Brassica for Thai

[Richard W]

I'm not really sure where this thread belongs - and it probably belongs as part of another thread.

Bradn asked for a suggestion to showcase Brassica's handling of suprasegmentals. It strikes me that the development of Thai (a.k.a. Siamese) might be a stressing example, perhaps taking it from the 13th to the 21st centuries. It's got a number of interesting phenomena.

Firstly, there are tonal correspondences that even seem to go back to Proto-Tai-Kadai, though of course these might just be coda features and phonemes that later became tones. Li Fang-Kuei reconstructs 13th century Thai as having an extensive set of voicing contrasts, though I suspect that was a register (breathy vowels v. modal) contrast as in Khmer and Mon. However, early accounts of Mon suggest that the onset voicing and breathiness were then correlated features in Mon, with the change from voicing contrast to register contrast not being completed until more recent times.

This onset voicing or breathiness contrast has induced a tone split apparently creating a system of six contour tones. This breathiness has induced aspiration on initial consonants. Thai orthography principally uses a 3-way tone indication plus pairs of consonants indicating the former consonants; the tone sets are designated A, B and C in Tai-Kadai philology. Two of these six tones (breathy B and modal C) then merged, and Thai orthography often writes modal C as breathy B. (There are a couple of examples in the name of the letters of the Thai alphabet.) Li also posits a sequence of preglottalised consonants; Pittayapon treats the stops amongst them as implosive. For Thai tone development, these had the same influence as voiceless consonants. These preglottalised consonants had their own influence on tone splitting in Northern Thai, patterning with initial glottal stop.

Checked syllables originally lacked a tone contrast; conditioned by vowel length and original voicing of the onset consonant. they now have three possible tones, in contrast to the five possible tones of unchecked syllables. Phonetically, a fourth tone is also possible on unstressed syllables. This tone can survive changes of vowel length.

Bangkok Thai had a sixth tone, apparently now extinct. I suspect it is related to some typically unstressed words written as though in the rising tone actually normally being pronounced with the high tone.

The glottal stop presents a problem of phonemic analysis. At the start of a syllable, there is no contrast between a glottal stop and zero, though it is quite audible at the start of non-initial syllables. Indeed, the surname of a previous Thai prime minister, Prayut Chan-ocha, was transliterated (in accordance with the standard) with a hyphen to show the glottal stop at the start of the second syllable. Syllable final glottal stops are also non-contrastive, being the automatic coda for a short 'open' vowel.

The sequence of phonemes in a Thai syllable is significantly correlated, which led to some descriptions erroneously denying the existence of the falling tone on checked syllables with short vowels. Some of the distributional gaps or non-gaps are due to recent history - the combinations could not arise from early Thai by regular sound changes. (It makes me cringe when I see analyses that ignore history.)

There have been shifts in Thai tones since the middle of the 20th century. We have description of these tones in terms of tone numbers. One is that the falling tone now seems best described as a mostly level high pitch. Another is that a native cue to recognising the rising tone is that it initially dips to the lowest pitch of any tone, a feature not recognised in the old description as '24', contrasting with '41' for the falling tone. Li records that the high tone as having an allophonic distinction of '453' in unchecked syllables and '55' in checked syllables.

The phonetic development of Thai has probably been complicated by literacy. Thai is full of loans from Sanskrit with a fair view from Pali, and, less recognisably, Khmer. Quite a few words from Pali seem to have been Sanskritised, and the authoritative dictionary gave up on attempting to say whether a word came form Pali or came from Sanskrit. I get the impression that early elites were fluent in Khmer. It's difficult to know whether tone-spreading is a borrowing from Khmer 'consonant governance'. It is not unknown for Thai and Khmer to disagree on whether it happens - it has been lexicalised in both languages.

Thai has also recovered the category of sesquisyllables from Khmer. For Thai, these also known as words with impure consonant clusters. They contain an anaptyctic vowel, and some Thais have told me that this vowel is phonetically distinct from the vowel of a separate syllable.

[bradrn]

Many thanks for this!

The ideal would be to get a listing of sound changes which is comprehensive enough to evolve at least a few sample words from an earlier form to modern Thai. Do you know of any references which might help me in this?

[jal]

with a fair view from Pali,

I suppose you mean "few"?


JAL