31. (h) Negation of simple sentences is likewise accomplished in several different ways, depending largely on the way the affirmative sentence is constructed.
| kháw mâjdâj chŷy prasə́ət | His name isn't Prasert. |
| nân mâjchâj tó | That isn't a table. |
| mâj dii | (It) is no good. |
| mâj paj | I don't (want to) go. |
| jaŋ mâj paj | (He has)n't gone yet. |
| jaŋ mâj dâj kin khâwu | (They) hadn't eaten yet. |
| jàa paj | Don't go. |
| phǒm mâj dâj pen chaawnaa | I'm not a farmer. |
32. (i) some of the aspects of simple Thai sentences appear strange and arbitrary to foreigners, and the classifier system is formidable, but all these can be understood and mastered one-by-one through hard work. Possibly the most confusing features of Thai structure are the ways in which one sentence can be embedded in another to form a more complicated sentence. Sentence embedding is in itself nothing new to us. We do it in English all the time. Embed The exam was hard in She took an exam and we get She took a hard exam. Embed The model works in This is a model and we may get This is a working model or This is a model that works.
33. We have two problems with Thai embedding in Noun Phrases and Noun Compounds: (1) The word order is frequently wrong, since the main noun precedes its modifiers instead of following them as in English:
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