เพื่อ -- Pheu

[Puccini]

In news articles I see a Pheu Thai Party mentioned and wonder what transliteration scheme was used to romanise เพื่อ as "pheu". I can't help pronouncing "pheu" like the English words phew and few. None of the transliteration schemes offered by Thai2English.com as a choice render เพื่อ as "pheu".

[Briggsy]

"The Party for Thais" or The "For [the needs of] Thais" party. Take your pick.

Nationalism is a common concept in the names of political parties and particularly so here.

Apologies, I speed read your post.

Please don't start the transliteration debate. Thais are not good at this and numerous parallel systems exist.

Edited March 14, 2010 by Briggsy

[Tod Daniels]

While trying to represent any thai word in engrish script is a perilous task at best; a quick search of the word on Glenn Slayden's site: thai-language dot com yielded the karaoke-engrish version as "pheuua(F)" with (F) = falling tone. That's about as close as you're gonna get.

The thai political parties are short on creativity "For thais", "thai pride", and the former "thais love thais" are all in that nationalistic genre of names. Not to mention the plethora of other corny names which dominate the political landscape.

Please don't start the transliteration debate. Thais are not good at this and numerous parallel systems exist.

As was pointed out in the above quote; thais totally suck at any rational method of phonemic transcription. This is due to the complexity in representing accurately the thai sounds in engrish. Plus if you factor in regional engrish accents, you only get further from what is actually supposed to be pronounced as well as the thai penchant for representing every thai letter in an engrish transcription; Suvarnabhumi สุวรรณภูมิ being one which springs to mind. It is also NOT uncommon to drive up country and see a location's name spelled several different ways in engrish.

I personally have heard thais speaking not so politely about this political party refer to it as เบื่อไทย, much as I refer to the musician known as Carabao's songs as เพลงเบื่อชีวิต. ..

[RickBradford]

This is due to the complexity in representing accurately the thai sounds in engrish

Thais may "suck" at it, but rendering Thai consistently and accurately in English alphabet is not difficult.

A Catholic priest did exactly this for Vietnamese (previously written in Chinese characters) 400 years ago, and his transliteration system is now the accepted script for that country.

The sounds of Vietnamese and Thai are very similar - even as to the tones -- with the only extra requirement in Thai being to distinguish some long and short vowels, as the Vietnamese script currently has no way to render the glottal stop in words like เกาะ.

It'll never happen because it was Not Invented Here.

[Puccini]

While trying to represent any thai word in engrish script is a perilous task at best; a quick search of the word on Glenn Slayden's site: thai-language dot com yielded the karaoke-engrish version as "pheuua(F)" with (F) = falling tone. That's about as close as you're gonna get...

Wikipedia, after giving the transliteration the party has chosen for itself, gives in parentheses the name in Thai script, followed by the transliteration using the RTGS system, with which I am more familiar than the dozens or hundreds of other systems that appear to coexist peacefully side by side. Phew!

[SimonN]

Wikipedia, after giving the transliteration the party has chosen for itself, gives in parentheses the name in Thai script, followed by the transliteration using the RTGS system, with which I am more familiar than the dozens or hundreds of other systems that appear to coexist peacefully side by side. Phew!

Using the Royal Thai General System to transliterate "เพื่อ" would give the result; "phuea" not "pheu"!

[chrgrims]

เ–ือ is sara uea, so i am not sure why anyone would excuse someone for making it into something else. Is there a case where this isnt pronounced as sara uea? If this is a can of worms let me have a look, I can close it after .

Disclaimer: I am a complete noob at ภาษา ไทย

[Rikker]

"pheu" is not a sensible transcription of เพื่อ under any known system. And there are lots of them. It's a bad transcription. Not because of the 'ph', which is used for พ in many systems. But because of eu = เอือ.

But that's how they've chosen to spell it in English, apparently, and so we use their preferred form because it's a proper noun.

[SoftWater]

เ–ือ is sara uea, so i am not sure why anyone would excuse someone for making it into something else. Is there a case where this isnt pronounced as sara uea? If this is a can of worms let me have a look, I can close it after .

Disclaimer: I am a complete noob at ภาษา ไทย

Like Briggsy said above, there is more than one system used for turning Thai into phonetic words using the English alphabet. I also agree with him that there's little value in arguing over this here, its been done. Look at the various systems on Thai2English.com for the differences.

[ivowatson]

"pheu" is not a sensible transcription of เพื่อ under any known system. And there are lots of them. It's a bad transcription. Not because of the 'ph', which is used for พ in many systems. But because of eu = เอือ.

But that's how they've chosen to spell it in English, apparently, and so we use their preferred form because it's a proper noun.

Sorry to hijack this thread a little.

There's one (stop)word "pheua" (don't know the tone nor thai writing) which is very often used in (only?) the south. Have no idea what it means. Someone?

[SimonN]

There's one (stop)word "pheua" (don't know the tone nor thai writing) which is very often used in (only?) the south. Have no idea what it means. Someone?

There's a similar word พรือ (phreuu), which is often heard in the southern dialect. The Central Thai equivalent is อย่างไร (yaang rai), which has the meaning of "anyhow" or "anything". A common phrase is ไม่พรือ (mai phreuu), Central Thai ไม่เป็นไร (mai bpen rai) - "It doesn't matter", "never mind". พรือมัง (phreuu mang), Central Thai เป็นอย่างไรบ้าง (bpen yaang rai baang) - "How's it going?", "how do you do?".

Another possiblity is ผัว (phuaa), but this is Cenral Thai also, meaning "husband".