ศาลาชุมนุม

[Rikker]

Quick note: I thought of a closed-syllable whose tone gets neutralized.

หนังสือ is most often pronounced นังสือ.

Woohoo! I found one!

[Chris Pirazzi]

Hence, there is a system of (ครุ-ลหุ)‘heavy-light’ sounds in Thai pronunciation ; it's not stressed or unstressed, but some may say it's similar.

Interesting! These rules look very simple, but I am curious about this: what exactly is a 'light' and 'heavy' sound? You say it's not quite the same as stressed/unstressed, but what is it exactly? For example, is a 'heavy' syllable always pronounced as written, but a 'light' syllable is always (?what?) short? mid tone?

Thanks for your post; looking forward to more info!

- Chris Pirazzi

[Rikker]

Hmm. I wasn't very familiar with this nomenclature, and I thought I'd only ever seen ครุ-ลหุ in reference to poetry, so I did some looking. From RID:

ลหุ 'light'
...used in chanthalak poetry textbooks to refer to syllables with 'light' sound, that is, syllables with short vowels and no final consonant, ex. จะ มิ ดุ ...

ครุ 'heavy'
...used in chanthalak poetry textbooks to refer to syllables with 'heavy' sound, that is, syllables with long vowels and 'extra' vowels (อำ ใอ ไอ เอา), ex. ตา ดำ (the vowel อำ can be both 'light' and 'heavy'), and all syllables with final consonants, ex. หัด เรียน...

This has to do with the strict structures for different forms of poetry. For chanthalak (ฉันทลักษณ์), there are rules about how many of which type of 'heavy' or 'light' sound come on each line.

Doing some more Googling, I found some articles on the Royal Institute page, for example:

http://royin.go.th/th/knowledge/detail.php?Search=1&ID=1921

After reading some of it, in my opinion there's nothing here that isn't already explained using phonetics and stress patterns.

For example, the part about the pronunciation of the phrase วัดสระเกศ, since สระ here means 'pool', we might expect it to be pronounced with a clear glottal stop, as in สระแก้ว. But it turns out it's pronounced as a 'weak' (unstressed) syllable, with the first and third syllables stressed. That means the quality of the vowel changes (to something more schwa-like), and glottal stop disappears.

This seems to be what the 'light'/'heavy' discussion is getting at, but it feels imprecise to me, like a lack of understanding of what's actually going on. Either that or it's irrelevant entirely, I'm not sure.

So, basically, I think it's what David sometimes asks about--this is a native (and probably quite old) way of conceptualizing the idea of stressed/unstressed, and the phonetic changes that occur in unstressed sounds. But I don't think it adds anything new.

[Rikker]

I hope that the previous post didn't come off as snide, by the way.

Also, about this statement:

Now we have to understand the nature of Thais that they'd like to make syllables in a word as less as they can for their convenient sake, perhaps. This happens in both original Thai words and loaned words.

Followed by citing abbreviations like อุบล(ราชธานี) to มอ(เตอร์)ไซค์.

There's absolutely nothing remarkable about this at all, and nothing at all uniquely Thai about it. I think to say it "implies something about the way the people live and view the world" is demonstrably false, just by looking at any other language!

For example, "comfortable" which MiTeTy cites in the post just before this one, is a good example. What about Wednesday (Wens-day), or vegetable (veg-ta-bull), or laboratory (lab-ra-to-ry), or even fifth (fith).

There are a whole slew of phonological processes that are seen in every language. This is how languages change and diverge. This is how หมากพร้าว becomes มะพร้าว, and สายดือ becomes สะดือ, etc. This particular process is called 'elision'.

Also, simple abbreviation, like อบุล for อบุลราชธานี, is different, because it's not a phonological reduction, but rather a lexical reduction. อบุล is a word that means one thing, ราชธานี means something else, so you can abbreviate it from one long compound into a shorter meaningful word. You're not just losing arbitrary sounds, like in หมาก > มะ.

[David and Bui]

For more on Thai poetry in both English and Thai see http://thaiarc.tu.ac.th/poetry/poem.html

[Richard Wordingham]

Since สตรี appears to be from Sanskrit strī́, which has an initial cluster /str/, then I guess inserting /a/ is just part of nativizing the cluster, and /saʔtrii/ becoming /sat-trii/ is assimilation. Right?

And I'm not sure, but I take it you're saying that for ศัตรู, /sat-truu/ was in fact the Sanskrit pronunciation? Am I interpreting Monier-Williams correctly, which appears to support this?:

śatru
(H1) śátru m. (said to be for śat-tru , fr. √2. śad) , " overthrower " , an enemy , foe , rival , a hostile king (esp. a neighbouring king as a natural enemy) RV. &c &c

Is there anything else enlightening you can divine from this entry?

Comparison to Khmer is interesting: the cognate of สตรี isស្ត្រី pronounced /saʔtrəy/, and the cognate of ศัตรู isសត្រូវ /sattrəv/ (both according to Headley 1997, via SEAlang).

The doubling to -tr- to -ttr- is not a Sanskrit phenomenon. It is possible that the t was doubled in the Khmer form of the latter for etymological reasons, and that glottal stop + t became -tt- when the former was borrowed from Khmer into Thai.

[MiTeTy]

(1)You say it's not quite the same as stressed/unstressed, but what is it exactly? (2)For example, is a 'heavy' syllable always pronounced as written, but a 'light' syllable is always (?what?) short? mid tone?

1. Linguistically, we really can't say they are similar. This is because STRESS changes the meaning of words either a single word or in a discourse, but a series of these sound movements behavior in Thai pronunciation doesn't . Let point out some examples,
/ re cord/ is different from /re cord
/ pre sent/ ~/pre sent .
And we English speakers all know well that
/ english teacher/ is different from /english teacher /
/ white house /~/white house /.

Therefore, it's not true to say they're the same thing.

2. Check and apply the rules explained.

When it comes to learning a new language it's best to let some certain jobs on linguists. And, we'd better learn it from a communicative aspect. It's good to be curious anyway.

[MiTeTy]

ครุ—ลหุ
Great job! That some have found out that this is something happening in Thai poem. Correct!

The word is used here to depict that despite being a tonal language this shiffting amount of sound in each syllable spoken is not a strange thing to the language. Hopefully it will help people explore its pronunciation by letting the search engine lead to wherever it will.

Since we cannot call it stress( See above reply ), other terms are coined. Here it is Heavy — Light. There may be others like STRONG—Weak. Whatever they are called in English, it is หนัก—เบา in Thai. But if anybody would like to do more search and research, you can try and read the book suggested previously. Invest Boy.

HTH

[Rikker]

1. Linguistically, we really can't say they are similar. This is because STRESS changes the meaning of words either a single word or in a discourse, but a series of these sound movements behavior in Thai pronunciation doesn't.

I have to disagree with you here. The way it manifests itself may not be identical, but stressed/unstressed syllables is a universal linguistic phenomenon, and documented even in tonal languages.

Doing a search in a database I have access to for papers with the words THAI and STRESS in the title, we immediately get plenty of grist for the mill:

Potisuk, S., Gandour, J.T. and Harper, M.P. 1996, "Acoustic correlates of stress in Thai", in Phonetica : international journal of speech science, vol. 53, no. 4, pp. 200-220.

Peyasantiwong, P. 1986, "Stress in Thai", in Papers from a conference on Thai studies in honor of William J. Gedney, ed. R.J. Bickner et al., pp. 211-30. Center for South and Southeast Asian Studies, The University of Michigan.

Potisuk, S., Gandour, J.T. and Mary, P.H. 1994, "F0 correlates of stress in Thai", in Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area, vol. 17, no. 2, pp. 1-27.

Patcharin Peyasantiwong 1979, "Stress in Thai", in Studia Turcologica Cracoviensia,

Theraphan L-Thongkum 1984, "Rhythmic groups and stress groups in Thai", in International Conference on Thai Studies, pp. 115-124. Chulalongkorn University.

Wong-Opasi, U. 1992, "The interplay between tone, stress, and syllabification in Thai", in Papers from the First Annual Meeting of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society, ed. M. Ratliff and E. Schiller, pp. 441-481. Arizona State University, Program for Southeast Asian Studies.

...among others.

I don't know why you think stress isn't possible in Thai, and why stressing different words doesn't change meaning. Let's take your English examples as a pattern:

/ re cord/ is different from /re cord

The position of the stress in this example affects the quality of the vowels in both syllables.
/'rɛ kʰərd/ vs. /rə 'kʰɔrd/

If are to define a set of corresponding variables in Thai that stress affects, it would be vowel quality and length.

Compare two potential uses of น้ำหอม:
/nəm 'hɔːm/ vs. /'naːm 'hɔːm/
'perfume' vs. '(this) water smells nice'

The second word here is two lexical units, both of which are stressed, but the point here is that you can affect the meaning by stressing or not stressing the word น้ำ, just as clearly as you can in English.

It's not a fluke either. There's a variety of banana called กล้วยหอม, but it's also possible to say that a กล้วย (of any variety) หอม (forgive my using two examples with หอม). The phonetic representation of these two possibilities would be:
/kluay 'hɔːm/ vs. /'kluːay 'hɔːm/
'(variety of) banana' vs. '(this/these) banana(s) smell nice'

You can even do this with the phrase ครูสอนภาษาอังกฤษ, using stress (which in this case manifests itself in the vowel length) to indicate whether you mean one of two things:
/kʰrusɔn pʰə'saː ʔəŋ'krit/ vs. /'kʰruː 'sɔːn pʰə'saː ʔəŋ'krit/
'English teacher' vs. 'the teacher taught English' (as opposed to teaching some other subject)

When it comes to learning a new language it's best to let some certain jobs on linguists. And, we'd better learn it from a communicative aspect. It's good to be curious anyway.

I'm not sure what you mean by this.

ครุ—ลหุ
Great job! That some have found out that this is something happening in Thai poem. Correct!

And as it's used within chanthalak poetry, it clearly means something else from what you're discussing. In chanthalak poetry, they define what is 'light' and 'heavy' based on the pronunciation of the word, apparently out of context. So given the rules I translated from the Royal Institute Dictionary (RID), every word fits in either the 'light' or 'heavy' group before you use it, and that doesn't change.

I assume that Thai scholars have adopted these terms in a new meaning to refer to stress phenomena in Thai, in which case the 'light' or 'heavy' nature of a syllable depends on its context. For example, from the Royal Institute article I quoted early, สระ in สระแก้ว is 'heavy', but when it finds itself in the compound proper name, วัดสระเกศ, it is 'light'. As it happens, this is exactly the kind of stress phenomenon I'm talking about.

The word is used here to depict that despite being a tonal language this shiffting amount of sound in each syllable spoken is not a strange thing to the language. Hopefully it will help people explore its pronunciation by letting the search engine lead to wherever it will.

This is where you start to get fuzzy. You merely assert that "heavy" and "light" are different from "stressed" and "unstressed", without clearly explaining how they are actually different. When you say, "despite being a tonal language this shifting amount of sound in each syllable spoken is not a strange thing to the language," that sounds like support for my claim that stress is a universal phenomenon that may manifest in slightly different ways in different languages.

Since we cannot call it stress( See above reply ), other terms are coined. Here it is Heavy — Light. There may be others like STRONG—Weak. Whatever they are called in English, it is หนัก—เบา in Thai.

While the phenomenon of stress patterns manifest themselves somewhat differently in Thai, I still maintain that ultimately it's the same thing. Call it heavy/light in Thai, and call it stressed/unstressed in English. I don't see the problem with it, despite claims otherwise.