Peppy

Thai spelling: ลบ

Ex. ลบ 5 องศาเซลเซียส - minus five degrees Celsius

Nice to see you over here, Mr 'Le Pew'. I see our old mate's on here as well, arguing about the price of fish electricity.

I think you must have me mixed up with somebody else. Or perhaps I'm missing something here...

Thai spelling: ลบ

Ex. ลบ 5 องศาเซลเซียส - minus five degrees Celsius

I think ลืมมันซะ means "forget about it" in the sense of "let it go" or "don't dwell on the past".

For the situation you describe, ไม่เป็นไร is probably the best response--"forget about it" in the sense of "no worries", or "it's ok".

Yes, you have the right verb.

ไปถามแม่ (Go) ask your mother.

Peppy, is that a typo? Surely it should be เหนือชีวิต?

Not a typo, sir--ชีวี is a poetic form of ชีวิต.

Interesting new vocab for me too Peppy, but the OP should be aware that Javier spelled ฮาเวียร์ will not be pronounced in the way that he pronounces it:

ja-beer or halloween - to be - emergency

The 'b' sound will be said like a 'w'

Yes, you're quite correct--but ฮาเวียร์ seems to be the commonly accepted Thai spelling for the name "Javier".

I've just noticed this thread's over two years old and was only just resurrected by our friend Niklota here, so I suppose the OP's no longer with us.

Regarding the ongoing debate about the tattooing of names, etc. in Thai script, I say, why the heck not? I don't understand the point of getting anything permanently written on one's body in the first place, so I don't see how getting one's own name done is any better or worse than any of the alternatives. If somebody wants to do it, well, hey, go right ahead!

ฉันปกป้องครอบครัว และครอบครัวปกป้องฉัน

I protect my family and my family protects me

เหนือกาลเวลา

เหนือปริภูมิ

เหนือชีวี

Beyond time.

Beyond space.

Beyond life.

ฮาเวียร์

Javier

Comments/suggestions appreciated.

Just to make your cards as clear as possible, maybe you could add pictures of a shrimp and a crab with a red circle with a slash through it over top, like a no smoking sign, and next to that, pictures of a fish and a clam with a green circle around them. Along with the explanation written in Thai, it should be enough to get the message through.

I can confirm that a51mas's translations are accurate.

As for illiteracy, I think you'd really have to go out of your way to find somebody unable to read that sentence anywhere in Thailand. It's true that a lot of extremely poor or very old people might have difficulty with high-level reading and writing tasks, but just about everyone knows the alphabet and can read simple words. Printing out what you want to say on cards is an excellent idea--I don't think there'll be any misunderstandings.

See http://www.thai-language.com/id/141749 , second definition. The word is a diminutive of the English word "racing" and is used to describe Thai teen illegal street racing.

While "diminutive" might be accurate here, it also carries connotations to me of being rather "cutesy"--but there's nothing intentionally cutesy about the shortening of "racing" to "sing", it's just what happens to a lot of English words when they become widely used in the Thai language. "Sing" isn't at all limited to kids' illegal street racing either--it's widely known and used by people of all ages to describe what Mikenyork defines as:

ฃิ่ง sing from racing means driving fast and recklessly.

Which is much closer to a perfect definition--except "sing" is spelled ซิ่ง, with sor soh (ซ), not "king" with khor khuat (ฃ). I should also point out that "sing" is used to describe modified or "sport" model vehicles that appear to be capable of being driven fast, regardless of whether they actually are, as well as people whose manner and style of dress make them seem like the kind of person who would drive recklessly--again, regardless of whether or not they actually do.

As for whether to use khap (ขับ) or khee (ขี่) for motorbikes, they're generally interchangeable--just like "drive" and "ride" are in English.

I always use the phrase คนละแบบ. To each his own.

คนละแบบ as I understand it is the same as คนละอย่าง, which doesn't necessarily refer to people--it simply means "a different kind of thing".

For example, "เสื้อสองตัวคนละแบบ" - "Two shirts of different styles".

After giving it some thought, another translation of ลอย ๆ that comes to mind is "absentmindedly". Also, So Sethabutra's dictionary gives "without provocation", so perhaps a translation for นักเขียนพูดเบาๆลอยๆ could be "The writer spoke softly, unprovoked."

I see loosely there now, I don't think you have to get one word and stick slavishly to it, or do you?.

No, no, absolutely not. It just seemed to fit quite well in the context of those particular sentences.

My understanding of "ลอย ๆ" is that it means something like "unspecific(ly)" or "loose(ly)".

For นักเขียนพูดเบาๆลอยๆ, howabout "The writer spoke softly and loosely."

เพราะคำพูดลอยๆของเขานั่นเองจึงทำให้หลายคนคิดมาก "Owing to his loose speech, many people read far to much into what he said."

การจะกล่าวหาว่าผู้ใดทุจริตคอรัปชั่นจะต้องมีหลักฐานมิใช่กล่าวลอยๆ "To say that a person is corrupt requires evidence; it is not an accusation to be made loosely."

The sticker on the upper-right corner of the truck's tailgate reads "รถคันนี้สีฟ้า"; the translation is this thread's title.

The owner's fortune teller probably told him that black is an unlucky colour for him, so rather than get a new truck or a new paint job, he decided to fool the spirits with a sticker.

Thank you, David, for your kind words. I find translating this sort of material quite enjoyable, and I think it's a shame the thread was deleted. I didn't see anything private or revealing of anyone's actual identity in the information posted, so I don't really see what harm it did. Ah well.

This is from someones Facebook. I can't find any of the words in the dictionary.

I wonder what the translation would be.

You're joking... aren't you? "I like this, it almost looks like I know how to write in the Thai language?!" What an ugly font!

Actually - re-reading your quote in Thai I would have thought that the "correct" ending should be "young ti row pen" (not - young ti row hen) - since what we see "hen" is determined by - what/who we are - "pen" (which then gives it the "philosophically poetic form" - but not yet in short).

Peppy please correct me (and the reasons) - However I have only been an active Thai Student for less than 2 years - therefore certainly not an expert..

Indeed, that's how it's translated in the second link I gave (http://th.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100513003838AALjq74) where the OP's question is "จริงไหมว่า เราไม่ได้เห็นสิ่งต่าง ๆ อย่างที่มันเป็น แต่เรามองสิ่งต่าง ๆ อย่างที่ตัวเราเป็น?"

I suppose the phrasing in the first link deviates slightly from what would be a literal translation in that it states "We see things not as they are, but as we see them to be" (เรามองสิ่งต่าง ๆ อย่างที่เราเห็น).

Is there a difference?

Peppy described it well (are you Thai??) - now I am trying to "shorten" into a "philosophically poetic form".

No, I'm not Thai actually... but I'm working on it, linguistically at least.

I should note that that wasn't even my own translation... I googled for "We do not see things as they are, but as we are" and found it was a quote from Anais Nin--so then I searched for "อนาอิส นิน คำคม" ["Anais Nin quotations"] and found the link I posted with the translation (it's the last quote on that page).

Personally, I think you'll have trouble shortening it--it's quite "philosophically poetic" just as it is IMO.

Here's an interesting discussion on the quote and what it means... http://th.answers.ya...13003838AALjq74

เราไม่ได้มองสิ่งต่าง ๆ อย่างที่มันเป็น แต่เรามองสิ่งต่าง ๆ อย่างที่เราเห็น

http://dungtrin.com/mag/?15.kumkom

That sounds like a Chamlongian ideal.

Yes, it's certainly a Santi Asoke thing... (for those interested in Santi Asoke, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santi_Asoke).

Sounds good and is dressed up as something good, but is really a dictatorship.

The difference from the current system being...?

Not a political party, but a system of government: "ธิปไตย" is equivalent to the English "-cracy" i.e. a ruling body, and "ธรรมา" is "dharma" i.e. the teachings of Buddha. So ธรรมาธิปไตย would be "dharmacracy", a system of government in which the Buddha's teachings are supreme.

There is no "new Thai script"--I think that must be a misunderstanding or mis-statement of some sort. There was an effort in the 1940's to reform Thai spelling and whittle down consonants and their respective sounds to a one-one relationship, but it only lasted about two years--the only part of it that stuck was the use of ค instead of ฅ, and ข instead of ฃ. The script itself, of course, remains the same.

As for how to remember what words are spelled with what letters, the best advice I can give is read, read, read! By seeing words over and over again, you should be able to get a sense of what's right and what's wrong when you're writing--just like with English vowels.

^ <deleted> are you talking about ? You are talking such bs saying the thai language isnt a simple language unable to be used to explain anything complex. Some people will defend anything thai. One tense compared to twelve is just the beginning of the problems with the thai language and any other simple language for that matter. Im not down on the thai language only pointing out the facts of it. The only misleading statements here are yours. There is a reason there is an abundance of work editing research papers in english for thai masters and phd candidates, there just are not any words or grammar in the thai language to explain their work.

Anything that can be explained in English can be explained in Thai just as well, and vice versa. Tenses, or different verb forms, have nothing to with it--what we call "tense" in English is only one method of defining when events occur in relation to the present, or to each other, and Thai, like every other language, has its own mechanisms for doing this. The reason Thai researchers write their paper in English isn't that their own language is somehow unable to describe the ideas they want to present--it's because if they wrote them in Thai, the audience for them would be limited only to Thai speakers. By writing in English, they make their work available to people all over the world, be they Japanese, German, American, Russian, or Brazilian. English isn't inherently better, it's just the currently agreed-upon medium for exchanging information between people who speak different languages.

The fact that many of these research papers are poorly written and require extensive editing to be presentable brings us more or less back on topic--the reason is that, as I said, English is very different from Thai (the different ways of expressing tense between the two languages are a case in point), and it takes a huge amount of work for a speaker of one language to get their head around the differences of the the other. For humans at least, it is possible--in the case of computers, they will need to develop something akin to human consciousness of context and relationships between objects before they'll ever be able to produce perfectly accurate translations. Of course, if computers ever develop consciousness, the lack of any language barriers between people will probably be quite far down on the list of interesting implications.

"Chamra" means cleanse???? I thought it was the word for 'pay' as in "pay money at this counter"?????

Yes, that too.