German, Jew, Jam And Jelly

[AyG]

Or in Thai: เยอรมัน คนยิว แยม เยลลี

There are a number of words which I suspect entered Thai from English in the Ayutthaya period. These words in English all start with the sound /dʒ/, yet in Thai are written with ย rather than (the seemingly closer) จ. The best theory I can come up with is that an initial ย was pronounced differently in those days. Does anyone have a better theory or explanation?

[thithi]

The Thai accent in the old days was pretty solid even for the thai language. By solid, i mean with stronger Thai accent and the English words were pronounced syllabically because most of the thai words back then were single syllable. AND We also changed how we pronounced if we found it too hard to pronounce. For example, George Washington - ยอด วัดชิงตัน, Europe - อีหรอบ, etc.

You can have a look in a Thai historical movie to hear how they speak. You can tell how different from the Thai language today.

[Thakkar]

We had some neighborhood kids over, visiting my kids and we all had a blast asking them to say:

Jolly German Jew juggles jam and jelly jars.

T

[sourcherry]

Or alternatively, the จ was pronounced differently. Maybe it was more /c/ than /tɕ/. Then I guess the ʒ part of the dʒ was the only segment that was heard by Thai people. (maybe they didn't hear the /d/ part). And maybe at that time according to Thai people's perception, the ʒ sound was the closest to /j/ (ย) more than the /c/ (จ).

[Dag Ekeberg]

Swedes do the same thing when they pronounce English words. Is that interesting or what?

[agam]

I thought it was pretty funny back during the Yugoslavia civil war(s), when Sarajevo was often mentioned in the news. Despite hearing "khon Yer-man" and "blue yeans" and "strawberry yam", the name Sarajevo (internationally pronounced "Sara yay-vo") was always pronounced "Sara jay-vo" by Thai newscasters.

[Richard W]

English /dʒ/ is usually voiced, perhaps more so in the past. Thai จ is not voiced. I remember a Mexican telling me that Spanish did have a jay sound, and giving me lleno as an example. Free alternation between initial /j/ and /dj/ is not uncommon, so using /j/ rather than /tɕ/ for /dʒ/ is not unreasonable.

It's just possible that some of these words were pronounced with /ʔj/ rather than with /j/. This is a guess, as I don't know when initial /ʔj/ (spelt อย) and /j/ (spelt ย) merged at Ayutthaya, and I don't know how these loan words were originally spelt.