Talk:Northern Thai language

message: The reason that Northern Thai people consider Yuan to be pejorative is that they don't know what it means. They confuse it with the now-pejorative term for the Vietnamese, which is a homophone, though the two are spelled differently. In point of fact, the Northern Thai (khon mueang, whatever) never referred to themselves as Yuan or Tai Yuan. The term is a purely literary one, derived from the Pali word Yavana, which in turn is derived from the Greek Ionia. In the original Pali usage Yavana referred to (1) speakers of the Greek language, and (2) the Greco-Bactrian kingdom in what is today Afghanistan/Pakistan. The name was later applied to the Chiang Mai region in the Pali-language chronicles (such as the Camadevivamsa) as part of a general trend to re-map the classical world of Indic Buddhism onto southeast Asia.
--Mrrhum 22:10, 2 Jun 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Untitled

message: Does anyone know which of the open vowels /a/ in คำเมือง front [a] or back [ɑ]? I changed the transcriptions so they're consistent with the Thai script page. Also, how do you add a macron to "ɑ" to make it a middle tone? We can replace the "˧" tone symbols. Wikky Horse (talk) 01:11, 21 April 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Front or back vowel? 

message: The tern Thai Yuan is considered pejorative, but I've yet to find a published source to state specifically why. One may get a sense of why from the article on the Dali Kingdom. I added:Historians, however, relate that the "traitor" was the last king of Dali, himself, who first fought and then surrendered to the forces of Kublai Khan, to be spared and later appointed by Möngke Khan (also known as Mengu) as the region's first Native Chieftain.
Du Yuting; Chen Lufan (1989) give ample reason to surmise the last king of Dali was the first Thai Yuan, and that the term subsequently applied to native chieftains subservient to the Yuan dynasty. —Pawyilee (talk) 14:09, 16 June 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Thai Yuan  

message: We ought to include a Gedney box.  Should it go under 'Tones' or 'Similar Words'?  If we put it under 'similar words' we can compare and contrast the Siamese and Northern Thai tones.  There are two different categories of tone differences - regular differences and irregular differences such as Siamese หญิง v. Northern Thai ญิง.  In this particular case, Lao has both forms!  RichardW57 (talk) 01:17, 9 December 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Gedney Box 

message: I'd like to see a source for the tones and meanings of the NT word /kàm.nɤ̀ːt/.  There's no guarantee that the meanings in Khmer and Siamese have transferred to Northern Thai.  I can't find the word in the Maefahlunang (MFL) dictionary of Udom Rungruengsi.  We could always replace it by by the simplex form /kɤ̀ːt/ ᨠᩮᩥ᩠ᨯ. RichardW57 (talk) 01:53, 18 January 2016 (UTC)
replies: text: /kàm.nɤ̀ːt/ is a noun in Northern Thai, although it can be used idiomatically as verb. I know this from my knowledge of Northern Thai (dialect spoken in Wang Nuea District, Lampang and Wiang Pa Pao District in Chiang Rai). I don't see it in the (rather rudimentary) dictionary I have on hand though, so all I have is OR right now. It would be fine to replace it with the verb form /kɤ̀ːt/, which is in my dictionary and would still represent a borrowing from Khmer. It's probably better anyway as it would be more easy for the reader to verify as well.--William Thweatt TalkContribs 07:52, 18 January 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Challenged Word Kamnoet 

message: I can't find /xūan/ in my dictionaries.  I'd like to see a source, or at least a check, that it isn't a mistake for /kūan/, which I can find.  /kuan/ is the form that one would expect, but perhaps it has been replaced by the Siamese form. RichardW57 (talk) 01:53, 18 January 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Challenged Word Khuan cha 

message: this need to be change to tai yuan language because not all northern thai are tai yuan and use tai yuan language Lalalulilalia (talk) 12:15, 11 March 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  change name to tai yuan language 

message: Based on my searches on Google Scholar, I think this order is more common: DS or DL + initial consonant category. Do you think this is accurate? If it is, "DS1-3, DS4, DL1-3, and DL4" could be used instead of "D1-3S, D4S, D1-3L, and D4L" respectively. --A.S. (talk) 17:56, 14 April 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm heavily influenced by Li's Handbook of Comparative Tai (1977).  I don't know if you've read it - it seems to have become a collector's item.  (It really ought to be regularly reprinted.)  He tags vocabulary items by tone class (A/B/C/D) and 1 for old voiceless initial and 2 for old voiced initial.  Where relevant, he uses a suffixed H/M/N/G for the split tones, so he has A1H v. A1M for Siamese and I think A1N v. A1G for Northern Thai.  He does make the point that consonant shifts can affect the phonation, so from his *pra:k (I think Pittayapon's *p-ta:k) 'to expose to the sun', we get Siamese and Northern Thai taak_A2, but in T'ien-Pao it's regularly thaaʔ_A1, with the aspiration determining the tone.  He also makes the point that vowel lengths might have changed before tones were assigned, so a word can be D1S in one dialect and D1L in another.  I think there are some examples of that between Siamese and Northern Thai, especially with back unrounded vowels.  Thus, old tone - phonation - length feels better to me.  It wouldn't surprise me if it turns out that the patterns are D1S ~ D2S but DS1 ~ DS2 ~ DS3 ~ DS4. --RichardW57 (talk) 03:13, 16 April 2022 (UTC)
replies: text:  Li's work (which I do not own but read parts of about 10 years ago) was one of the works that inspired me to learn more about tonogenesis. Have you read the origin of tones in Vietnamese (1954)? It is another inspiring work. --A.S. (talk) 05:01, 16 April 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes, though it took a long time for me to come across Haudricourt's article itself. --RichardW57 (talk) 11:52, 16 April 2022 (UTC)

text: Also, I wonder who was the first person to use 1-4 to refer to Gedney's four initial consonant categories across all tones. Was it Gedney himself? Previous studies that used 1-4 such as the studies by Owen (2012, p. 14) (link) and Osatananda (1997, e.g., pp. 168-177) (link) seemed to have used a tone box adapted from the one used in Gedney's (1972 or 1989) article called "a checklist for determining tones in Tai dialects" (link). His box had 1-4 and 5-20 (e.g., his B7 is B3 in the 1-4 system). I like the 1-4 system more than the 1-20 system because it is easier to understand. Do you know who did the adaptation? Thank you. --A.S. (talk) 18:51, 14 April 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: I haven't got a subscription to see the relevant part of Osatanada's thesis.  I first came across the 1/2/3/4 system at http://thaiarc.tu.ac.th/dialect/, which comes from something in 1982, but may have taken its current form in 2001 or 2002.  I note that uses notations such as DS3.  I remember reading the big article on the dialectology of the tones of Southern Thai, and feeling that its use of the numbers 1 to 20 was obfuscatory.
I don't see any split between 1-4 and 5-20  in Gedney's paper.  He puts a number 1 to 20 in each box, so modern B2 is his box 7, not 'B7'. --RichardW57 (talk) 03:13, 16 April 2022 (UTC)

text:  Thank you for your explanation. I am not sure why Gandour (1977), who used Gedney's tone box, used B7 and other higher numbers (link). --A.S. (talk) 05:01, 16 April 2022 (UTC)
replies: text:  Gandour is using Gedney's box numbering but adding the tone (and length) numbering to make it clearer.  He does this for all 20 boxes, so also has A1 and DL20.  At least, that is the effect.  It significantly improves the readability of the text.  He may have been influenced by a table for Li's system.  The next evolutionary step is to reduce the numbers modulo 4 to 1 to 4, but we still haven't found out who took that step. --RichardW57 (talk) 11:52, 16 April 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Proto-Tai tone + initial consonant category 

message: I've just removed a load of spurious initial cluster combinations, or at least, spellings that found no support in Rungrueangsi or the Northern Thai dictionary of Palm Leaf Manuscripts.  The one's I removed were combinations with letters primarily for Indic loanwords and ones that use MEDIAL RA to mark aspiration.  We have one left which is not supported by them, ᩉ᩠ᩃ᩠ᩅ, which would be an alternative spelling of ᩉᩖ᩠ᩅ for those who do not like ᩉᩖ.  Does anyone have source to back up its inclusion?  The best I can do is ᩉ᩠ᩃ᩠ᩅᩣ᩠ᨷ in a set of examples of how to decode Tai Tham spellings, but I have no confidence that the list is based on real spellings, as the table it is in includes clusters such as /fw/. --RichardW57 (talk) 11:28, 23 July 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: I just got a nasty shock when I saw the word quoted as evidence for  - the bottom consonants for the two half stacks were overlaid by Noto Sans Tai Tham, and I misread it as   It's one of the many problems to be fixed in that font. --RichardW57m (talk) 13:44, 26 July 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Spellings of Initial Clusters