prepositions undergo changes in form within the word due to conjugation, declension etc.
Of course, this doesn't work for a human learner. You can't possibly memorize the spelling of twenty thousand Thai words before you learn to read Thai. But I'd like to see the code which could implement the specifications given in language textbooks.
I think it would still have to start off with a table of single-character words. But then you could add rules about which two consonants can appear together, and which signify a missing vowel, etc. By the way, I feel that issue has really been neglected in the textbooks, but it's crucial to guessing the pronunciation of an unknown word.
Likewise, just distinguishing between characters really deserves a procedural description. I have been thinking of writing up a guide to distinguishing bewteen similar characters, as I've noticed I've recently become much better at correctly reading characters in a nonstandard font. Incidentally it seems to me that the differentiation between the standard Thai body text fonts and the "sans serif" varieties corresponds to the difference between adding error correction code and cutting the bit rate. Ie the standard varieties, with multiple hints to allow you to distinguish between characters in the presence of noise, require more bandwidth but reject noise better. The sans-serif fonts reduce the points of differentiation between characters to the minimum, but (presumably) continue to work in a low-bandwidth channel.
2004 Feb 04 [ Wed ]Motorcycle safety helmets in Thailand -- report in "The Nation"
In a recent "Things to Bring" posting, I made the following point:
most safety helmets available in Thailand are of completely inadequate construction, resembling children's wear for Halloween.
Today's issue of "The Nation" (2003-02-04) has an article "Most helmets substandard" which cites Prof. Weera Kasantikun referring to a 2003 survey conducted as part of the "Wear Crash Helmet" project.
In substandard helmets, the foam that functions as a protective barrier on impact was usually a mere 1.5-cm thick, Weera said.
Also, the covers of most crash helmets are made from low-quality plastic. This is why the products can be sold for between Bt90 and Bt100 apiece, he said.
Even after the fall in the dollar, Bt90 is less than $2.50.
I'm not making all of this stuff up.
2004 Jan 29 [ Thu ]Bird flu and the coverup in Thailand
When I chat to other expats about our experiences in Thailand I hear a lot of complaints along the lines of "this could only happen in Thailand". Quite often I think (but probably don't say) that actually bad service, incompetence and corruption are to be found in larger and smaller magnitudes everywhere in the world.
Now people are attacking Thaksin because of his attempted coverup of the bird flu problem. I haven't seen anyone compare it to the British BSE coverup. Britain stonewalled in exactly the same way as Thaksin/Thailand, right down to the detail of ministers organizing a photo-op in which they consumed some of the suspect food.
In a lot of ways the BSE episode was far more shameful. In Britain it's still unusual for senior civil servants to be murdered by the secret police just because they blabbed to the media, but in Thailand the men who made sure the story got to the media knew they were risking their lives. All that people in Britain (thought they) were risking was their pension, and they still did their master's bidding.
The interesting thing, as usual, is to speculate about what Thailand, and Britain, have managed to *successfully* cover up by their established process of mendacity.
2004 Jan 26 [ Mon ]Review of "English-Thai Bar Guide"
This is a blue pocket-size book. The cover has "Bar Guide" in big white letters and a cartoon of a plump farang in a bar wowing the bargirls by being able to say "phom rak khun mak mak".
I bought this book even though several problems are evident from a glance.
1. Not only does the romanization not indicate tones, it has no pronunciation guide at all! So probably most hapless customers will pronounce "phom" "fom".
2. The slant of the marketing seems doomed to failure. Guys may assume bar girls will like it when you try out your Thai on them, but they will smile and laugh *whatever* you say. Actually, you will probably do better pretending you speak no Thai at all. The makers of the book are probably aware of this.
3. The book is not very well organized. The book is divided into sections, but many phrases could fit into several different sections. I don't have "Thai for Lovers" in front of me, but I was not conscious of that problem with TFL. In other words, it's hard to guess which section to turn to if you need a particular phrase (even if you remember seeing it).
4. Background information is scattered through the book. The locations chosen are not terrible but again not particularly helpful. There is a list of contents which gives the section titles, but again this is not very helpful. How does one *know* one would like to read about "Soi Thaniya" unless one happened to be there? Likewise, many newcomers won't know what "bar fine" means (any more than "bar beer") and won't check it out in advance, which they definitely should.
If it were up to me, I'd collect the background info sections together but provide *references* to them, in the phrases sections.
5. I got the impression the background info sections were located to fill up white space. For instance, what is the info on "katoeys" doing in the "you're so cute" phrase section? They got so desperate they threw in a full-page ad for another (equally shoddy) book on p133. That's *in addition to* three pages of ads at the rear of the book – where the designer has sloppily allowed the chapter heading "bar pickup phrases" to continue to run as the page heading!
6. Despite making such efforts to fill white space, the layout is inefficient and there is little material per page.
— — — — — — — -
So why did I pay money for it? Because the phrases themselves are not bad, and the price at 195 THB, while exorbitant for such a small and badly-produced book, made it an impulse buy.
I certainly wouldn't recommend it for *any* first-time visitor to Thailand, though.
2004 Jan 17 [ Sat ]Male prostitute has excuse for killing farang client
Recently a male prostitute was arrested in Pattaya, Thailand, after six months on the run for the murder of a farang who had bar-fined him.
The published reports are a little vague about what the motive for the murder was, apparently out of propriety. They use expressions like "the farang made a sexual suggestion which the prostitute would not agree to and an altercation ensued".
The Thailand newsgroup speculated that the farang had wanted to have anal intercourse and the prostitute refused. The suggestion was of course that the prostitute refused the *passive* role.
I think this betrays a lack of acquaintance with the gay lifestyle and fantasies. It's important to realize that quite a lot of gay prostitutes in Thailand are heterosexual. (The gay version of "Thai for Lovers" has many phrases for farangs who doubt whether the Thais are really gay – not I think phrases you'd need very often in the US.)
You may think "well obviously they wouldn't want to get it up the bum" but that's missing the point. Really, anal intercourse, despite obvious risks and discomfort is *doable* – but only if you're the *passive* partner. You may think it's hard to imagine sticking your bum in the air for an old farang, but for what seems to you like a hell of a lot of money it's *doable*. What turns out to be *difficult* is getting an erection.
Heterosexuals are simply overwhelmed with feelings of disgust when they're required to *do* the deed. They're not very happy when the deed is done to them, either, but they can lie there and think of England. That just isn't an option for the *active* role!
My guess is that the argument which led to the murder was actually the farang complaining that the Thai couldn't get hard. But the Thai probably feels he'll get more sympathy if he lets people think he fought to defend his bum.
2004 Jan 14 [ Wed ]Interesting statements about Thais in Bangkok Post
The Bangkok Post is an English-language newspaper which has many Thai contributors, eg Kriengsak Niratpattanasai, who wrote the following article "Getting to know land of the free" in the Business Section for 2004-01-09 (p10).
[http://www.bangkokpost.com/090104_Business/09Jan2004_biz70.html]
There are many interesting ideas here which would sound racist (anti-Thai) if offered by a non-Thai. Take a look at a couple of excerpts:
Two major ethnic groups make up the population. The Thai-Chinese or ethnic Chinese, who account for around 15% of the population, are more aware of the importance of education while the Thais, the majority of whom are poorer and live in the provinces, have less education. In the workplace, you may find the Thai-Chinese make up approximately half of the educated work-force. As a rule, the majority of the ethnic Chinese have an ambition to become entrepreneurs or self-employed, while most educated Thais prefer to become civil servants or take up other secure jobs with less work pressure.
Every expat you meet on a barstool will say the same thing about Chinese Thais.
The unique Thai language is the official language in education, business or government services. This explains why Thais are relatively less fluent in terms of English language skills compared to their neighbours.
This is somewhere between silly and condescending. No neighboring country uses English as its official language, and Thai is by no means unique. Perhaps he means merely that having Thai as a mother tongue makes one per se a bad linguist, which may be true, but sounds un-PC. Certainly Cambodians, whose language seems to me to be very close to Thai, find it much easier to pronounce English correctly (although I have to say I have hung out with bargirls much less in Cambodia than in Thailand).
2004 Jan 12 [ Mon ]Link to old but good page with Thai localization issues
"Localization" is the process of adapting a product, usually software, to be used in a foreign market.
Here's a link to a page which discusses many issues involved in localizing for the Thai market. Its only drawback is that it was last updated in 1998-10! Still, it's certainly interesting to know that even an old version of Word sorted *only on the first character*.
[http://qtranslation.com/ttrans/english/thailoc1.htm]
Another good page for using computers with Thai: [http://seasrc.th.net/main/main.htm]
Regrettably it too is very old (1995!) It's worth looking through though. Check out this (unfortunately .gif – oh, I see they also have it as .eps!) chart showing Thai pronunciation and tone rules: [http://seasrc.th.net/card/th_con1.gif]
Here's another good page, with eg reviews of Thai dictionaries: [http://www.thai-language.com/default.asp?tab=5#faq]
2004 Jan 11 [ Sun ]
Another point about terrorism in Thailand's southern provinces
I forgot to add this point when I posted the previous paranoid suspicion:
[http://www.panix.com/~dannyw/weblog/2004/01/09#terrorism01]
...why have we never seen any public statement from the people, whoever they may be, who carried out these outrages?
Thaksin at first said they were just bandits. But apparently they were trying to *pretend* to be insurgents. So why didn't they improve their plausibility with a few suitably revolutionary public statements to the press?
And if they *are* insurgents... again, why not make statements to the press?
"Is a puzzlement."
I just checked that line: it's a quote from the song "A Puzzlement" in "The King and I", lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein. They are surprisingly apposite, so here's a link to the full lyrics: [http://log24.com/log/2002-1123-puzzlement.html
] 2004 Jan 10 [ Sat ]Disgusting hygiene standards, Thai-style
I've complained about Cambodian hygiene before, so now in the interests of fairness I'm going to complain about something in Thailand.
I was at an Irish restaurant on Soi 7 in Pattaya and ordered a steak pie. When it showed up it was hot but utterly limp, with the texture and crispness of a pair of wet underpants.
I said, struggling with my inadequate Thai: "please do again".
The waitress (I have eaten there on many previous occasions and they have been OK before) said doubtfully "not hot?".
I said "do again".
She placed her index finger against the pie for a second or two. "Hot!" she said triumphantly. (For those not with the program, this was the hygiene problem.)
After a little more to-and-fro the manager showed up, a Thai male in his twenties. "You want put microwave again?"
I said "microwave not good. You have 'oven' – you know English word 'oven', right?" He said "You order something different now."
For the fourth time I ordered chicken with cashew nuts, which as usual was really very nice. I guess the conclusion is that restaurants all over the world are just microwave shops these days, and they never want to admit it.
Don't let that put you off their breakfasts, Thai food and desserts at this restaurant however, if you're ever on Soi 7. Their irish coffees are pricey but worth it.
If you want pastry, though, go to the Pig & Whistle.
2004 Jan 09 [ Fri ]The recent terrorism in Thailand's southern provinces
Many commentators have called Thaksin's behavior on indications of unrest in Thailand's southern (Moslem) provinces inexplicable. For a long time, his administration denied that there was any insurgency at all, referring to the problem as "banditry". Last year he actually dissolved the organization that had been specifically set up to combat insurgents in that area. Now he has abruptly changed his mind and went so far as to say that the soldiers who had been killed in recent raids deserved to die.
As usual, I have an explanation which covers it.
Thaksin is determined to have total control of the country. To do this he needs emergency powers. To have that he needs an insurgency. To have that he needs insurgents, and the best way to create them is to have a brutal crackdown on the local people. The best excuse for a brutal crackdown is to have a series of murderous outrages committed ostensibly by insurgents. To do that without being discovered he needed to get the army/police units capable of discovering what he was doing out of the way.
QED.
Colloquial Thai
This is a book by John Moore and Saowalak Rodchue, published by Routledge.
I might have been able to state the publication date, but as I was writing down the above a girl rushed up to me in Bookazine and told me I wasn't allowed to take notes. I complied, in some astonishment. I asked her why a couple of times and she just repeated "policy". I've shopped there hundreds of times and never had this problem (or anywhere else in the world). I'm aware that some stores forbid cameras and noting prices, because pricing is valuable information for other stores, but I hardly think that's the issue here. I wonder what it could be?
Perhaps they are worried that someone is going to post a negative review on the Internet, which is in fact their doom.
You can tell I've only flipped through the book. The general production is similar to the "Colloquial Cambodian" book (Smyth) and I was getting interested until I realized that the romanization includes no tone marks! I had time to find and note down the stated reason for this: "...as you should try to learn the tone with each new word". (They *do* specify the tone when each word is introduced the first time, but not subsequently.)
This excuse is utterly preposterous.
My guess is that the original text *did* have tone symbols, but when they got to prepress the faggot in charge of design wanted to go to a different font, and at this point they discovered that the tone marks didn't come through. Rather than actually fix that problem they just got the author to manually rekey the tone marks in the vocabulary lists, as he probably got a little testy when they asked him to rekey the whole text.
To be fair I am starting to realize that this whole romanization issue is by no means as straightforward as I at first thought. You may, for instance, have noticed that I have eschewed tone marks in my own text...
Responses: 2
Name/Blog:
URL:
Title:
Comment/Excerpt: "the faggot in charge of design" - This "faggot" was enjoying your site until I read this.
Name/Blog: The Boss
URL: www.panix.com/~dannyw/weblog/
Title: Re "faggot"
Comment/Excerpt: It has been my experience that people who work in print design departments just are faggots. Not bears, not leathermen, not bi-curious: faggots. But maybe twinks. []
Review of "Thai for English-Speaking Learners"
I saw this book the other day in a Thai bookstore and being ever-hopeful that there might be a book which would allow me to learn Thai without doing real work I bought it, even though it was quite expensive – I think 295 B (no price was marked on the cover).
1. This book was written by a Thai: "Tipawan Thampusana-Abold". It has the usual wobbly English so the major interest is its insights into Thai from the inside.
2. I was congratulating myself on detecting germanic coloration in the English when I got to the end of the book and found a short bio of the author which mentions she moved to Germany in 1990 (the book was first published in 1995).
It doesn't refer to her husband so presumably he had separated from her by the time the book came out.
3. The English in the book is clearly strongly influenced by German, but it's hard for me to estimate whether her German husband edited it. At a guess, he did, because the general phrasing has too much "Sprachgefuehl" to have been written by a Thai alone.
4. Examples of germanicisms: "The cassette is absolutely needed" (absolut noetig); "helping verb" meaning auxiliary verb; use of "already" (see below).
5. Indeed the cassette *is* "absolutely needed", but the edition I bought had no cassette, and there was no sign of one in the store, and I saw no mention of it on the cover. You need it (assuming you buy the book to use rather than for peripheral amusement) because although the book includes a gloss for Thai consonants it has no explanation of Thai vowels and nothing useful on the tones.
6. As stated, this book is quite interesting because of its Thai-centric viewpoint, but the grasp of English grammar is slipshod. For instance, there is a useful discussion of equivalents to English tenses which is spoiled by an inadequate grasp of English (although Americans will be less upset because their grammar is closer to German).
Eg p41: "The younger brother ate already". This is OK in US English but in English it should of course be "the younger brother has already eaten".
Perhaps more seriously (also p41): "he has already studied Thai for 2 years": this should be "he has been studying Thai for two years". (The "2" is also germanic; in English "two" is preferred.)
This section regrettably omits the useful "yuu" construction to express the present continuous mood.
7. The author's grasp of how hard it is to learn to read Thai is laughable. It is utterly unrealistic to drop transliteration so rapidly.
Lesson 6 p105: "Anyway the most important thing is that you must be able to distinguish and pronounce the 5 tones correctly. If you need more practice, just go back to lesson III, page 33." Bwahahaha!
Lesson 6 p108: "The tone rules are really complicated, aren't they? Please do not feel discouraged. Study the table with explanations slowly and carefully a few times, then you will master them. After this lesson, you can be sure that you can read or pronounce almost every word in this tonal language so correctly that even the Thai will definitely feel surprised." Double bwahahaha!
8. Despite my carping, I do not feel my money was wasted. The discussions of how to address an envelope; classifiers; pronouns; and spelling/pronunciation issues were all very interesting.
9. My copy was labelled "3rd printing – Publisher's number 11/2000 – 1,000 copies". That's interesting right there. Publishing teach-yourself-Thai books does not seem to be the royal road to riches.
2004 Jan 05 [ Mon ]Amusing free font for Thai-like English text
This freely downloadable font produces readable English text that happens to look just like Thai characters.
[http://www.weygandt.de/aw_siam.htm]
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