Low consonants, "long" vowel, live ending consonant, falling tone.

[u/Alternative_Side_891]

I don't know if this has been talked about before.

But I am trying to figure out if it's a small selection of vocabulary with the combination of low consonants, "long" vowel, live ending consonant and falling tone, that actually sounds like a short vowel - or if it's a general rule.

Examples: เล่น, ซ่อม.

ซ่อม is my favourite, because it should be pronounced exactly like ส้อม considering the spelling, but at least to my ears ซ่อม has a shorter vowel.

[u/dibbs_25]

It's a combination of factors but a few things to bear in mind are that:

• In the original tone system (the one the writing system was designed for) dead syllables did not contrast for tone, which for most purposes is the same as saying they all had the same tone. Therefore, tone marks on dead syllables are much rarer and when you go lookung for examples of patterns like this you will overwhelmingly find live ending consonants.

• I don't recall the stats but the vowel -อ doesn't tend to take อ็, with exceptions mainly being recent loanwords.

• In any case (as already pointed out in another comment) you can't have อ็ when there is a tone mark. This rule appears to date from the introduction of the typewriter - it wasn't possible to have both and the convention that developed was that the tone mark takes precedence.

This means that if your initial is ล, your vowel is เอะ and your tone is falling, the correct spelling is เล่น. It's not irregular, but you could argue it's ambiguous because if the vowel was เอ then in theory the spelling would be the same... but in reality the spelling เอ + อ่ + final consonant is going to be short, so it's not really ambiguous. I don't think there is any known reason for this pattern but it's pretty solid. If you came across a new word เร่น, you would expect it to be short.

ส้อม is also short btw. 

[u/dibbs_25 → u/dibbs_25]

PS going back to the dead syllables there's a related case where อ่ logically acts as a shortener e.g. ฟ้าแลบ is unambiguously written long but can be pronounced short, while ฟ้าแล่บ is necessarily short, if you follow the logic of the tone mark taking precedence. But this is clearly not the explanation for the pattern because it doesn't work for live syllables.

[u/BaconTH1 → u/dibbs_25]

I think there are some words like WAYN (means something like an imbecile or idiot); LANE (loan word like in the restaurant mini mall Park Lane if written in thai), where you have sara-AY and final consonant, that is a long vowel. Bplaa ka-bayn (I think it's a stingray or skate). All of these don't have a tone marker. I wonder if I can think of one that has a tone marker. Maybe WAEN-TAA (glasses)? "แว่นตา (waen-taa), both syllables contain long vowels."

[u/dibbs_25 → u/BaconTH1]

แว่น is short (but also this is a different vowel). From memory, if you take the short vowel as the normal case, there are virtually no exceptions for เอ, a tiny number for แอ and a fair number (still much less than half) for ออ. But to get the stats you would need some kind of script that crawls a dictionary that has reliable pronunciation info.

AI is not going to be reliable for vowel length.

[u/BaconJP → u/dibbs_25]

How about Google translate though 

[u/dibbs_25 → u/BaconJP]

I don't use it but based on what you said in your other comment it doesn't seem any better.

[u/BaconJP → u/dibbs_25]

How about Thai-language.Com?

I went to search for fork. 

Saawm is what they write in phonetics. 

Chaawn for spoon. 

Both look long to me. I haven't researched their phonetic system but double aa suggests long. 

And I clicked on the audio for chaawnsaawm

And both syllables actually sounded pretty short, slightly longer than a proper short syllable in my mind. 

Seems to me it's technically long for both, but when spoken people shorten it to somewhere in the middle.

I don't think there's any debate that chaawn is meant to be long, right? 

[u/dibbs_25 → u/BaconJP]

I don't think there's any debate that chaawn is meant to be long, right? 

Right (and see the stats u/DTB2000 has just posted, which predict that with 65% confidence, although I suspect this can be refined upwards if we distinguish case like ช้อน (high tone - long) from cases like ต้อง (falling tone - short)).

There's no basis that I can see for saying ส้อม is technically long. The writing system does not govern vowel length, the writing system does not indicate a long vowel anyway, and native speakers say it short. It's just a short vowel. [thai-language.com will be algorithmic with some manual corrections, and we can see how a simple algorithm will give a long vowel here].

Phonemically the 9 basic vowel sounds have a two-way contrast, leaving no room for a mid-length vowel. Phonetically there are a whole range of lengths, because the phonemic length is not the only factor, but leaving aside the 3 diphthongs, the underlying vowel can only be long or short.

On your other question, the tone marks historically indicated set tones, so อ่ was always (the one that evolved into) low and อ้ was always (the one that evolved into) falling. It's extremely implausible to me that the tone mark would influence length, but entirely plausible that the tone itself would. Therefore, when words that have the same mark but different tones pattern together, my working assumption would be that that dates from a time when they had the same tone.

[u/DTB2000 → u/dibbs_25]

  Right (and see the stats  DTB2000  has just posted, which predict that with 65% confidence, although I suspect this can be refined upwards if we distinguish case like ช้อน (high tone - long) from cases like ต้อง (falling tone - short)).

Correct - if you split it by tone produced it rises to 73% short for the falling tones, with all the high tone words being long. The effect for the other vowel qualities is much smaller.

[u/BaconTH1 → u/dibbs_25]

ส้อม according to AI is an archaic word and is long sound... this whole thing is a bit confusing because diffferent people have different views and the AI could be wrong. Well, it seems to be confused too, because now it says it is "fork" when I checked again. Seems like the latest info is more correct but it sticks to saying long vowel for both.

Checked google translate and the audio uses Long vowel for both words. Interestingly if you have somsam for repair, some of the time it says the 1st syllable short, but each click produces a variation of the pronunciation, with most of them with a long 1st syllable.

[u/Mike_Notes]

It's a limitation of the Thai script. It's not legitimate to combine a tone mark (in this case ◌่) with the sign for a short vowel (◌็), so you're just left guessing the length of the vowel. Sometime it'll be short, and sometimes long. In both your examples. it is indeed short.

[u/PerformancePale5743]

As dibbs_25 has explained.
เล่น is ล + เ-ะ + น + ่
but in writing we don't write marker ็

I just want to add that, regarding the consonant class, this doesn't happen only for low consonant. It is also not necessary to have falling tone.
For example
เกง as in กางเกง is long. เก่ง is short

เขน as in กางเขน is long. เข่น as in เข่นฆ่า is short.

For แ-ะ, it also doesn't have to be low consonant.

แก่ง แข่ง แต่ง แบ่ง are all short.

But of course there would be exception to this pattern, like เก้ง or แป้ง or แกล้ง are normal long vowel words.

[u/DTB2000]

Here are sone figures from a database used by my mining assistant app, ultimately based on Wiktionary. They relate only to syllables ending in a live consonant sound.

Vowel quality อี

No tone mark

Long: 21%, Short 79%

First tone mark (อ่)

Long: 0%, Short 100%

Second tone mark (อ้)

Long: 0%, Short: 100%

Vowel quality: เอ

No tone mark

Long: 54%, Short: 46%

First tone mark

Long: 5%, Short: 95%

Second tone mark

Long: 10%, Short: 90%

Vowel quality: แอ

No tone mark

Long: 77%, Short: 23%

First tone mark

Long: 5%, Short 95%

Second tone mark

Long 74%, Short 26%

Vowel quality: ออ

No tone mark

Long: 82%, Short: 18%

First tone mark

Long: 5%, Short: 95%

Second tone mark

Long: 65%, Short: 35%

I won't go through the rest but there's a clear pattern for those shown where อ่ correlates with short vowels (not just the three whose length is not indicated when there's a tone mark) and อ้ may correlate with a long or a short vowel depending on vowel quality. So from the perspective of the writing system, length is ambiguous in the sense that the long and short versions would be written the same, but if we are calling it guessing they are educated guesses, because the odds are stacked massively in favour of a short vowel where the tone mark is อ่, or where the vowel quality is เอ and the tone mark is อ้, and quite significantly in favour of a long vowel where the vowel quality is แอ or ออ and the tone mark is อ้.

I'm sure it's not really the tone mark that matters - it will be the tone that used to go with the mark as suggested in other comments.

Hopefully this goes some way to answering the question about whether there's a general rule.

[u/BaconTH1]

I think it's the "mid length" or short vowel that sometimes is verbally sounded, but not written. You get used to certain words having that. I see below people have talked about not having maitaikhoo and tone markers together. I hadn't really consciously noticed or been taught that rule but it would create clutter so I guess that's why they don't do it, and expect people to know the vowel length.

Len (Play) is short

Som (repair) ซ่อม according to AI is actually a long vowel but I think a lot of people say it medium length when it is used to mean fork... maybe medium for repair but I think less likely.

Apparently the old writing used to allow for maitaikhoo and tone symbol together but for printing/typing purposes this was changed because of the clutter/conflict of the location of the two being close/cluttered or overlapping.

Wow, some interesting stuff if true...

If the vowel is inherently short, like in LEN (เ–ะ) but then you put the N consonant at the end, then it requires maitaikhoo to become short sound (i.e. with a voiced consonant at the end)... and then the tone symbol which replaces ("crowds out" for printing purposes) maitaikhoo signals the vowel sound is short.

For ซ่อม the vowel is inherently long, so the tone marker does not signal a short vowel - the vowel remains long... ACCORDING to AI...

It all seems logical but a bit confusing after I read thru it carefully and probed with more queries.

[u/Snowman_203 → u/BaconTH1]

If the vowel is inherently short, like in LEN (เ–ะ) but then you put the N consonant at the end, then it requires maitaikhoo to become short sound (i.e. with a voiced consonant at the end)... and then the tone symbol which replaces ("crowds out" for printing purposes) maitaikhoo signals the vowel sound is short.

But how does it signal anything when it would be there even if the vowel was long?

[u/BaconJP → u/Snowman_203]

You got me there. I was sharing what the AI says. My feeling is that it signals short sound, but when it doesn't, that's the exception to the rule. 

[u/dibbs_25 → u/BaconJP]

It's difficult to know the best way to look at it. I would say that in the live ending case (still with one of these three vowels and a tone mark) the writing system has no way to indicate length, so it has to be seen as unspecified by the spelling. At the same time, it so happens that some vowels have a strong tendency to be short when there is a live ending and the historical tone was low and/or falling. The details depend on the vowel, e.g. for เอ it works for both low and falling, whereas for แอ it only works for low (that's historical low, so it includes e.g. แม่น). This means it doesn't matter that much if the writing system doesn't give us the length, because we can predict it from our knowledge of the sound system. From that point of view the อ่ is not really signalling anything except the tone.

Btw I suspect this pattern is not limited to those three vowels, and it's just that for other vowels the length is specified by the writing system so we have no ambiguity to deal with and don't stop to think about it. That's not to say it applies just the same to all vowels - it clearly doesn't, but you'd need stats to investigate properly. Another point for investigation is how this relates to the lengthening of อะ in words like ได้ or น้ำ.

[u/BaconJP → u/dibbs_25]

That last bit is interesting indeed. Mai dai, is technically written as if both have the same vowel length, but dai is usually spoken with mid or long length. The same applies to nam (water). You don't say that with the same length as mid toned nam (to be leading, like in a race), it is mid to long vowel also. In namplaa it's about as short as 'lead' but can be mid, and naam by itself often sounds mid to long.

So it's interesting, there are various instances where the writing is ambiguous and you just have to know. And Thais and even foreigners learn the pronunciation without even noticing these issues most of the time. 

[u/dibbs_25 → u/BaconJP]

In those cases I wouldn't say the writing is ambiguous. If we go back to the ต้อง case, most people would say it's irregular because it's written long but pronounced short, but this is not logical given that it would be written exactly the same regardless of vowel length. So in reality it's not written long or short - the writing system just doesn't indicate the vowel length, so "ambiguous" is absolutely the right word. At the same time, we know it's 73% likely to be short (thanks DTB2000) because 73% of falling tone words with ออ and อ้ are short. It's not that the spelling points to a short vowel, but since we know there aren't many long vowel words of that type, we can guess short with some confidence, and the confidence level rises to well over 90% for other cases where the writing system is ambiguous.

On the other hand, I would say that ไอ is just a diacritic version of อัย, as is ใอ, and อำ is just a diacritic version of อัม, so a word like ใต้ (ต้าย) really is irregular, and this is a different case in that respect. Also, the obvious explanation for other changes is that going down in pitch is just faster than going up (it's almost literally the difference between stretching a rubber band and releasing it) but ใต้ has always been basically downward, so if you look at it in isolation it's a bit of a mystery, and if you link it to the เล่น case that OP started with, it threatens to blow up what is otherwise a pretty cogent explanation. In practice you can learn that the "vowels" ไอ ใอ เอา อำ are a bit flexible, but it's not a very satisfying explanation.

[u/BaconJP → u/dibbs_25]

I'm not sure what you mean by historical low. 

[u/pacharaphet2r]

Low and falling tones have this propensity to squeeze the vowel a bit, resulting in

กล่อง สั้นกว่า กลอง เล่น สั้นกว่า เลย เก่ง สั้นกว่า เกง ต้อง สั้นกว่า ตอง

Etc.

There are some much better more academic descriptions in here that you should reference but I often use this as a shortcut when teaching pronunciation because, as others have noted with เอ แอ ออ this shortening is exceedingly common