From Ancient Thai to Modern Dialects And Other Writings on Historical Thai Linguistics

by J. Marvin Brown

Standard comparative studies usually stop with phoneme correspondence lists, which illustrate neither the phonological system of the languages not the systematic nature of the changes. In this book, “transformation charts” of modern phonemes in the ancient arrangement reveal both of the above mentioned at a glance. A comparison of a dialects transformation chart with a chart of ancient Thai shows the systematic changes, while the dialects phonological chart insures the correct interpretation of the phonemic symbols. These charts, together with a map and a family tree (on fold-out sheets for simultaneous inspection), give a complete view of the phonological history of sixty Thai dialects. For the Thai a unique wealth of information. For the historical an ingenious methodology. For the a powerful phonological theory. And, for the traveler in a guide for converting central Thai words into the local pronunciation of nearly every part of the Kingdom. The book also includes other Writings on Historical Thai Linguistics. In addition, this reprint offers five more articles by Dr Brown on historical Thai linguistics that will help the reader understand the main book. A short article on Dr Brown’s “Control Phonology”, which appears here for the first time, is of special significance. This is the key to understanding all of Dr Brown’s work which was too far ahead of its time to be published when it was written in 1965. The gap has now been narrowed.

264 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1985

About the author

James Marvin Brown was an American linguist who studied the evolution of Thai and related languages, supervised the teaching of English and Thai at AUA Language Center, Bangkok, Thailand and developed the Automatic Language Growth approach to language teaching.

Reviews

[André · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's hard to decide whether I like or dislike this book. Brown developed a very idiosyncratic way of describing the phonological systems of the Tai-Kadai languages in this study. With formulas and dozens of not always intuitive abbreviations. However, he included expandable sheets at the end that can be used as a reference for the chapters. It's a bit hard to follow him in some points, but his analysis seems very thorough and credible. The amazing thing is that this book gives a kind of guide on how the various dialects of Thai, Tai, Lao and Shan developed from Ancient Thai (spoken in Yunnan around 700 AD), piece by piece, including the evolution of tones. If you manage to understand how these ideas work, you an actually use the various dialect charts to figure out how a word that you know in Bangkok or Standard Thai, would be pronounced in not only Ancient Thai but also in all the other dialects. What Brown falls short of mentioning, though, is that many of the words that pose problems to the reconstructions are in fact early loanwords (often from Chinese). Perhaps this wasn't known yet as of 1985, but that way a few problematic cases can be explained away.

[Nathan Glenn · Rating 5 out of 5]

There were some interesting nuggets in this book. It contains extensive documentation on the geographic and diachronic variation in Thai/Laotian/Isaan, a phonological analysis of Thai, and, the reason I bought the book, an easy-to-understand account of how Thai spelling came about. I tried to summarize Thai letters in a way that would be easy for me to memorize here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/...

The author also presents an (at the time) novel theory of phonology. The book is old enough that it felt like it was simply stating the now-acccepted differences between phonology and phonetics, though my reading of it might have just been too shallow.