“A round-eyed person is comfortably getting fresh air.”

The tile of this blog may sound a little strange, but it is a direct translation of a valid and common sentence in Thai. I would like to apply the knowledge provided in the Carnie reading to this sentence and compare the differences between the Thai and the English syntax. To make things simpler, the original Thai text, its pronunciation, a word by word translation, and the technical breakdown of the sentence in a bracketed diagram is shown as the following.

คน                   ตา               กลม          ตาก           ลม            อย่าง              สบาย

Kon                  ta              klom          tak           lom            yang              sabai

(A) person      eye(d)       round          get            air           (-ly)            comfortable

[NP [N person][adjP [adj  eye][adjP [adj round]]]][VP [V get][N air][advP [adv [-ly][adj comfortable]]]]

Comparing this Thai sentence to English, there are some clear similarities and differences between the syntax of the two languages. Both languages are in a SVO (Subject Verb Object) word order, but in Thai the adjectives are always written after the words they modify, and Thai nouns do not have determinants. Furthermore, Thai words do not change form regardless of tense, gender, or part of speech. In this sentence, the word “yang” (อย่าง) is added instead of the derivational suffix “-ly” to convert the adjective “sabai” (สบาย) into an adverb.

(This difference between language structure is one thing that young bilingual speakers, like I was, often get confused. When I was very young, I tend to interchangeably put the adjectives in the front and back of a noun.)

Another interesting thing about this sentence are the words for eye and round (ta & klom). Since Thai writing does not have spacing between words like in English, these particular words (ตากลม) can be read as “ta klom” (ตา-กลม) which means round-eyed or “tak lom” (ตาก-ลม) which means getting some fresh air. To be precise, the consonant sound “k” can either be the ending sound of the first word or the beginning  of the second word. In this particular case, speakers are unable to use the meaning or semantics to judge which pronunciation is correct since “round-eyed” and “getting fresh air” both make sense after the noun “(A) person.” However, Thai native speakers can automatically guess the correct pronunciation based on the syntax. The words  “round eyed” is an adjective phrase and “getting some fresh air” is a verb phrase. The noun, “A person,” should directly be followed by the adjective phrase that modifies it, and then followed by a verb phrase to complete the sentence. Therefore, the correct readings must be “round eyed” and “getting fresh air.”

This example demonstrates the innate ability of human brains to take into account the position of a word or phrase in a sentence as well as its surrounding context to resolve ambiguity based on the syntax.