Re: Silencing in Thai

Richard Wordingham wrote:

> Phinthu's also used in dictionaries, but as you say, it's hardly in
> common use, which is why I emphasises the word. Thanthakhat is rather
> different, as it silences consonants, occasionally taking a vowel out
> as well. Where does thanthakhat come from? Come to that, why is the
> final vowel of Sankrit -a stems deleted word-finally?

Well, in actuality, the thanthakhat/karan doesn't *only* kill the final
Pali-Sanskrit -a#, since other words like พันธุ์ทิพย /bandhudibya/ (<
bandhudivya) [phanthíp] also exists, cf: -ศาสตร /śaastra/ [sa:t] -ology,
etc.
The whole syllable lopping seems to have a lot of input from Khmer
reduction as well... Although, I think it really has a lot more to do
with the usual fit of a monosyllabic/sesquisyllabic language schrunching
a polysyllabic language's loans...

> I've little idea. I post and reply via the archive rather than via
> e-mail. The archive's format seems to be Latin-1, but that may just
> be the browser's default. In this case I cut and pasted from a
> TIS-620 page. The text is perfectly readable in the archive if I
> switch the encoding to TIS-620 or one of its supersets. That suggests
> that it was sent as TIS-620 tagged as Latin-1. (The concept doesn't
> faze me; at one point I was regularly FTPing binary object files in
> ASCII mode, as binary mode corrupted them. I've yet to work out why
> Notepad on my home PC thinks ANSI means TIS-620!)

I wonder if the moderator can make sure to specify UTF-8 encoding for
traffic...?

cheers,
-patrick