The 'Tai' Language

[gobbledonk]

Guys,

 

 

 

I am trying to learn Mandarin Chinese in preparation for my trip to Southern China, in the belief that it is the official language, and they may be able to understand my woeful pronunciation. I only wish there was one language that everyone in Asia understood (yeah, I know I'm a dreamer ..), when I came upon this :

 

 

 

Thai (Siamese,Central Thai) belongs to the Tai language family, a subgroup of the Kadai or Kam-Tai family. A number of linguists now regard Kam-Tai, along with Austronesian, as a branch of Austro-Tai, although this hypothesis remains controversial.

 

 

 

All members of the Tai family derive from a single proto-parent designated as Proto-Tai. Linguistic research has shown the area near the border of northern Vietnam and southeastern China as the probable place of origin for the Tai languages.

 

 

 

Today the Tai family includes language sporken in Assam, northern Burma, all of Thailand including the peninsula, Laos,northern Vietnam and the Chinese provinces of Yunnan, Guizhou(Kweichow) and Guangxi(Kwangsi). Linguists, notably Fang Kuei Li, divide these languages into a Northern, a central, and a Southwesthern branch. Others, in particular William J. Gedney and A. G. Haudricourt, view the Central and southwesthern branch a single group. In the tripartite division, Thai falls into the southwesthern branch.

 

 

 

Anyone care to comment ? I know that some Chinese dialects are so different to the 'norm' that even the Chinese think they are 'foreign'languages (I think Hakka falls into this category), so the common threads running through 'Tai' probably dont mean much in practise.

 

 

[Guest]

I am sure there are true students of history, culture & language reading this forum, until they step up, here ia simplistic take on the T'ai

 

 

 

The modern people of Thailand are descendants of the T'ai, a larger group of people extending from extreme northeastern India into Vietnam and the central Malay Peninsula. There is ongoing discussion as to whether the T'ai originated in either southern China or northern Vietnam. The T'ai spread through southern China, northern Burma, northeastern India, Laos and Thailand. The T'ai migrated along river valleys and settled a large geographic area of Southeast Asia and southwestern China. The T'ai were an advanced society that cultivated domestic animals and practiced subsistence agriculture, based on rice cultivation.

 

 

 

From the sixth century BC onwards, Chinese annals make frequent references to the T?ais as the "barbarians" south of the Yan-tse-siang.

 

 

 

The Chinese gradually began to encroach upon them and press them hard. Due to their lack of unity, the T?ais could not organize an effective resistance to the Chinese rule and most were eventually absorbed by them, while others made attempts to preserve their independence. In order to attain their objective, they started their southward migrations gradually and intermittently.

 

 

 

The T'ais followed the river valleys in their movements towards the south.

 

 

 

The western group of Thais descended along the Salween River where they settled down and became Shans or so-called Great T'ais. Choosing the Mekong valley as its home, the eastern group spread its influence to Tonking, and constituted the ancestry of the Laotians, while the middle group immigrated into Thailand. These last two groups have been referred to as the Little Thais.

 

 

 

 

[gobbledonk]

Wow ! Thanks, BC - I am completely illiterate in terms of the history of Asia, and it shows. Probably the only thing that ever caught my attention was the militarism of the Japanese in the 20th Century. Sad, but true.

 

 

 

I got another rude shock when I wnt looking for more - I had always thought of English and German as being derivatives of the Romance languages (Latin-based). Apparently not ....

 

 

 

http://babel.uoregon.edu/yamada/famguides.html

[Flashermac]

"Tai" is the term used to refer to the entire linguistic group, as distinguished from the "Thai" of Thailand. There are many in depth studies on the relationship between the branches and their apparent split from a common source. Many of the words are virtually the same, sometimes exactly the same. But don't expect to understand one if you speak another. Be sort of like trying to understanding German just because you speak English.

 

 

 

p.s. English and German are both members of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European languages. French is not, though many French words entered English after the Norman Conquest and through diplomatic vocabulary or literature.

 

 

[Guest]

"I had always thought of English and German as being derivatives of the Romance languages (Latin-based). Apparently not ...."

 

 

 

English is a Germanic language, it's closest relative today being Frisian in The Netherlands. Latin/Romance infusions into English occurred, I believe, with the Norman invasion in 1066; for 300 years after that, all kings of England spoke only French, English being a peasant language.

[Guest]

whats the deal with pitches ( not bitches ) in Thai, Khem, Viet, Chinese et al.

 

The pitches are beyond the capabilities of both my ears & tongue ( without mentioning cognition! )

 

Historically what is the derivitive of these tongue twisters & ear benders?

 

 

 

The Asian languages without pitches are relatively easy for me to verbally communicate in. ( Japanese & Korean )

 

 

 

Are Farangs that can master the pitches better at cunning-linguistics?

 

 

 

 

[iuytrede]

You, too, can produce and recognize different pitches! You do it all the time.

 

The word "Yes" the way you speak it when you are listening to someone on the phone and you repeatedly say "yes" - or the word "Yes!" a recruit shouts back to his sergeant - or the drawn out "yes?" when your GF in the second floor is calling your name - or the confirmation (with a deep voice)"Yes.", they all have different pitch.

 

Pitch makes you sound ironic, or impatient, or turns a statement into a question ("This is our bus." vs "This is our bus?").

 

English uses pitch a lot, more than some other European languages (like German) which have special words to convey the meanings that English conveys with pitch, so they sound monotonous to native speakers of English.

 

But English never uses pitch to distinguish between different words. The same word spoken with a different pitch is still the same word!

 

Lexical tone means the "same" word spoken with a different pitch has another meaning, it is NOT the same word. Chinese, Vietnamese, and Thai have lexical tone, Khmer and Japanese don't (pitch is important in Japanese though).

 

Most European languages do not use pitch to distinguish words (Swedish and Serbocroat do), but they use pitch to convey intentions and emotions.

 

It can be learned, you nee a lot of practice, start with simple short words, and imagine you are pronouncing them like a question, or like angry, or like shouting.

 

 

 

Historically, the origins of lexical tones are letters (usually stops like p,t,k) that used to be in front of the vowel that carries the tone or just behind it and have disappeared or changed. All that remains is different tone. So words like "mak" and "mat" and "mad" might drop their final consonants (or these consonants might merge into one, e.g. a glottal stop) - but depending on the original final consonant the new words "ma" might have different tones.

[gobbledonk]

Wow ! Thanks for that - I feel a little better about my abysmal Mandarin. Will be interesting to hear so many different dialects in Southern China (assuming I can tell one from the other...). Must be frustrating for the Chinese themselves, although they seem philosophical about it. Interesting the Beijing doesnt seem able to force them all to learn Mandarin, but I guess there are more urgent issues in a country with 20 million unemployed.

 

 

 

I guess its all part of what makes Asia so special :}

[iuytrede]

"Beijing doesnt seem able to force them all to learn Mandarin"

 

 

 

Beijing forces them all to learn Mandarin in school, but they can still use their mother tongue.

 

Taiwan actually tried very hard to suppress the native language of the majority of the population (Taiwanese, a variety of Hokkien). The ruling class of Taiwan were the nationalists who came from the mainland after the communist victory and did not speak Taiwanese, they were less than welcome in Taiwan (which had not been under Chinese rule for decades). 40 years of very harsh language policy (kids were beaten in school for speaking Taiwanese) did not succeed in suppressing the language, though.

 

Nowadays this is considered a good thing in democratic Taiwan, Taiwanese is very fashionable and the mainlanders are learning Taiwanese.

[gobbledonk]

I'm dangerously close to breaching the 'no politics' rule here, but the threat of WWIII erupting when China tries to annex Taiwan seems a little too real to me.

 

 

 

Call me paranoid, but watching their efforts in Tibet makes me wonder how far away the beginning of the end is. I acknowledge that a lot of the media reports we get regarding China have plenty of US-inspired bias behind them, but it's difficult to see the current leadership allowing the Taiwanese to remain autonomous. Hopefully, we can all come to a HK-style compromise......

 

 

 

Ok, I admit that 'dangerously close' was an understatement :}