Hello All!!
Heck... David, I think you’ve stirred up a hornet’s nest on this one! But it looks like fun, though!
From what I can tell, you are all right. I just think we need to first understand the Lao language to better understand how one should render the word “
อร่อย” in Standard Bangkok Thai.
So, here we go.....
If we start with the Standard Lao spoken in the “Vientiane Dialect”—which is considered the national norm in much the same way that the “Bangkok Dialect” is considered the national norm of the Thai language—we see that the word
อร่อย translates into
ແຊບ. In “official commie” Lao this would be considered a falling tone. Look at page 142 in Benjawan Poomsan Becker’s “Lao for Beginners” and it says that for the Lao script a falling tone is made from a low consonant with a long vowel and final stop—no tone mark is needed (this is identical to Thai). Therefore the easiest way to render this sound using Thai script would be without the use of the
ไม้เอก as well, and written as
แซบ. Anything else would be redundant. Agreed?
But before we talk more about that pesky, redundant
ไม้เอก let’s double check to see exactly what tone this word is in Lao and ask ourselves the question: Why did Nan when she heard her friend say
แซบ it sounded more like a high tone, but yet when Montrii worked out in the boonies of Isan (similar to myself) he heard it as a falling tone. Adding to that my own experience—I often hear
แซบ pronounced in what we sometimes call the seventh tone up here or the “high-falling” tone, a tone that rarely rears its ugly head in Central Thai. (The sixth tone would be the “low-rising” tone.) Working in my little village of
บ้านท่าแร่ in
จังหวัดสกลนคร I consistently came into contact with about five to six different subgroups of the Tai-Kadai Language Family as well as a lot of Vietnamese speakers which we call
ญวน or
แก๋ว, depending on how politically correct you want to be. Those subgroups were
ผู้ไทย (sometimes written as
ภูไท or
พูไท),
ขะลึง,
ญ้อ (also written as
ย่อ or
ญ่อ),
ลาว (that’s used in Vientiane,
อีสานเหนือ, and finally
อีสานไต้ (sometimes
อีสาน is written as
อิสาน)***. This list doesn’t even include some of the other bits of odd vocabularies or misguided tones that people in my area use that aren’t even considered to be under Tai-Kadai (for example
ภาษาโซ้,
ภาษาข่า or
ภาษาแสก). So to answer the question: What the hell tone is
แซบ anyway? There’s probably four or five different ways to pronounce the tone, and all of this depends on where you were born, where you grew up, what class you are, what generation you are from, how much time you had access to your language group, and probably how far away you live from the city. So, like so many other things in life the right answer is “it depends!”
However, if I were to have to put money on it, I’d say that most people up here say it with a falling tone.
***(Just a side note: If anyone has access to it, check out “US Peace Corps/Thailand, Northeastern Dialect Lessons.” It was written in about the middle 1970’s. This is a really cool book and helped us out a lot in the field!!)
Ok, so now that we know that
แซบ is often pronounced as a falling tone, why then is it often written with a
ไม้เอก as
แซ่บ??? First check out some dictionaries and you’ll see that it is often written as
แซบ as often as it is written as
แซ่บ. David, check your Matichon Dictionary and you’ll see that they wrote it with a
ไม้เอก as
แซ่บ. For fun I often like to check out the comics “
หนูหิ่น.” They’re about a small Isan girl who ends up working for a pretentious, newly rich Thai family in Bangkok as their little servant maid. What’s interesting about these comic books (both for social commentary and humor) is the way the editors decided to render the Isan speaking little girl. It just so happens that the editors sometimes decided to spell
แซบ as
แซบ and other times they render it with a
ไม้เอก as
แซ่บ. I think this is important because it suggests that they themselves don’t know how best to render this tone. Further more, it shows that the tone can fluctuate between high to falling or even to “high-falling” like it does up here in the Northeast of Thailand.
I guess in the end it doesn’t really matter if
แซบ is written with a
ไม้เอก or not—if it’s redundant or not. The fact is unless you have to deal with one of the Lao dialects up here that word is not in Central Thai and therefore shouldn’t be fretted over too much. More than anything the word
แซบ is nothing more than a novelty to most Thais, similar to David’s, over-priced, underwhelling Isan restaurant in Phuket. Hehe
Hope that wasn’t too winded.
(Note to Glenn, if the Laos characters don’t appear, try downloading that font from Northern Illinois University Website at www.seasite.niu.edu The font is called MaHaSila.)
Now I’ve got a question about a redundant
ไม้เอก of my own:
ในคำว่า แรด ที่เราคงจะใช้กันเป็นคำแสลงคำด่าอะไรยังเนี้ย และที่หมายความว่า slut
ของภาษาอังกฤษโดยตรง นี่ไงจำเป็นต้องใส่ไม้เอกด้วยรึเปล่านะครับ??
บางทีเคยเห็นมันออกเป็น แรด แล้วบางทีสะกดเป็น แร่ด...
แล้วขอถามหน่อยอันไหนถูกต้องเนี่ยนะครับผม?
That’s it for me for now. Cheers!
Thaitom
