Last week — with the help of a lot of friends on and off the Internet — I learned something very important pertaining to how tones for syllables without final consonants are produced, and I would like to share what I learned with you today.

There are a few short-length vowels in Thai that, when determining a syllable’s tone, are categorized as having a live ending. Those vowels are:

If a syllable does not have a final consonant but DOES contain one of the above vowels — the word/syllable ไป comes to mind — we would treat this syllable as a mid-class consonant with a live ending, resulting in a mid tone pronunciation.

I apologize for not having figured this out earlier and possibly causing some of you to be confused. Suffice it to say that I’m quite glad I found out this information at all, and all of the relevant articles in my blog have been updated to reflect this new information. I am also updating my Cheat Sheets with lots of new information (including this info) and will be posting a new version soon.