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Vietnamese, Thai and Burmese | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Wilco Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 6329 days ago 160 posts - 247 votes  Speaks: French*, English, Russian | Message 1 of 3 16 February 2010 at 2:55am | IP Logged |
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How can we compare these languages, and more specifically, their tones?
I've read contradictory information. Some say the tones play an much bigger role in Cantonese or Vietnamese than in Thai and Burmese. Much like Tibetan, these two languages are tonals, but apparently the tones don't change the meaning of words. Wherehas in Vietnamese, tones would play an even bigger role than in Mandarin or Cantonese, since most of the vocabulary is still monosyllabic. Did anyone study all three of them and can compare? Also, Burmese really seems to be understudied: is this a result of the political situation over there, or is there something terribly difficult I'm not aware of? 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| TixhiiDon Tetraglot Senior Member Japan Joined 5463 days ago 772 posts - 1474 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese, German, Russian Studies: Georgian | Message 2 of 3 16 February 2010 at 6:50am | IP Logged |
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I can't remember a great deal from my six months of Thai classes, but I do remember that the five Thai tones most definitely do change the meaning of words. We were taught the example of "ma", which means five completely different things when pronounced respectively using the middle, low, high, rising, and falling tones. All I can remember is that one of them means "horse"... What a waste of six months!
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| Fat-tony Nonaglot Senior Member United Kingdom jiahubooks.co.uk Joined 6139 days ago 288 posts - 441 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Russian, Esperanto, Thai, Laotian, Urdu, Swedish, French Studies: Mandarin, Indonesian, Arabic (Written), Armenian, Pali, Burmese | Message 3 of 3 16 February 2010 at 1:20pm | IP Logged |
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Thai and Vietnamese are very similar to Cantonese in that tone does affect the meaning
quite a lot. However, none of these three are on a par with Mandarin when in comes to the number of homophones, so there is some flexibility for the learner i.e. in the early stages you are likely to sound really funny rather than say something completely different. In Thai, many of the regional dialects differ only by tone so Thais are quite used to hearing tonal variation. I think in Vietnamese the Hue dialect is renowned for its unusual tones and foreigners with poor tones are often asked if they learnt Vietnamese in Hue! The tonal system in Burmese is said to be in decay; the only real tonal difference is high vs low with some syllables also having unusual articulation or final glottal stops to make them shorter. There's enough material around for Burmese but it tends to be expensive. Anything by Okell is generally very good - there's a very good introductory course available from SOAS. Dunwoody also do an expensive but very good reader. The problem is really communicating with the locals, I travelled to Myanmar 7 years ago and made some good friends, but it's not really feasible to keep in touch via the Internet or by phone and I'm reluctant to write letters (yes old-fashioned letters!)in Burmese in case it arouses suspicion. 5 persons have voted this message useful |
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