Thai Language 

สวัสดีครับ

สวัสดีครับ ผมชื่อเอียน

Exotic Keyboards

Exotic languages call for exotic-looking keyboards. On the left, my somewhat dated iBook with a Japanese keyboard - although to be honest, Japanese can be input on virtually any keyboard. There are several input methods, the most common of which is via the Latin transcription of the Japanese words, which are automatically converted to the appropriate Japanese characters by a clever piece of software. It's actually a little more complex than that, but you don't actually need keys with any Japanese characters on them. The characters you do see on the keys are hiragana, one of Japan's two phonetic alphabets, and it is also possible to input Japanese using these - but most people stick to the Latin letters. The only real advantage to having a Japanese keyboard is that it has some extra utility keys for actions such as switching between input methods (the key with the Chinese characters next to the "Apple" key on the bottom row is one).

Thai, on the other hand... although a purely phonetic alphabet, it does not match well to the Latin letters, and thus has its very own keyboard layout (there are actually two different layouts in existence), and it is difficult to input Thai on a non-Thai keyboard (unless you have memorized the layout).

See this article for some more info on Thai keyboards.

Gwaa (กว่า) - than

Used in comparisions, e.g.:

"Bangkok is larger than Berlin" -> "กรุงเทพฯใหญ่กว่าเบอร์สิน"

"Happy New Year" in Thai

A useful seasonal phrase:

สวัสดีปีใหม่

(sà-wàt-dee bpee mài)

Thai for Japanese Speakers

The Thai and Japanese languages are completely unrelated, although they have both been influenced to some degree by Chinese, eastern Asia's 900lb linguistic gorilla. Nevertheless there are a number of aspects to Thai which will strike speakers of Japanese as familiar in concept, which I will enumerate here in an act of unashamed linguistic posing, as time permits and as they occur to me.

kirei ka?

First off, an anti-similarity, if it can be termed such: the Japanese word for "pretty" is kirei (綺麗, きれい). The Thai word for "ugly" is kêe-rày (ขี้เหร่), which sounds essentially the same.

...ka(?)

This still keeps tripping me up and causes my teacher to ask me if I am a ladyboy: the "question" particle in Japanese is ka (か), as in "kore wa pen desu ka?" (これはペンですか; is this a pen?). In Thai "ka" (ค่ะ/คะ) is a politeness particle used by females (the male equivalent is "krup", ครับ). "Nee bpen bpaakgaa ka" (นี่เป็นปากกาคะ) is therefore of course not a question but a statement of fact by someone of the female persuasion.

Thai for Beginners (2)

I have just had an Aha-Moment with regards to one of those thingies which sit atop Thai letters, and it is this: it is there to indicate the letter is not pronounced.

I am currently doing something tricky involving programming a trilingual website (English-German-Thai), so to get a feel for the Thai part I decided to look up a few IT-related words, in the course of which I came across some like "mouse". Which in Thai is also "mouse", spelt something like "maos". Only the "s" has a little thingy on it which I had assumed was a tone-marker thingy, but that would be a little odd on a final consonant. A feverish search through my modest collection of books with titles like "Thai for People with Unsound Minds" reveals the truth: it is written "maos" but pronounced "mao". Which in a way is sort of logical, because one of the first things I learnt in Bangkok is that "s" on the end of a word transmutes by some magic process into a "t".

Thai for Beginners

BiB wrote:

Before we went on holiday to Thailand, I had a fantasy that I would learn the Thai alphabet so that I'd at least be able to read and not be totally useless as I saw friends who came to visit me in Russia were. Then I looked at those 700, to me utterly identical, squiggles and gave up. Still, I used to shout khawp khun kharp, or whatever thank you is, with vigour when I was there. That was rewarding.

As someone with several pieces of official-looking paper proving I know both Japanese phonetic alphabets as well as an indeterminably large number of characters (together with a semi-infinite variation of pronunciations thereof), I assumed in my quiet arrogance that a couple of dozen letters, even squiggly ones, would present no problem to a person of my astounding intellect.

Hah.