I occasionally have readers who write in to ask me to explain what’s up with all those numbers next to all my karoke Thai words. The answer: the numbers are declaring tones. But why am I using such an unintuitive method, I’m asked?

As such I will explain what all the methods I’ve seen are. And then I’ll explain my thoughts on each.

 

1) Method #1: Simply don’t write the tones.

You’d be amazed at how many ‘learn thai’ books out there that just don’t bother with declaring tones. If you see a book like that, burn it for me.

 

2) Method #2: Use the ‘Vietnamese’ method.

It was probably the French who invented this method because the Vietnamese didn’t use (or even have?) a written language before colonization. In written Vietnamese (tiếng Việt), which uses the French alphabet, you’ll often see little squigglies around the letters. These are used to define tones. My guess is that a similar train of thought is used for when writing Thai using the English alphabet, which is why I call it the ‘Vietnamese method’ (I made this name up).

For Thai, you add a mark above a vowel in each syllable of the word as so:

e – mid tone

è – low tone

é – high tone

ê – falling tone

ĕ – rising tone

For example, the word for ‘hello’ has four syllables: sàwàtdeekráp

I have two issues with this method. First, it’s a bit non-intuitive – you need to spend some time to memorize it. I mean, the low tone looks like a picture of a line falling, no? And the falling/rising marks have both a falling and rising half – so which is which? But my bigger issue is, where are these squiggly marks on my keyboard anyway?! To use it, I have to bring up Windows Character Map and then find the appropriate vowels and tone marks, then copy/paste it over. It’s time consuming.

 

3) Method #3: Use a sub/super script to define the tone.

This method involves writing a little letter to represent the tone of each syllable of a word using either subscripts or superscripts. This method is more intuitive than the previous Method #2, and doesn’t require any time to learn.

The code is as such:

M – mid tone

L – low tone

H – high tone

F – falling tone

R – rising tone

For example, the word for ‘eat’ would be: gin^M

Microsoft Word has a little button at top that makes it easy to create sub/superscripts. Push it a second time to exit it.

There is one annoying issue with this method – you are forced to break up the word for each syllable with a space before Microsoft Word allows you to add a script. It does allow you to delete that space afterwards, but it’s two extra annoying steps.

For example, the word for ‘hello’ has four syllables: sa^Lwat^Ldee^Mkrap^H

Lastly, when writing on a big black/white board by hand, the scripts can be hard to see for those in the back of the class. And they can get mixed up with the rest of the word when I don’t ‘super’ them enough.