The Use of Numeral Classifiers in Thai

1. The numeral classifiers2 of Thai constitute an important syntactic wordclass of the language and are employed with all nouns denoting objects which may be counted (e.g. 'man', 'house', 'word'). In most cases it is impossible to devise rules which will serve as an infallible guide in choosing the proper classifier to be employed with any given noun. For this reason it is desirable to memorize the classifier to be used with a noun at the same time that one learns the noun, just as in French or German one must memorize the gender of each