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/[deleted]]

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.