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Re: thai grammar

PostPosted: Sat Jan 21, 2012 2:50 am
by Richard Wordingham
pensive wrote:
Tgeezer wrote:Can you show me an example of a stative predicate in English so I can see what it is, purely for curiosities sake of course.

The sea is green.

The problem with this example is that it is very hard to find a clear example of an intransitive stative verb in English. The closest I can come is the verb 'to smell' simply meaning 'to smell bad', but even that is subject to the caveat that smells wax and wane. A test for a stative verb is that it does not readily adopt the continuous verb form (the form in '-ing'). Stative verbs with complements or objects are common - 'to own' and 'to be' are good examples.

Stative verbs contrasting with adjectives do occur in other languages - Latin has stative verbs such as caleo 'to be hot' and valeo 'to be strong'. These had competing adjectives calidus 'hot' and validus 'strong'.

Adjectives tend to either behave like verbs or to behave like nouns. In the Indo-European scheme, adjectives were very like nouns (some deny that nouns and adjectives were distinct parts of speech in Latin), though the similarities are weaker in English. In Thai, either adjectives are very like verbs, or what we translate as adjectives are verbs and the true adjectives are a relatively small class.

Re: thai grammar

PostPosted: Sat Jan 21, 2012 3:31 am
by Tgeezer
Richard Wordingham wrote:
pensive wrote:
Tgeezer wrote:Can you show me an example of a stative predicate in English so I can see what it is, purely for curiosities sake of course.

The sea is green.

The problem with this example is that it is very hard to find a clear example of an intransitive stative verb in English. The closest I can come is the verb 'to smell' simply meaning 'to smell bad', but even that is subject to the caveat that smells wax and wane. A test for a stative verb is that it does not readily adopt the continuous verb form (the form in '-ing'). Stative verbs with complements or objects are common - 'to own' and 'to be' are good examples.

Stative verbs contrasting with adjectives do occur in other languages - Latin has stative verbs such as caleo 'to be hot' and valeo 'to be strong'. These had competing adjectives calidus 'hot' and validus 'strong'.

Adjectives tend to either behave like verbs or to behave like nouns. In the Indo-European scheme, adjectives were very like nouns (some deny that nouns and adjectives were distinct parts of speech in Latin), though the similarities are weaker in English. In Thai, either adjectives are very like verbs, or what we translate as adjectives are verbs and the true adjectives are a relatively small class.

Thank you Richard, you wont be surprised that My brain now hurts. Whatever that is grammatically.
I think that the differences between English and Thai are too great to be able to allow the classifications in each language to migrate from one to the other. In the same way that some nouns can't be translated in one word, neither can any other class of word.
That is probably my view because I don't know enough of either language. However I think that, because Thai words don't change shape, their position is the only way of knowing what they mean to do in the sentence, whereas in English we have both position and suffixes prefixes conjugations etc.
This English appears to have a confusing set of differing and overlapping ways of showing meaning to me.
I think that the meaning of Thai would be better found if the rules of juxtaposition were emphasized more, rendering the conversion to complicated English superfluous.
Kitchen grammar I know, but I am an engineer not a linguist, I can't discuss this at the academic level. Sorry. :)

Re: thai grammar

PostPosted: Sun Jan 22, 2012 4:06 pm
by kriswillems
I think about adjectives in Thai as verbs (like Richard explains).
So in the sentence, ทะเลเขียว, the sea is doing an action: being green. So, เขียว or being green is a verb.

In English there are similar sentence constructions that may lead to confusion.

"They do not like my dancing".

Is dancing a noun or a verb?
Most people will say dancing in this sentence acts as a noun. But I can think you could also call it a verb. It just a convention and our interpretation might very much depend on how things are called in our own native language.

"The dancing girl is tired"

Here dancing is adjective. But with a bit of imagination, I think you could also call it a verb. Again, it's just a convention.

I think it's pretty hard to match the concepts of Thai grammar onto the grammar concepts of another language (and the other way around).

Re: thai grammar

PostPosted: Mon Jan 23, 2012 12:43 am
by Richard Wordingham
Tgeezer wrote:However I think that, because Thai words don't change shape, their position is the only way of knowing what they mean to do in the sentence, whereas in English we have both position and suffixes prefixes conjugations etc.

And that is part of the argument for regarding Thai 'adjectives' as verbs.

Re: thai grammar

PostPosted: Mon Jan 23, 2012 10:51 am
by Tgeezer
My problem is that I am trying to take a piece of Thai and parse it using the nomenclature of the parts of a sentence as laid down in the RID.
As time goes by and I read more and learn the meanings of more words the less important their name and role in a sentence becomes. There are differing opinions on what a word does but generally no argument on the meaning.

ทะเล น. ห้วงนํ้าเค็มที่เวิ้งว้างกว้างใหญ่ แต่เล็กกว่ามหาสมุทร. . ที่อยู่
หรือเกิดในทะเล เช่น สาหร่ายทะเล ปลิงทะเล แมงดาทะเล.

เขียว ๒ ว. มีสีอย่างสีใบไม้สด.
As you can see the verb มี ก. ถือเป็นเจ้าของ,
is included in the definition of เขียว so to argue that เขียว acts as a verb is wrong.
If it were ทะเลมีสีเขียว then it becomes Subject verb noun adjective.

You can see that ทะเล is also a วิเศษณ์ at or occurring in the sea. Fortunately, here the RID has it covered but I expect that there are places where they don't.

Re: thai grammar

PostPosted: Mon Jan 23, 2012 11:26 am
by Tgeezer
Richard Wordingham wrote:
Tgeezer wrote:However I think that, because Thai words don't change shape, their position is the only way of knowing what they mean to do in the sentence, whereas in English we have both position and suffixes prefixes conjugations etc.

And that is part of the argument for regarding Thai 'adjectives' as verbs.

I don't know Richard. I used to think the problem was a verb which appeared to be an adjective, now I am not sure what the problem is. I remember when 'cupola' was a revelation to me, and think that it stems from the mixing of Thai and English grammar. I understand most of what I am reading at the moment and verbs are acting as verbs กำลังเล่น สอน เกิด adjectives มาสาย รับจ้าง เก็บขยะ subjects กินมากเป็น etc.

กริยา [กฺริยา, กะริยา] (ไว) . คําที่แสดงอาการของนามหรือสรรพนาม. (. กฺริยา; . กิริยา).

วิเศษณ, วิเศษณ์ [วิเสสะนะ, วิเสด] (ไว) . คําจําพวกหนึ่งที่แต่งหรือขยายคํานาม คํากริยา หรือคําวิเศษณ์เพื่อบอกคุณภาพหรือปริมาณเป็นต้น เช่น คนดี นํ้ามาก ทําดี ดีมาก. (.).

I have a book where the definition of a verb is very wide if anyone is interested.

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