How systematic is Thai orthography?
January 25, 2015 6:55 PM Subscribe
I am mildly interested in learning to read the Thai alphabet, but I'm having a hard time getting an understanding of the relationship between Thai writing and spoken pronunciation.
I'm not afraid of non-Latin or weird scripts in and of themselves. I read/write Chinese at a decently fluent level, can read Korean and have at various points in my life been able to read Cyrillic, Devanagari, Arabic, hiragana and katakana script. That said, I'm kind of interested in learning to read Thai* but I'm having a hard time figuring out if the relationship between writing and spoken pronunciation in Thai is more like:
1. Spanish, where the writing <> speech relationship is bidirectional, in that:
- if you see a written word, you can predict with a high degree of accuracy how it is pronounced
- if you heard a spoken word, you can predict with a high degree of accuracy how to spell it (AKA why I imagine spelling bees in Spanish are pretty boring)
2. French, where speech > writing is much more unpredictable but writing > speech is reasonably to highly predictable, so:
- if you see a written word, you can predict with a reasonably high degree of accuracy how it is pronounced
- but if you hear a spoken word, getting the correct spelling is much more unpredictable
3. English, where both speech > writing and writing > speech are relatively unpredictable, so:
- if you see a written word, there are nontrivial odds you will mispronounce it (like how I thought that segue rhymed with "league" for so many years)
- and if you hear a spoken word, getting the correct spelling is more unpredictable (hence why spelling bees are interesting in English)
If Thai is more like 1 or 2 then I'd be happy to take a crack at learning it. If it's more like 3, however, then I'm not really invested enough in this project to make it worth it. Anyone who can shed light on the situation?
*Not really germane to the question, but the reason is that I am embarking on learning to cook Thai food and I find it helpful for purposes of shopping in markets and understanding the names of dishes and ingredients to be able to read the script.
I'm not afraid of non-Latin or weird scripts in and of themselves. I read/write Chinese at a decently fluent level, can read Korean and have at various points in my life been able to read Cyrillic, Devanagari, Arabic, hiragana and katakana script. That said, I'm kind of interested in learning to read Thai* but I'm having a hard time figuring out if the relationship between writing and spoken pronunciation in Thai is more like:
1. Spanish, where the writing <> speech relationship is bidirectional, in that:
- if you see a written word, you can predict with a high degree of accuracy how it is pronounced
- if you heard a spoken word, you can predict with a high degree of accuracy how to spell it (AKA why I imagine spelling bees in Spanish are pretty boring)
2. French, where speech > writing is much more unpredictable but writing > speech is reasonably to highly predictable, so:
- if you see a written word, you can predict with a reasonably high degree of accuracy how it is pronounced
- but if you hear a spoken word, getting the correct spelling is much more unpredictable
3. English, where both speech > writing and writing > speech are relatively unpredictable, so:
- if you see a written word, there are nontrivial odds you will mispronounce it (like how I thought that segue rhymed with "league" for so many years)
- and if you hear a spoken word, getting the correct spelling is more unpredictable (hence why spelling bees are interesting in English)
If Thai is more like 1 or 2 then I'd be happy to take a crack at learning it. If it's more like 3, however, then I'm not really invested enough in this project to make it worth it. Anyone who can shed light on the situation?
*Not really germane to the question, but the reason is that I am embarking on learning to cook Thai food and I find it helpful for purposes of shopping in markets and understanding the names of dishes and ingredients to be able to read the script.
Response by poster: (I forgot to add, I've obviously looked at Wikipedia but even from a description like this it's difficult for me to tell if Thai orthography is more French-like or more English-like, which would make a big difference in the feasibility of this endeavor.)
posted by andrewesque at 7:00 PM on January 25, 2015
posted by andrewesque at 7:00 PM on January 25, 2015
I would also add that many Thai-English dictionaries for foreign learners are romanized in their lookup, i.e. you would not need to know how to spell a word in Thai to look up a word, only how it sounds.
posted by pravit at 7:03 PM on January 25, 2015
posted by pravit at 7:03 PM on January 25, 2015
Response by poster: pravit: thanks for such a prompt response! Casual Googling indicates that Thai has a nontrivial number of silent letters. Are these predictable as well? (One forum I stumbled upon had a learner bemoaning the difficulty of these but details are short.)
posted by andrewesque at 7:19 PM on January 25, 2015
posted by andrewesque at 7:19 PM on January 25, 2015
There are a few irregularities which crop up fairly frequently that any good book should teach you. Most of these come from Sanskrit. So you wouldn't really have to "predict" them per se so much as just remember them as a "rule" that is somewhat obscure, e.g. every time you see "sri", pronounce it as "si", etc.
I can recommend "Thai for Beginners" by Benjawan Poomsan Becker. While it's a book about learning beginning conversational Thai, it also teaches the entire writing system, which is definitely complicated enough to warrant a book. This isn't just a matter of memorizing 40-odd letters; you have to understand the system of how different consonant classes interplay with different vowels and syllable lengths to produce different tones. And if you don't know the tones, a lot of the writing system is going to seem redundant and arbitrarily complex - so you need to learn to speak the language as well. The Thai alphabet is, to my knowledge, the only indigenously developed writing system in the world that conveys tone information.
posted by pravit at 7:48 PM on January 25, 2015 [1 favorite]
I can recommend "Thai for Beginners" by Benjawan Poomsan Becker. While it's a book about learning beginning conversational Thai, it also teaches the entire writing system, which is definitely complicated enough to warrant a book. This isn't just a matter of memorizing 40-odd letters; you have to understand the system of how different consonant classes interplay with different vowels and syllable lengths to produce different tones. And if you don't know the tones, a lot of the writing system is going to seem redundant and arbitrarily complex - so you need to learn to speak the language as well. The Thai alphabet is, to my knowledge, the only indigenously developed writing system in the world that conveys tone information.
posted by pravit at 7:48 PM on January 25, 2015 [1 favorite]
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However, there are multiple ways to write the same sound, so you would not with 100% certainty be able to write a word you heard with the correct spelling.
posted by pravit at 6:59 PM on January 25, 2015