#sorry to all the gifmakers out there who've been subjected to my long-ass ep 5 rooftop scene tags re: แม่งโคตรเหงาเลยเว่ย

[philologique]

perpetually fascinated by how the thai series i've watched tend to translate vulgar intensifiers,¹ and specifically thinking about โคตร,² which i'm just gonna write as "kho:t" for the rest of this post (pronounced with an aspirated k or the 'ch' in 'loch' and an unreleased t at the end; the colon just makes the o long)

heads up that i don't actually speak thai and i'm not any kind of translator! just an english speaker with a pretty good ear who spends approximately two-thirds of all waking hours thinking about language. footnotes and stream of consciousness thoughts on ongoing phonological change(!!) in footnotes under the cut.

anyway! kho:t literally means ancestry, clan, descent, or lineage,⁷ but is used an intensifier that wiktionary describes as "slang, sometimes considered vulgar." ⁸

i think about thai intensifiers—and specifically kho:t—all the time in the context of episode 5 of bad buddy. pat's "it was so depressingly lonely for me" is the last pin you can hear drop before the dam breaks, but what he says is แม่งโคตรเหงาเลยเว่ย, (maeng kho:t ngao loey woey). which is a bit rawer? cruder? three of those five words (แม่ง,โคตร,เว่ย) are sometimes are translated as "damn," including just a few sentences earlier when pat says "while you were away, my life was so damn happy."

when i first watched bad buddy i didn't know a single sentence in thai, and i have no idea how any other choice might have hit me in that moment. but at least twice a week i wonder whether and how that translation choice might have affected the english-language bad buddy fandom. damn, it was so lonely. so damn lonely. so freaking lonely. so desperately lonely. so depressingly lonely.

of course, it was all of those things.

¹ Shout out to Methawee Yuttapongtada for their article, "Intensifier as Changed from the Impolite Word in Thai," without which it would have taken last-year-me months longer to tell what pat was saying. i was playing the audio of this scene on a loop in my brain and assumed that the velar fricative was a /kʰ/, but there are so many spelling options for word initial /kʰ/ and word final /t/ that i gave up experimenting with spellings and looked for english-language linguistic literature on thai intensifiers.

² Theoretically pronounced /kʰôːt/ but often (usually?) realized by young speakers in contemporary thai as [xôːt] or [χôːt], which is a whole other thing (that is vastly more interesting to me personally).³ ⁴ i feel like (at least gen z) speakers use a velar or uvular fricative in more or less free variation with an aspirated k, but i haven't come across any literature on it other than in descriptive studies of northern thai.⁴ ⁵ Either way kʰôːt rhymes with the "tô:t" in the thai word for sorry, which you'll probably recognize if you've watched anything in thai!

³ I know this is rough IPA lol. the unreleased diacritic looked weird on tumblr and struck me as unnecessary for phonemic transcription given that all word-final stops are unreleased. also i'm fine with just using the most commonly used latin-script tone diacritics for standard central thai. to me IPA's value is in precision and facilitating common understanding; i don't feel like any of that's lost by not using IPA tones here.

⁴ PHONETICS THOUGHTS re /kʰ/

I kinda think [kʰ], [x], and [χ] are in more or less free variation phonologically among most speakers today in all environments except before close/high front vowels—คิด is pretty much always [kʰit], and from watching a bunch of cooking shows 'salty' (เค็ม) seems to be not-quite-invariably pronounced with a [kʰ].

...but then i think boom used a fricative (possibly [ç]) when saying คิดอะไร at one point in last weekend's hidden agenda?? and 'okay' (โอเค) seems to have a fricative at least half the time i hear it. i would hazard a guess that if you did several hours of (ideally) informal linguistic interviews with central thai speakers of different ages: (1) everyone would have some velar or uvular fricatives, (2) the fricative /kʰ/ would be more common among younger speakers (vs older speakers) in all (syllable-initial) phonetic environments, (3) individual speakers would be most likely to pronounce /kʰ/ as a fricative before more open/low and back vowels and in true consonant clusters, (4) individual speakers would be least likely to pronounce /kʰ/ as a fricative before closer/higher front vowels, particularly /i/, and (5) speakers would be more likely to pronounce /kʰ/ as [kʰ] when they're paying attention to their speech, e.g. reading off a list of words in isolation—which takes us to:

SOCIOLINGUISTICS-ish THOUGHTS re /kʰ/:

I know i just talked about the phonological constraints and possible ongoing sound change for the phoneme /kʰ/ but i think it's super NOT free variation in practice, even before a vowel like /a/. this is just based on observation from contemporary dramas/cooking shows/interviews/songs (which is another thing i have Thoughts about), but i feel like at the moment it's largely a register thing that maps imperfectly onto levels of formality (and also friendliness? one hyper-specific almost-baseless hypothesis i'd like to test is that you'll hear more fricative /kʰ/ in constructions with the particle 'na' (นะ)). i would also guess that if there are any attitudinal studies on the pronunciation, they would reveal that most speakers view an aspirated stop as the "proper" way to pronounce syllable-initial /kʰ/.

i would love to look at whether /kʰ/ is realized as a fricative more or less often in constructions with certain particles, as an easy proxy for certain kinds of register. (i would also want to look at this with different first- and second-person pronouns, although so many of them are roughly gendered or would correspond to the relative age of the speaker and listener that it would almost certainly skew the results and might just tell us more about the demographics that are leading this phonological change! which is also useful!) ANYWAY if i win the lottery maybe i'll go back to linguistics for real bc i miss it desperately and want an excuse to study this 😭

re attitudinal research, I would really want to poll and have linguistic interviews with thai speakers of central thai as well as bilingual speakers of central thai and northern thai, isan/lao, and other tai and non-tai minority languages in thailand. i'm interested in questions about possible interference from those languages vs the extent to which speakers might emphasize differences between their respective minority languages and central thai (even where they may not exist) for the sake of maintaining regional/cultural identity through language (or something?? this is really poorly articulated but as an example i'm thinking about how my dialect of swiss german uses the same construction as standard german for the verb "to hurt" (Weh tun/Weh tue), but swiss german speakers think of "Weh tue" as a uniquely alemannic construction and instead use the word "schmerzen" when speaking/writing swiss standard german, effectively inventing a "german" construction that the local language can be in opposition to. see also fn 5 and 6 on northern thai below.)

⁵ Those studies note (if i recall correctly, this is off the top of my head lmao) that kʰr- consonant clusters in northern thai effectively drop the r and realize the k as a fricative.⁶ which. i'm not convinced this is uniquely part of northern thai so much as a productive phenomenon across central and northern thai that's just highly register-dependent in the standard language. (i would argue that at least the dropping of 'r's and 'l's from consonant clusters absolutely is just part of central thai phonology at this point. if being able to pronounce a consonant cluster—or a rolled r, for that matter—is a sign of ~good education or ~elocution rather than something that any subset of speakers learns as part of the spoken language when acquiring the language as children (which is possible, i just have not observed it), then—apart from the extent to which it conveys social meaning—i don't really think of it as a fundamental part of the language itself. this is maybe kind of a hot take lmao)

⁶ There was also a clip i watched—i think it was from the 1000 stars bts of khaotung trying to speak northern thai—where someone basically articulated that same rule to him, like "for ครบ just say /xop/"

⁷ From sanskrit, hence the silent r in the thai script.

⁸ I don't know nearly enough abt thai language or culture to meaningfully analyze the implications of that etymology or how โคตร might best be translated with minimal context. i'm guessing "damn" might be at about the right level of intensity/vulgarity as an intensifier, but it carries such explicit religious implications that i'm hesitant to use it?? i'm happy to let the translators and subtitlers make the difficult decisions while i just ponder stuff about sound change