tody wrote:which part of Thailand do u stay with your wife?
My wife and me are staying in Germany, river Rhine region.
Our house in Thailand is near
ยโสธร/Yasothon, in a small village on the road from
ยโสธร/Yasothon to
มุกดาหาร/Mukdahan (with Savannakhet, PR of Lao, on the other side of mea nam khong).
tody wrote:just wanna know how to speak the basics
Thai and Lao are highly related languages (and in major parts mutual intelligible). Isan is ... a western idiom of Laotian language, in principle the most frequently spoken Laotian.
The difference between Laotian and Isan language is that the latter (Isan) - if written - is written in Thai (akson Thai) but not Lao letters (tua Lao).
Some features of Lao (and therefore Isan) language which are different from Thai (but please note that the common features are rather more frequently):
1. Lao/Isan has no ro ruea (formerly the "lo rot" in tua Lao). Please note that /r/ actually does not exist in modern tua Lao/writing system.
2. ro ruea is replaced in Laotian by one of three consonants, these are b, h, or l. A sentence to remind in this phenomenon could be "hon thi lot bo", Thai: "ron thi rot ro".
3. With the exeption of ? (Richard was already mentioning these, as far as I remember it was kw and khw; please see also
"Modern Lao does have two unligated and true initial clusters - /kw/, /khw/, so three spellings." ) Lao has no initial clusters. I recall this phenomenon always by pala (Thai plara/
ปลาร้า)
.
4. What is in Thai the cho chang is in Lao the so sang (meaning elephant as well). Accordingly, terms written in Thai with cho chang are typically pronounced in Isan with /s/.
I think that Richard also explained somewhere in the long thread
"ประมาท" that the tone system of Thai and Lao are very similar (if not identical).
Thus, the described phonetic and spelling differences are - besides some divergencies of the vocabulary as already outlined [saep ili = aroi ching] - that what renders Isan and Thai different. But both "languages" have much more in common so that it - my opinion - does not deserve to learn Isan.
Last remark: In a Website I'm building up currently I use for "my dictionary" (Thai-German), besides Sanskrit meaning, RTGS, Sattha Akson etc. also always the Lao term (if available). If interested, please check e.g. the current entries for
อักษร and
ปัจจุบัน.
At least my Firefox does show also the text in tua Lao. If you can see tua Lao in your browser you can also see that Lao is very near to phonetic writing (sattha Akson) of Thai.