Thanks, again.
- About the writing issue.
Thai was a language that was derived from Suriyavarman's Khmer Empire's script, which was inturn derived from Sanskrit, which was derived from Pali. The number of almphabets increased from
Pali's 32 --> Sanskrit 34 --> Thai 44, with tons of them having the same sounds, and used the same way. And asked for the complexity issue, well, if you're lucky enought to see this...
พ ฟ ผ ฝ บ ป and ฑ ท and ฏ ฎ and ฆ ม ...
are totally different, and delightfully evil fun. Thai maybe easy to talk and speak, but it can be one hell of a writing language. Writing almost perfect Thai in the basic words are a quality only found in definitely lower than 50 percent of Thais. The internet slang transformation didn't help either.
Another headache in reading Thai is that they don't use spaces between words, capitals to begin sentences, or much punctuation so that entire paragraphs can look like one very long word. Try reading the following:
propelledbyaneleganttastyguitarandpianoriffholymanwasoneofthehighlightsofpaulwellersstupendouswildwoodalbumthesongitselfisbrokenupintotwodistinctsectionstheversesareaminorkeyfolkdrivenprogressionwherewellerdeliverssomeofhispatentkarmicsuggestionsanditsactuallybetterthanElvisCostelloseffortsinthisveinthecatchysoulinflectedchorusisgospelorientedwithanexcellentlittleturnaroundthe lengthyinstrumentalcodatakethepieceintotheozonewonderful.
(If the above makes your eyes cross, the original can be read at
allmusic.com)
Thai doesn't have "th", "v" or "z" as far as I know, but it does have everything else plus ป which is somewhere between a very hard "b" and a slightly less hard "p", and an initial "ng". Where Thai writing breaks down in relation to foreign pronunciations is that, while they have most of the initial consonants, many of these same consonants can't be pronounced in a final position. For instance, if you transcribe "noodle" into Thai, the final "l" becomes "n". Thus, though written "noodle", a Thai will invariably pronounce it as "noodon". Similarly a final "s" will become "t", a final "g" becomes "k" (I'm am also "Greck" to my Thai and Lao friends).
Korean does something similar. ㅅ is essentially the letter "s". Thus, 삼, three, is pronounced "sam" with a long British "a". However 인터넷, internet, is pronounced "in-taw-net" (no "er" sound in Korean). More confusingly, if the next sound lacks an initial consonant, the final consonant reverts to its original sound. Thus, 인터넷 이 (이 marks the preceding word as the subject of the sentence) is pronounced "in-taw-neh-shee". Korean does have a final "L" sound, though, making them the only East Asians I know who can pronounce "noodle".
- Mandarin = nu-der
- Japanese = nu-du-ru
- Thai, Lao, or Vietnamese = nu-don
Part of the complexity of written Thai or Lao is the need to cover the various tones. Therefore, while one "t" suffices in English or German, Thai needs a number of them. That's one of the reasons for the following:
พ = "p", ฟ = "f", ผ = "p", ฝ = "f", บ = "b", ป = "bp".
I'm not sure about ฏ or ฎ, though I'd guess they are variants of "k" though they might be "t". I have no idea about ฆ, but I think ม is "m".
On a side note, the old question "Which came first, the chicken or the egg?" is utterly irrelevant to a Thai or Lao. When reciting the alphabet, a Thai or Lao recites the letter and a representative word to differentiate between the multiple variations of some letters. It's sort of like an English speaker always saying "A - apple, B - banana, C - cat" when reciting the alphabet. In Thai and Lao, the first two letters are "gaw gai (pronounced "guy") and "kaw kai (rhymes with "high"). Gai is "chicken". Kai is "egg". Great existential mystery solved.
@MilesGregarius - Are you an English teacher in Korea? If so, can you explain to me why English comprehension in Korea is so shockingly low, I mean, they are a developing country, and another question. Do high school Korean students study a third language, like French or Chinese? Because a third of Thai high school kids, do, they study French, Jap or German.
The level of English in Korea isn't as bad as the press it receives. Korea is English obsessed, so EVERYONE studies English and attempts the TOEIC/TOEFL or IELTS at some point. Therefore, not only the competent, but the mediocre, and the downright hopeless also have their scores recorded, greatly dragging down the average. In a country like Thailand, only the well-to-do, those in the tourist trade, or the highly motivated sit exams, so only the relatively competent are ever measured.
Korea also receives very few Western tourists. Countries that have a constant stream of Westerners buying their souveniers, sleeping in their hotels, eating in restaurants, taking their taxis, not to mention short-time "romances", will have a whole sector of the populace that picks up English from daily business transactions that their compatriots can only hope to pick up in the classroom.
Comparing Korea and Thailand on this front, there is undoubtedly much better English to be found in Bangkok or Chiang Mai or Phuket, with their hordes of native English-speaking visitors plus all the others (including Koreans) who use English as the traveller's
lingua franca , than in Seoul or Pusan. But get off the tourist trail, and I generally find the level of English in Korea to be no worse than any other non-European country I have visited.
This is not to say there are no shortcomings to English education in Korea. One problem is that the Korean education system, like many in East Asia, has a Confucian base that encourages rote learning. While keeping your mouth shut and listening to the teacher drone on and on may be effective for learning long division or the periodic table, language acquisition requires active student participation. It's not that bad for literacy acquisition, though. Quite a few of my students read English several levels higher than they can speak it. One of my uncles (my father's Korean) completed a medical degree using almost entirely English-language textbooks and enjoys reading western philosophy, but I can't understand a thing he says in English.
Another obstacle is that, generally speaking, Korean kids are very reluctant to look foolish in front of their peers, even moreso than kids from other countries. In my brief time teaching Thai kids, I found that once their initial shyness was overcome, laughing at each other's mistakes became almost a game. Often, if one of my Korean students gets laughed at, they may not participate in class again until they get over their embarrassment. Unfortunately, the only way to learn a foreign language is to be willing to make a fool of yourself on occasion, as I can attest to from personal experience.
Also, Korean, like Japanese (another country notoriously slow to pick up English), is syntactically different from English. Where Chinese or Thai, like English, are Subject-Verb-Object ("I hate you") languages, Korean and Japanese are Subject-Object-Verb ("I you hate") languages. When forming sentences, one naturally tends to think of the words needed in the same order as one's native tongue. My own attempts at speaking Japanese and Korean also often flounder on word order even when I have the vocabulary readily at hand.
