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jtb

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Posts posted by jtb

  1. I only want a small run-about in Pattaya for 2 days, can anyone advise please?

    Try One Stop Transport - 315 Moo 12 Tappraya Rd (at junction of Tepprasit Rd) tel 06-6267001. Really friendly, helpful company and very good value!

  2. LaOpera, Perhaps the oldest place in town, down Sukhumvit Soi39. Nice neighborhood place.

    I'll second that.

    Strictly airline food qualitity.

    Really??? Any chance of letting us know which airline you use? Eva Air (my airline of choice) don't serve pizza :o

  3. You might as well ask why the word "dog" isn't pronounced "perro" if you were a native Spanish speaker learning English. There is no more underlying logical reason for any language's word order being the way it is than for any certain word being what it is and not another. That's just how the language is.

    That said, the word เถอะ is what you call a hortative particle, and Thai is filled with sentence final particles. "Hortative" means you are exhorting the person to do something. You will notice there are also layers of particles, and the order is fixed. If you add นะ to the end, it must come outside of เถอะ:

    งั้นไปกันเถอะนะ. Semantic effects aside, this is simply a feature of Thai word order that could just as well be another way.

    As for นี่, Thai demonstratives come after the noun. Thais say "company this," but it's not any stranger to them than it is for you to say "red car" where Thai, Spanish, and hundreds to thousands of other languages would say "car red."

    A now-deceased linguist named Joseph Greenberg wrote a seminal paper in 1963 on language word order, examining the word orders and formulating "language universals" based on statistical tendencies of certain features to correlate with other features. It is part of the linguistics subfield of "typology," or categorizing languages based on certain shared features The Greenberg paper, and a critique and update to it written in 1989 by Matthew Dryer have tons of information about the percentages of the world's languages with various features, and which features are more common in which areas of the world. For the part of the world Thai is in, it has very common word ordering, pretty much exactly what we would expect based on the majority of languages in the area.

    Take a look at some facts from Dryer's paper, for which 200+ languages were sampled:

    Of 23 Southeast Asian/Oceanic languages, 17 of 23 put the adjective after the noun. The tendency is actually *stronger* if the language is SVO order like Thai: Out of 16 SEAsian/Oceanic languages with SVO word order, 12 of these put the adjective after the verb.

    Compare this to the Eurasia sample (since English is historically a European language): of 37 sample languages, 30 put the adjective before the noun. So for English we are not surprised that we say "red car," but for Thailand to say "red car" would actually be typoligically unexpected. In fact, for all 224 languages sampled for noun/adjective word order, 129 out of 224 order their words like Thai does. That's about 58%.

    Now let's look at demonstratives (word like "this" and "that"):

    Whereas in Eurasia 28 out of 30 languages sampled would say "this company" (a very strong statistical tendency), in SEAsia/Oceania 15 out of 24 languages would say "company this." Looking specifically at SEAsian languages with SVO word order, 11 of 18 would say "company this."

    From a linguistic standpoint, there's no point in asking why any language is ordered a certain way, since there is no logical benefit or detraction for its native speakers compared with native speakers of another language.

    As someone learning it as a second language, though, it will take some getting used to the Thai word order, but it will come to feel natural for Thai, and if you're like me you may find yourself mixing up your English if you speak Thai too often. :D

    Well if that doesn't win the 'Erudite Reply of the Week' award, I don't know what could! :o

  4. A man escapes from prison where he has been for 15 years. He breaks into a house to look for money and finds a young couple in bed. He orders the guy out of bed and ties him to a chair. While tying the girl to the bed he gets on top of her, kisses her neck, then gets up and goes into the bathroom.

    While he's in there the husband tells his wife:" Listen, this guy's an escaped convict, look at his clothes! He probably spent a lot of time in jail and hasn't seen a woman in years. I saw how he kissed your neck. If he wants sex, don't resist, don't complain, do whatever he tells you. Satisfy him no matter how much he nauseates you. This guy is probably very dangerous. If he gets angry he'll kill us. Be strong honey, I love you."

    To which the wife responds: "He wasn't kissing my neck, he was whispering in my ear. He told me he was gay, thought you were cute, and asked if we had any Vaseline. I told him it was in the bathroom.

    "Be strong honey. I love you too".

  5. with wholemeal slices , a som tam sandwich is also a tasty treat , especially with a slice or two of smoked ham thrown in , and most of the juices drained off so that the bread is not too soggy.

    fusion cuisine a la tax !

    :o Now that DOES sound interesting. I'll definitely try it. :D

  6. And: jtb...also interesting about your remark about the IBM (I suppose) Thinkpad.

    Why would you buy a IBM Thinkpad, instead any other brand? (what about screensize?)

    LaoPo[/color]

    Chosen as a consequence of advice from well-informed source, plus there was a good deal available at the time! Dell also have a good reputation and may well be cheaper than IBM now. Good luck! :o

  7. I have been a dedicated Mac user since 1987 but, in line with what Plus has said, if you are travelling the world, you're far more likely to find someone to solve a problem on a Windows machine than a Mac. Consequently, I went over to the 'Dark Side' a couple of years ago and bought a Thinkpad. No problems and much better than all the Mac gurus would have you believe!

  8. A riddle for you:

    Early one morning, some time around dawn, I asked someone what time it was.

    They said I was lying.

    Where were they from ?

    Edit>> - and what time was it ?

    Like we don't have enough riddles here already! :o (No idea btw) :D

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