Thai Phrase of the Day #3

How to choose the Phrase of the Day? So many options. But, I'll write about what I've most recently learned. Not exactly a phrase, but a series of phrases: how the Thai tell time.

The Thai have a rather unusual way of counting the hours. First of all, to ask what time it is you say

"Kii mong lao (khrap/kah)?"

The answer depends not only on what the clock face reads but also what portion of the day it is. Kind of like when we read 12:00, we may say it is noon, or we may say midnight. But the Thais do this for every hour. SO,

12 Midnight = tiang keun
12 Noon = tiang wan

1:00 AM is tii neung
2:00 AM is tii saang
3:00 AM is tii saam
4:00 AM is tii sii
5:00 AM is tii haa

"Tii" denotes that it is early morning, and the other words are just counting as normal.

But then at 6 AM we get a change. "Tii" is out and "chao" is in. Furthermore, the word for hours (mong) is explicitly stated at this point. SO,

6:00 AM is hok mong chao
7:00 AM is chet mong (chao)
8:00 AM is baat mong (chao)
9:00 AM is gao mong (chao)
10:00 AM is sip mong (chao)
11:00 AM is sip-et mong (chao)

I put "chao" in parenthesis after 6:00 AM because, even though it is the time of day marker, it is rarely said except for hok mong chao. The reason will become apparent once we get to the evening times.

1:00 PM is bai mong
2:00 PM is bai sang mong
3:00 PM is bai saam mong
4:00 PM is bai sii mong
5:00 PM is bai haa mong

Notice that "neung" (the word for "one") is missing from the 1:00 PM translation. I have no idea why they do this, but they do. "Bai," of course, is the time of day indicator for afternoon.

6:00 PM is hok mong yen

This is exactly the same as 6:00 AM, except that "yen" replaces the word "chao"

So far so good. But at 7:00 PM we get into some really wierd stuff. Instead of continuing our count of the hours from 6, at 7:00 PM we start over again with 1! "Tuum" is our time of day marker, SO...

7:00 PM is neung tuum
8:00 PM is saang tuum
9:00 PM is saam tuum
10:00 PM is sii tuum
11:00 PM is haa tuum

You can also see now why they rarely bother giving the time of day marker for 7 through 11 AM... the only time they would say it is seven o'clock would be in the morning... in the evening, seven o'clock is called one o'clock.

This is a bit confusing, obviously, and i still haven't quite gotten it down. I'm getting close, though. Minutes can be reported by just enumerating them (i.e. haa tuum sip see is 11:14), but there is also a system of saying "half past" and "quater till" and all that which I have yet to begin to learn.

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