Inconstant Consonants

When I went to work in Thailand, my company encouraged me to learn Thai. “It would be to your advantage” is what I was told. Unfortunately, I got involved with a Thai woman called Toy who actively discouraged me from learning Thai. She wanted to be able to talk to her friends without me being able to understand what she was saying – presumably, about me.

After an eternity of 6 months married to her, she was persuaded to walk out of the marriage, and I got on with my life. I had another girl primed and waiting, so the walk-out was exactly what I wanted to happen, and this new girl was helpful towards me in my attempts to learn Thai.

Once I had learned about the unwritten vowels, I started to make mistakes. These mistakes were because I had not yet learned about the Thai consonants which can become vowels.

These dual-purpose consonants are:
อ – aw ahn;
ว – waw waeng;
ย – yaw yuk;
and to a certain extent, ร – raw rheua.

As a short aside, I tend to reach for my head when I hear mention of raw rheua; this is in anticipation of tearing out handsful of my hair. It is a most frustrating consonant.

OK, so now we get down to business. What are the dual-purpose consonants all about? Well, obviously, there is some other function that they perform, and that function is to act as a vowel in certain circumstances. The trick is being able to recognise these circumstances.

Have you ever been on the road in Thailand and seen the rear end of a truck? I can’t recall seeing any trucks there which did not have the three characters “พวง” clearly visible somewhere low and in the middle of the rear. That’s paw-pun waw-waeng ngaw-ngu, or PW[NG]. The mistake that I was making was to not know that the W character changes to a specific vowel when it is the middle letter of a 3-letter word; I thought that it was the same as “Nakorn” and it would become “Pawong”. This is not the case. Waw-waeng becomes a vowel which has the sound “oo-ae”, so the word is pronounced “poo-ang”. The Thai word[s] “rot poo-ang” mean “truck”.

So there’s an exception to the two-unwritten-vowels rule.

Let’s look at an easy one now, yaw-yuk. Officially, when yaw-yuk appears at the start of a word or in the middle, it is a “Y”. At the end of a word it becomes an “I”. Can anyone tell me the difference between writing “soi” and “soy”? They are pronounced the same by my mouth...

Leaving what I think is the strangest until last, we can now look at aw-ahn. This character allows another strange rule to be followed, and it is probably the most difficult character to fully understand – I still can’t claim to know all about it, and I have been looking at it for about ten years. The best way I can describe aw-ahn is that it is both a dummy consonant, and an “O” sound vowel. I sigh and rack my brain, trying to think about what form of words will best convey what I know. Another of them darned foreign rules says that all words must start with a consonant, if a word has to start with a vowel-sound, you write a silent consonant as the start of the word.

I like to use either “Austria” or “Australia” as the illustration for both uses of aw-ahn. The “Aus” portion, when written in Thai, is aw-ahn aw-ahn saw-seua. The first aw-ahn is the dummy [silent] consonant; the second is the “O” sound. So you will read ออส...

And now, the one that I consider to be the odd man out in the Thai alphabet, raw-rheua. From my little learning of the Thai language, at least two rules apply to this character, and if I look further, I could perhaps find more applicable rules. The first rule that applies is the end-of-word value shift. That’s where it officially becomes an “N” sound, but in actual usage, it turns into the “RN” sound – one needs to remember that the theory and the practice do not always perfectly interface with one another. That means that what is written into the English translations and what is actually spoken do not always co-incide.

My sister-in-law, the lady who was nicknamed after the obscene curcurbit [fuk fang], has the officially given name of บรรณารักษ์. That’s a name of two words, and if one applied the principle of two unwritten vowels to the first three consonants, one would be wrong. The baw-bai-mai raw-rheua raw-rheua – or BRR – becomes BAN. That means that the first raw-rheua becomes an A sound, as in “apple” and the second raw-rheua follows the value-shift rule, and becomes an “N” sound.

So there you have it. Four consonants which don't always say as they read.

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