Native Thais speaking Thai with accents.

[Guest lazyphil]

<<just like me learning her useless village prattle... >>

 

Nice attitude ::

 

 

i give credit to anyone who can make themselves understood using a language not native to them.

[samak]

Flashermac said:Only the South has what might really be a dialect

 

i doubt that one really can differentiate that northern and isaan thai are different languages, while southern thai is just a dialect. probably a matter of definition and a discussion we can leave to linguists.

sure they are from the same language family and very close (in opposite to the isaan kmer = kamen) to each other. structure of sentences, grammar and a lot of words are the same as central thai.

however northern and isaan have a lot of different words, sometimes the same (for example ngam = beautiful; muan = sanuk; ai = phee (the older)); but also southern uses different words. or would anybody say that words like mai plue (mai pen rai), laeng (talk) or chang hoo (a lot) are close to central thai?

and for tones: there are also changes in northern and isaan; it is just more obvious in the southern thai where they seem to have a strong rising tone on the last syllabe.

[waterdog]

Has anyone heard the accent the people in Kanchanaburi speak in? It's very easy to recognize when someone is heard speaking it. I would not begin to be able to describe it. I hear the Thais refer to it as "nurh nurh".

[Flashermac]

Central Thai has borrowed a lot from Cambodian, whilst Lao and Kham Muang have not. The "different" words spoken in the north and northeast usually are the older and "real" Thai. Central Thai has even borrowed that peculiar "in-fix" (or whatever you call it) of Cambodia. (English simply has prefixes and suffices). Thus from DERN (walk) you get the fancy DAMNERN (which is what royals do). From the ordinary DTROO-UT (inspect), you get DAM-ROO-UT (police). The so-called "rachasap" -- royal language -- in reality uses a lot of rather ordinary Khmer words, and dates back to the time when the Khmer Empire extended across so much of SE Asia. I've read that the southern Thai peninsula was still Khmer speaking as recently as the 16th or early 17th centuries.

 

As to classifying something as a language, Kham Muang and Lao both have their own alphabets. I don't think Southern Thai has ever had one. Then again, if it were not for the Chinese characters, one could hadly say there was such as thing as Chinese dialects. Since these "dialects" are as different as say Dutch, German, Danish and English, only the fact that all "Chinese" can read the same non-phonetic characters allows them to be considered dialects of one language.

 

Bangkok used to have its own "accent", according to older Thais I've spoken to, and using an L in place of an R was one of the traits. But so many newcomers are in the city now that the old Bangkok accent is heard less and less.

 

p.s. From the whackiepedia:

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thai_language

[samak]

the "whackiepedia" you quoted considers southern thai to be a different type of thai language and not a dialect and is therefore contradicting you!

only the Korat Thai is considered a dialect

[iuytrede]

"all "Chinese" can read the same non-phonetic characters "

 

the Characters are mostly phonetic'

and not all Chinese can read a text written in Chinese C

Just don't think because haracters but not in their own language. Just like you cannot read a text written in Portuguese (even it is written with the same letters as English and you will recognize some words, probably even get some idea what the whole text is all about) a Taiwanese (who has learned Mandarin as his second language in school) usually cannot read a text written by a Hong Konger (even if the Hong Konger thinks what he is writing is Mandarin - it usually is too much mixed up with Cantonese). If the Hong Konger writes Cantonese the Taiwanese cannot read it.

 

Just don't think that all Chinese can read the words "Drugstore" (in Chinese characters) in Beijing, Bangkok or New York means anything. You can read "Farmacia" just as well.

[asdf]

samak said:

the "whackiepedia" you quoted considers southern thai to be a different type of thai language and not a dialect and is therefore contradicting you!

only the Korat Thai is considered a dialect

 

The Wikipedia coverage is heavily based on Ethnologue, which tends to treat everything as a separate language rather than as a dialect of something else. That's not to say that Ethnologue is right or wrong, but it is at one extreme.

[samak]

iuytrede! you are just plain wrong on this!

the chinese characters have the same meaning in any chinese language but is differently spoken or pronounced. the only difference is that in Taiwan and Hongkong they use traditional characters, while the so called old mainland china use simplified characters. while Taiwanese and Hongkongese usually have no problem to read simplified characters, mainland Chinese have difficulties to recognize all traditional characters

[Flashermac]

I studied Mandarin 34 years ago, and that is what I was taught. S Tsow and Dean Barrett were both Mandarin translators in the US Army -- and told me the same thing.

 

p.s. I've forgotten Mandarin almost completely through lack of use.

[samak]

i fully agree with you. a text in chinese has the same meaning for all chinese, whether they are mandarin, taiwanese, hokkien, cantonese or shanghainese speakers. however it would sound completely different when they read it loud!

 

Iuytrede brought up a totally different opinion.

 

my Mandarin is still pretty basic