There is no gender in relation to inanimate objects in Thai.

With regard to people and animals, gender is indicated where necessary by the addition of another word or words.

In the case of human beings we use the word CHAI to denote male and YING to denote female.

	DEK CHAI	เด็กชาย	A boy.
	DEK YING	เด็กหญิง	A girl.

For people engaged in certain menial work, mostly of the domestic variety, we sometimes use POR (father) or MAA (mother) as a prefix to denote gender.

	POR KROO-A	พ่อครัว	A male cook. (Father of the kitchen)
	MAA KROO-A	แม่ครัว	A female cook. (Mother of the kitchen)
	MAA BAHN	แม่บ้าน	A housekeeper, housewife.

For animals we use two additional classifiers, POO for male and MEE-A for female.

	MAAW DTOO-A POO	แมวตัวผู้	A male cat.
	MAAW DTOO-A MEE-A	แมวตัวเมีย	A female cat.

As we have already seen the sex of a person speaking is often shown by the “polite” word used at the end of the sentence as only a man can use KRUP and only a woman can use KA.

In Lesson 12 you will see that the sex of the speaker is often shown by the first person pronoun used.

Generated by Lyndon Hill on Thu Jul 20 18:40:32 BST 2006.

Copyright remains with the original authors.