Customer Reviews

A Reference Grammar of Thai (Reference Grammars)

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This volume is probably unique in its field : providing a comprehensive view of Thai grammar in the context of real-life language use in Thailand (so called "functional grammar").

In my opinion, the book will provide most value to :
- linguists wanting to understanding the grammar of the Thai language. In particular the book expresses many of its ideas in the standard terminology of linguists ; it refers to recent developments in functional linguistics using Thai as a test case ; use of IPA-based phonetic symbols
- advanced students of the Thai language who want a deeper understanding of the structure and grammar of the language. In addition, this audience will learn a great deal about linguistic analysis, as most of the linguistic terminology is carefully defined at the start of each section.

For those of you reading this review who are looking for a book that will help you to learn the Thai language from scratch, this book is not for you yet. A new student of Thai looking for an introduction to basic Thai grammar would be better served by Higbie's book of a similar title.

I can highly recommend this unique and scholarly work, to linguists wanting to understand Thai grammar, or to advanced Thai students wanting a better understanding of Thai grammar, from the viewpoint of how the language is used.

This is the most scholarly and complete work I have seen on this subject and reflects an enormous amount of work undertaken by the authors. This book will surely become the standard text on this subject.

There are now THREE very good Thai grammars available. David Smyth's book Thai: An Essential Grammar (Routledge Grammars) and the Higbie/Thinsan book Thai Reference Grammar were apparently the first two out of the gate, and now we have a third, which first appeared as a hardback in 2005.

This is probably not a book for beginners, BUT this judgement may depend on the type of "beginner" we are talking about. I think that once you have started learning to read Thai --- or even before --- you may find this book extremely useful. And, in an important way, it's useful aside from the grammatical explanations.

As a comparison: that old classic, William Kuo's Teaching Grammar of Thai had a lot of good grammar, but I came to love it because it presented ONLY Thai script and was fantastic handwriting practice. In a similar way, I appreciate that this is the first truly modern Thai grammar, but even more I love it because it presents hundreds and hundreds of examples of real Thai speech! Where else, for example, can you find a Thai saying, "Well, the electricity was almost unusable, or something like that..." "Or something like that?" How do you say THAT in Thai?

So, if you can read Thai in transliteration (and I give this book additional high marks for a transliteration system which is Haas-based and does not have to be learned!!), you may want to start leafing through this book in the early stages of learning the language. It will instantly take you way beyond the "sawatdii khrap" stages, and lead you into things like, "I don't THINK he was here, but I'm not quite sure..."

This book is FUN!

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Revised review: I am revising this review simply to state that I think this is the best of the three. Especially in the field of particles, it absolutely dusts the competition.