Miss-spelt Words For K And G

[Murf]

I have wondered this for some time now about spelling of words from Thai into English.

I think almost everyone would agree that the closest representation of ก ไก่ in English is the letter G.

and ค ควาย would be K. (I realize that there are more K sounds in Thai)

So why is it so ofter that you see names and other things spelled with a K

(Kipakorn) < the 2 K's should be G's as the name is spelled using ก ไก่ not ค ควาย

other examples would be - Kan Kititsak, I could go on... but you see my point.

Other miss spellings include mixing up 'J' and 'Ch'

Again, J would be equal to จ จาน and Ch would be equal to ช ช้าง (amongst others)

So จันทน์ (the moon) starts with a J sound, comes out as 'Chan'

The sounds are pretty close to each other, so i guess easy for someone to mix them up if they are not a native English speaker...

I teach kids and I read one kids name in English as Kan... When i pronounced it like that, the class started laughing, "Gan teacher, Gan"

No wonder the kids are having problems...

[sarahsbloke]

It's because transliteration doesn't work.

Big shopping mall in ChiangMai pronounced Gat Su-an Gairw but written on the signs as Kad Suan Kaew (กาดสวนแก้ว) ... try asking a local where that place is!

I always wondered if it were deliberate to stop foreigners trying to learn Thai, or making it as difficult as possible.

Also you get the diffuculty of แ being written in roman script as 'AE' when it should be 'AIR' so Mae Rim and Mae Sai should actually be pronounced Mair Rim and Mair Sai.

Edited May 27, 2010 by sarahsbloke

[bhoydy]

I hear you. I always thought ฝิดีโอ or ฟิดีโอ would work better than วืดีโอ but it's all a bit too late for that...

[LazyYogi]

It is because the Thai alphabet is based on the Sanskrit alphabet of ancient India.

Much of the Thai vocabulary is of Indian origin.

The Thai letter ก was used for the Sanskrit letter क, and the standard romanization for that Sanskrit letter in English is "K".

However, Thai pronunciation has shifted somewhat since the 13th century, so words of Indian origin sound quite different than their original Sanskrit or Pali spellings.

That's why it is "Phuttha" instead of "Buddha", "Mekhong" instead of Mae Ganga (mother Ganges), and "Phitsanulok" instead of "Vishnuloka" (Vishnu's world). That's also why "Suvarnabhumi" Airport is pronounced "Suwanaphum"

[zzdocxx]

That is really interesting LY, thanks.

[Jay_Jay]

'g' is a voiced sound. There is no voiced 'k' sound in Thai. It's an unaspirated 'k' - still closer to the Sanskrit क than 'g' in English. When you hear Thai's making fun on Farang pronouncing Thai, one of the features they pick up on and emphasize is the mispronunciation of ก as 'g'.

It's like the 'k' in 'sky'. Many learners of Thai have to train their ear to it in the beginning and not filter it out as a 'g'. Similar thing happens with many Thai's not being able to hear the difference between 'GOD' and 'GOT' when a native English speaker says them. Many Thais will argue that there is no perceivable difference. To a native speaker however, they are very different.

Edited May 28, 2010 by Jay_Jay

[Murf]

Thanks for the replies.... But,

Just to reiterate,

I am talking about Thais miss-spelling English words, and the pronunciation of the English language, not the pronunciation of the Thai language.

I fully understand that there is no direct transliteration from Thai to English.

The point i was trying to make is when you transliterate from Thai to English ก is transliterated as a K when it should really be a G.

Thanks LY... that sort of makes sense, but i know bugger all about Sanskrit!

Edited May 28, 2010 by Murf

[meadish_sweetball]

/k/ for ก is in line with the international phonetic alphabet. It also follows the only transliteration scheme resembling a standard that exists for Thai, the RTGS ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Thai_Ge...f_Transcription ).

Neither of these two systems are Anglo-centric.

Provided Thailand had introduced and taught a uniform system of romanization, such as pinyin ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin ) for Chinese, there would have been no problem, just a matter of learning how it's written and which symbol(s) correspond to which sound.

Basing a transliteration scheme on English spelling is not a good idea; the English spelling system is further removed than most from the principle one sound-one letter, and within the English speaking world, pronunciation varies wildly.

An illustrative example from a post above: "Gairw" for แก้ว

That is using three (3) letters to represent one (1) sound. Using /r/ in the transliteration means Scots, Irishmen and North Americans, plus most people who can read Latin letters but do not speak English, or speak English as a second language but actually pronounce the letter r, will be invited to mispronounce.

[jombom]

It seems to me (based on observation) that Kh is used to indicate a K sound and K is used to indicate a G sound. The addition of the letter h also occurs with P (example Phuket) and T (example Thai). This is quite ok with me, as I was not expecting Thai to be english sounding.

The French pronounce Paris more like Ba-ree, and why not ?

It appears there are inconsistencies with some words; Pattaya and Bangkok being two examples. I have seen some roadsigns with Phattaya, and I was told that Bangkok is a deliberate error to try and help foreigners to pronounce it correctly. The letter g was added, when it is superfluous to a Thai. This could, of course, be just another urban legend.

[anchan42]

Just want to share an experience. On my first day at the university I was required to fill in a form in English. My English back then was next to non existence and I did not know how to write my last name in English. My last name is about 2 miles long . I turned to a stranger standing next to me and together with our best effort we came up with English version of my last name. Sure enough 'k' was used for ก.

I dont think they teach us how to do the transliteration in school. We just have to try our best to copy and learn from our surrounding, sign posts, the way friends do it etc... no wonder that we have inconsistency and inaccuracy.

As for English sounds, I (as well as most of the Thai) have never been taught English sounds in school. I had to learn the differences between v and w, th and t, z and s etc on my own.

So yah... no wonder kids are having problems...

Edited May 28, 2010 by anchan42

[321niti123]

It's because transliteration doesn't work.

Big shopping mall in ChiangMai pronounced Gat Su-an Gairw but written on the signs as Kad Suan Kaew (กาดสวนแก้ว) ... try asking a local where that place is!

I always wondered if it were deliberate to stop foreigners trying to learn Thai, or making it as difficult as possible.

Also you get the diffuculty of แ being written in roman script as 'AE' when it should be 'AIR' so Mae Rim and Mae Sai should actually be pronounced Mair Rim and Mair Sai.

The r is not evident in the thai pronounciation so they decided not to use the "air"

[321niti123]

you wont be able to do all 44 because there is no direct translation for all thai consonants and definitely no direct translation for all of the vowels

[Peppy]

I fully understand that there is no direct transliteration from Thai to English.

The point i was trying to make is when you transliterate from Thai to English ก is transliterated as a K when it should really be a G.

Pardon me for nitpicking, but aren't you contradicting yourself here? I mean, if we can agree that there's no direct transcription of Thai sounds into English, as evidenced by the fact that the sound of ก. ไก่ is unlike either K or G in English, then why should we choose one particular letter over the other?

[Roota]

The fundamental problem here is that a language like Thai requires different transliteration systems for different purposes. Do you want a system that any tourist can just look at and roughly pronounce, or one that requires a bit of study but then allows you to pronounce every phoneme correctly? The RTGS manages to fall right between the two.

Personally I think the use of 'h' to mark aspiration is a pretty elegant little solution. (For newcomers, there are three pairs of these in standard Thai transliteration: /k/ and /kh/, /t/ and /th/, and /p/ and /ph/. The 'h' suggests the puff of air from the aspirated ones.)

I was happy to see that the Wikipedia article mentions my pet peeve with the RTGS: using /ch/ for both the จ and ช sounds. Why in the world not be consistent with the above, and use /c/ and /ch/?

Accurate transliteration of Thai consonants is trivial compared to vowels, which really require at least three special characters (usually ɔ, ə, and ʉ) . And no, spellings like 'airw' say more about the bizarre orthography of English than they say anything about Thai.

[Bklyn]

The point i was trying to make is when you transliterate from Thai to English ก is transliterated as a K when it should really be a G.

Actually it shouldn't be a G. I am not a linguist and don't claim any expertise, but I think the issue is less voiced versus unvoiced than aspirated versus unaspirated. ก is an unvoiced, unaspirated K, in much the same way that ต is an unvoiced, unaspirated T.

To account for the variations, พ, for example, is transliterated Ph, ป is transliterated P and บ is transliterated B; ท is transliterated Th, ต is transliterated T and ด is transliterated D; ข is transliterated Kh and ก is transliterated K. This would mean, of course, that there is no true voiced K (G) sound in Thai. I don't know what to say about that.

I will only add parenthetically that I think most transliteration schemes for Thai are appallingly bad and should be abolished. In my experience, the Bua Luang system is the best for farang who don't read Thai.

[HappyInCM]

I think almost everyone would agree that the closest representation of ก ไก่ in English is the letter G.

Which everyone, you mean native English speakers? Our ears have been trained to hear ก ไก่ as a G, but that doesn't mean that the target audience of hearing us pronounce transliterated words (native Thai speakers), also experience the letter G as closer than a letter K to ก ไก่. Perspective. And to Bklyn's point, maybe they think we will practice a bit and make our K more unaspirated.

I teach kids and I read one kids name in English as Kan... When i pronounced it like that, the class started laughing, "Gan teacher, Gan"

No wonder the kids are having problems...

Your example seems to be about Thai words being pronounced, so I'm unsure of what you mean about your referring to the other way around.

And why would the transliteration of English words into Thai need to be the same as Thai into english? I would presume the word "go" in English would be transliterated as โกะ or โก because to our ears this is the closest writable sound in Thai. Maybe Thais hear it more as some other letter, but that's pretty irrelevant to what a native English speaker hears - perspective.

Edited May 30, 2010 by eljefe2

[RickBradford]

Virtually every issue related to transliterating the sounds made in the Thai language can apply equally to Vietnamese, and that problem was solved 400 years ago by a Catholic missionary called Alexandre de Rhodes, who invented the 'quoc ngu' script.

When I began learning Thai, before I could read Thai script, I used this scheme for transliteration, and it proved invaluable.

[farangnahrak]

What LazyYoga said is definitely interesting, and will explain a lot of words.

That said, its obvious that who made the official transliterations wasn't skilled bilingually enough to get the pronunciations correct. Understandable as most of the transliterations were done long before the internet, learn Thai books, or even before Thai-English dictionaries existed. The Royal transliteration system is absolutely horrible: no tone differentiation, no vowel length differentiation, and the matching of many letters was poorly thought out. 'Suvarnabhumi Airport' is a perfect example.

Keep in mind though that all the latin languages use basically the same alphabet, but each pronounces the letters somewhat differently.

When I transliterate for people who can't read Thai, so that they can speak it 'correctly', I carefully select the spelling that would give them the best possible pronunciation.

[bhoydy]

Virtually every issue related to transliterating the sounds made in the Thai language can apply equally to Vietnamese, and that problem was solved 400 years ago by a Catholic missionary called Alexandre de Rhodes, who invented the 'quoc ngu' script.

When I began learning Thai, before I could read Thai script, I used this scheme for transliteration, and it proved invaluable.

Does that mean you have learnt Vietnamese before? If so did someone teach how this script sounded?

The point i'm trying to make is that before i knew the ng sound ง in Thai i wouldn't have known how to say ngu as above.

I would have pronounced it ingu or something like that and that's with a hard g sound as in good.

So while it is a benefit to those who do not wish to learn Thai script, you still have to have some help in how to pronounce a word that begins with an ng sound like งง

ผรั่งงงูสองตัว

[RickBradford]

^

Yes, I had learnt Vietnamese before, so this scheme worked well for me.

My point was that it is a pity that no consistent and convenient transliteration system is widely used for Thai, when 'quoc ngu' shows that such a scheme is easily achievable.

[farangnahrak]

Everyone develops there own transliteration scheme.

Who'd want to follow the International Phonetic Alphabet, anyway?

http://weston.ruter.net/projects/ipa-chart/view/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet

I mean, its all Greek to me . . .

[Richard W]

I mean, its all Greek to me . . .

And if we transli8terated Thai to Classical Greek, we'd transliterate บ as β, ป as π, ผ, พ and ภ as φ and ง as γ.

[Peppy]

The Vietnamese model does seem ideal for Thai--it's exactly what's needed, a system that shows all the stuff that the current one doesn't: tone, vowel length, the exact consonant sound used in the original word. I'm going out on a limb here, but perhaps nationalist/traditionalist elements in the institute that rules on such matters might be holding back out of a fear that such a system would eventually usurp the Thai alphabet. Perhaps such fears would be well-founded, too, what with the difficulty of learning Thai script and all its funny tone rules compared with a Latin script of fewer unique letters in which a syllable's tone could be shown simply by putting a particular little squiggle above it, like in Vietnamese...

I mean, its all Greek to me . . .

And if we transli8terated Thai to Classical Greek, we'd transliterate บ as β, ป as π, ผ, พ and ภ as φ and ง as γ.

Hah!

[leah]

I don't think the government has any reason to think that a system like that would usurp the Thai alphabet. Even in Chinese, which has both a far more difficult writing system and an official transliteration scheme ("pinyin", as someone mentioned above) that marks sounds and tones in the Roman alphabet, natives still learn how to read and write using hanzi characters and show no interest in abandoning their system. The Thai alphabet works perfectly well for reading Thai, and Thais have no problems learning how to use it. It would make it easier for foreigners, though given that the Thai gov has already created one official transliteration scheme, it's probably not a top priority to refine it further for our benefit. Maybe one day.

[Peppy]

You're probably right, Leah. I did think of pinyin when I posted the above, but I'm not familiar enough with it to know if it has any drawbacks compared to writing with Chinese characters. Anyway, regarding the RTGS, it has in fact been updated several times over the decades (note, for example, the changing of "don muang" to "don mueang"), so I just couldn't think of any other reason why it wouldn't be possible to revamp the system entirely. Ultimately though, I suppose, it's simply a case of "never ascribe to malice what can be explained by incompetence". Why, perhaps that should be the Tourist Authority of Thailand's new motto to replace "Land of Smiles"!

[leah]

Pinyin is actually a great tool for Chinese people themselves, and wasn't specifically created for the benefit of foreign learners (though it's an enormous help -- said from experience!). All Chinese children learn it before they learn how to write the real way, so it perfectly captures all the sounds and tones of the language. I wonder if a transliteration system HAS to come from the Thai government --maybe it's possible an outside body could champion its system as the new standard, just like standards develop in the tech industry. After all, it's not exactly fair to expect the Thai gov to do this for us -- we wouldn't have expected the US to create the system to create the transliteration system to convert English letters to Thai sounds! Of course that's about relative importance of the languages, but it's worth noticing, especially since these English-Thai transliterations do exist and are popularly used in learning-English books for Thais. So basically we expect the Thai gov to produce systems going both ways. It's quite possible the US gov would have been just as incompetent if faced with this task!

[anchan42]

Pinyin is actually a great tool for Chinese people themselves, and wasn't specifically created for the benefit of foreign learners (though it's an enormous help -- said from experience!). All Chinese children learn it before they learn how to write the real way, so it perfectly captures all the sounds and tones of the language. I wonder if a transliteration system HAS to come from the Thai government --maybe it's possible an outside body could champion its system as the new standard, just like standards develop in the tech industry. After all, it's not exactly fair to expect the Thai gov to do this for us -- we wouldn't have expected the US to create the system to create the transliteration system to convert English letters to Thai sounds! Of course that's about relative importance of the languages, but it's worth noticing, especially since these English-Thai transliterations do exist and are popularly used in learning-English books for Thais. So basically we expect the Thai gov to produce systems going both ways. It's quite possible the US gov would have been just as incompetent if faced with this task!

Pinyin were created as a part of the effort to modernized China. One of the objectives is to replace several preexisting romanized system used primarily by foreign learners. You could say that helping foreign learners was one of the (small) reasons. Chinese were using Zhuyinfuhao at the time. The system is still widely in use in Taiwan.

Pinyin was basically created by Chinese government. Without the government strong support, I am really doubt it if the pinyin would have been widely accepted as it is now. There were discussions about abandoned Chinese characters and replace in with Pinyin but they were strongly opposed by Chinese and foreign learners alike.

Thai writing system is an alphabet system (as opposed to characters in Chinese) which more or less phonetic system in itself. The need to have common romanized system is far less then in the case of Chinese.

In theory we could use IPA but without government and local community support, I don't think it will ever be a commonly accepted system.

Edited June 1, 2010 by anchan42

[DavidHouston]

For a discussion of these issues, see "Romanization, Transliteration, and Transcription for the Globalization of the Thai Language," Nitaya Kanchanawan, Journal of the Royal Institute of Thailand, Vol. 31, No. 3, Jul.-Sep. 2006, page 832-841. If you would like to have the article, please PM me.

[NBD]

Any system of translitertion will have huge inconsistencies. A friend of mine who lived many years in the south before moving up to Isan insists there is no "g" sound at all in Thai, but anything with a ก here is definitely pronounced with a sound much more like a G than a K.

Sometimes it's transliterated as a "gk" especially at the start of words, which makes some sense.

I'm still pretty basic with reading Thai, but starting to see the huge advantages of it already, becuase it forces you to drop the habit of trying to think how you would write the word in Roman script.

[mangkorn]

Sometimes, a bit of humour can be found in such differences. I understand that in New York, street vendors sell a fair amount of T-shirts reading: "New Jork" - because that is how most latinos actually pronounce it. (And it's always fun to call a friend a "son of a beach." )