Thai phrasebook - Pronunciation
Thai is a tonal language with five tones: Mid, Low, Falling, High, and Rising. Meanings can change critically based on the tone, but Thais are fairly used to hearing foreigners mangle their language and can often work out the correct tone based on context. Try not to inflect your sentences; in particular, any questions should be pronounced as flat statements, without the rising intonation ("..yes?") typical to English questions.
The Thai written language is essentially alphabetic, but notoriously difficult to read due to a profusion of 44 consonants (many redundant), complicated tone and vowel signage around consonants and a complete lack of spaces between words.
Vowels
Thai has a complicated set of vowels and diphthongs that distinguishes between vowel length (short and long) and vowel position (front and back). In Thai script, vowel signs are always written around consonants and the letter ภ(k) is used here to demonstrate. This list follows the Royal Thai General System of Transcription (except that some long vowels are doubled).
Consonants
Thai distinguishes between aspirated ("with a puff of air") and unaspirated ("without a puff of air") consonants. Unaspirated consonants exist in English too, but never alone: compare the sound of 'p' in "pot" (aspirated) and "spot" (unaspirated). Many English speakers find it helpful to pronounce an imperceptible little "m" in front to 'stop' the puff.
In Thai romanized with the Royal Thai General System, the distinction is usually represented by writing aspirated consonants with "h" and unaspirated ones without it. In particular, "ph" represents a hard aspirated 'p' and not a soft 'f', and Phuket is thus pronounced "Poo-ket". Likewise, "th" is a hard aspirated 't' and hence Thailand is pronounced "Tie-land".
Other systems of romanization may use 'bp', 'dt' and 'g' for the unaspirated sounds, and 'p', 't', and 'k' for the aspirated sounds.
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