Suvarnabhumi - Pronunciation, Spelling, Origins?

[RDN]

I've copied this post from another forum on TV: ( http://www.thaivisa.com/forum/index.php?sh...ndpost&p=518410 )

Might be off the topic but I'll give it a shot:

I've been here for less than two yrs, but I've learnt to read Thai quiet accurately and know _most_ of the language rules.

Looking at "SUVARNABHUMI" raises two questions

1) There is no "v"-sound in Thai - they have only "w" - "woh - wan"

How can the official name of the name airport contain a "v"-sound then?

When going English->Thai, eg. "DVD" the Thais will of course say "DWD", nothing strange.

2) Where do the "r", the "b" and the "i" in "aRnaBhumI" come from?

In Thai it's pronounced "suwanapoom" but it's spelled with "Bali-Sanscript" characters at the end which may be confusing. Still, when transcribing it to English, it seems like the "official transcriber" mixed up Thai and Sanscript, or?

If all transcriptions were _this_ screwed up then Pattaya would be located close to ChoL-buri, Empire Tower would be located on Satr road and the last stop on the sky-train would be On-Nuch.

Guys, don't waste your time replying "uuh because Thai's are too stupid to spell", because all farang journalists at Bkkpost/Nation spell like this too and I would really like to know if there's a real reason for this.

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Anyone got any answers to yankee's questions?

[the scouser]

Spelling from Wikipedia:-

สุวรรณภูมิ

To me, that transcribes as "su-warn-na-poo-mi"

Scouse.

[RDN]

Spelling from Wikipedia:-

สุวรรณภูมิ

To me, that transcribes as "su-warn-na-poo-mi"

Scouse.

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My g/f pronounces it the same, but without the "i" at the end: "su-wahn-nah-phum" (please excuse transcription - not one of my strong points).

[the scouser]

Wikipedia reckons it's pronounced as your g/f says, RDN, so why is the sara "i" silent?

Help!!

Scouse.

[RDN]

Wikipedia reckons it's pronounced as your g/f says, RDN, so why is the sara "i" silent?

Help!!

Scouse.

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Waiting for one of the experts to enlighten us...

[katana]

I think it's just a quirk of Thai spelling/pronounciation, when you have a มิ on the end of a word, the สระ อิ sound is often ignored.

Another example is PHOOM JAI ภูมิใจ - To be proud.

[sabaijai]

I think it's just a quirk of Thai spelling/pronounciation, when you have a ÁÔ on the end of a word, the ÃÐ ÍÔ sound is often ignored.

Another example is PHOOM JAI ÀÙÁÔ㨠- To be proud.

Exactly. Whenever ÀÙÁÔ ([M]phuum) appears by itself or at the end of a word, the ÍÔ (/i/) is silent.

ÀÙÁÔ comes from the Pali-Sanskrit bhumi , which means 'land' or 'ground'. The Thais have 'Thai-ised' the pronunciation to [M]phuum.

In a compound Pali-Sanskrit word where another P-S syllable follows ÀÙÁÔ, the ÍÔ (/i/) is pronounced, e.g.: ÀÙÁÔÈÒµÃì (geography), from the P-S bhumishastra, pronounced [M]phuum-[H]i-[L]saat in Thai.

Suvarnabhumi - pronounced in Thai as [L]su-[M]wan-[H]na-[M]phuum - means 'Golden Land' in Pali. There is already a small town in Roi Et Province, northeastern Thailand, of the same name and at one time a large swathe of central Thailand and possibly parts of central Myanmar and Cambodia were known by this name.

It would have been a lot less painful for everyone concerned if the government had followed the same offical transcription as they did for the town, Suwannaphum. I wonder what the inhabitants of Suwannaphum, Roi Et, think about the airport's name?

Wikipedia entry on Suwannaphum:

Suwannaphum

[RDN]

Excellent post, sabaijai. So it looks like they've named it after a place in Southern India? Does Thaksin know?

[the scouser]

Suwannaphum it is, then. Thanks for the explanation.

Scouse.

[Richard W]

Wikipedia reckons it's pronounced as your g/f says, RDN, so why is the sara "i" silent?

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A final syllable is stressed in Khmer (and also Thai), and if it has a short vowel, it has to be followed by a consonant, be it only a glottal stop. The best guess is therefore that /bu:m/ (possibly /bhu:m/) is the closest a Khmer could come to /bhú:mi/ (stress on first syllable) without the pronunication sounding too peculiar. The other alternative would have been /bu: mí?/ (stress on second syllable, sounding like an Estuarine English 'mitt') and /bu: mí:/.

This explains the general silence of final short /a/ (unwritten, so we don't notice it's loss), /i/ and /u/ in P/S loanwords.

There is debate as to how natural a pronunciation /bh/ would be in Thai, but the great Thai consonant shift changed siamese /b/ to /p/ plus a 'breathy' vowel, and then /p/ plus breathiness was interpreted, in Siamese, Southern Thai, Lao and a few adjacent (or embedded) Central Tai dialects and one Northern Tai (or slightly more distantly related) dialect, as /ph/. No such interpretation occured in Northern Thai or Khmer - the consonant shift has swept through the Tai languages, most Mon-Khmer languages - including Vietnamese, Cham, and most of Chinese.

In the languages where old /b/ is now /p/, not /ph/, Indic /bh/ is usually represented by modern /ph/.

The pronunciation of -รณ- probably reflects the Pali pronuinciation as -nn-, though it could just be a case of syllable final ร being pronounced as /n/.

[Abandon]

sabai jai is right, it comes from Pali language. many of the pali words have the endings cut off in Thai, or cut short. Such as Dhamma = tam Acariya = ajahn

Why do they do this? In Pali the end of words changes according to both the tense and the case (i.e. to the man, from the man, belonging to the man, etc... all changes the end of the word.) In Thai of course the changing of the word due to grammar is unheard of. Even in English it is not done to the same extent as Pali. So it is my guess that the Thai's cut the word short as a way to focus on the stem, rather than the myriad of different ways to spell the word. That and of course, being basically a monosyllabic language, it is a natural adaptation.

As for the place itself. It is listed in the Buddhist commentaries as a Buddhist holy land/kingdom that existed a hundred+ years after the Buddha. There is a lot of contention as to exactly where the site was. Most western scholars/archeologists place it in Southern India, Burma, or possibly Malaysia (on the sea route to China). There has been some effort by Thai's to locate the historical site in Thailand, either by extending the malaysian empire north, or as a seperate holy land in Western Thailand. There is not much evidence for this. I guess that these days Thailand really is the Buddhist holy land ....

[RDN]

If you go to the Wikipedia page that Sabaijai posted ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suwarnabhumi ) and then click on the "Please see discussion on the talk page" link, you get to this page, which made me laugh (my red colouration):

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

I'm re-posting the new text here, in case some Thai nationalist comes along and decides to re-write the entire entry with the same propaganda nonsense they put in the museums.

Suwannaphum (also Suwarnabhumi) remains one of the most mythified and contentious toponym in the history of Asia. In Thailand, government proclamations and state museums insist that it was somewhere along their southern coast (and, in celebration of this, the government has named the new Bangkok airport after the mythic kingdom of Suwarnabhumi, or "Suwannaphum"); meanwhile, in Myanmar, authorities insist that it was the Sittang River in Burma. Working from limited historical sources (primarily, the vague accounts of the region provided by Chinese pilgrims on their way to and from India) the term has been identified with coastal regions from Indonesia to Malaysia.

The issue at the base of all these modern myths is the appearance of the term in the ancient stone inscriptions of Ashoka; it is significant that none of these myths existed (in any country in South-East Asia) prior to the publication and translation of the edicts of Ashoka in the 19th century.

Scholars identify the "Suvannabhumi" named by Ashoka as a toponym in Southern India, and deny that it has anything to do with South-East Asia. The later (and less contested) references to the region in Chinese historical sources depends on the (highly conjectural) identification of Chinese idiograms with phonetic equivalents, and the subsequent identification of those phonetic toponyms with ancient civilizations.

Responsible modern scholarship does not accept that Ashoka's missionaries went any further east than Sri Lanka, and archaeological evidence tends to affirm this. Further, the attempts to identify the modern ethnic/political groupings of "Thai" and "Burmese" with a conjectural "Suvannabhumi" of the 2nd century BCE flounders on the simple fact that neither the Tai-Kadai migration nor the Sino-Tibetan population of Burma had yet come to pass. In other words, if the myth identifying Ashoka's "Suwannaphum" with Burma or Thailand were true, it would entail an impossible anachronism, as neither any Thais nor any Burmese lived on that coast for many centuries thereafter.

[Richard W]

sabai jai is right, it comes from Pali language. many of the pali words have the endings cut off in Thai, or cut short. Such as Dhamma = tam  Acariya = ajahn

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Surely 'ajahn' is from the Sanskirt AcArya. Pali Acariya would have yielded something like อาจรีย์.