Tones And Vowel Lengths For Some Thai Words

[Richard W]

I have seen some distinctly odd spellings of loanwords from English 'cake', 'golf', 'graph' and 'toffee' in the Northern Thai script. (Three of them can be found on page 1 of Proposal for encoding the Lanna script in the BMP of the UCS - they're taken from Boonkit's 'Phasa Mueang' p151 et seq.) To get a firm understanding, can people advise me on how these words are actually pronounced in Thai. The issues are tone and vowel length. I am also interested in knowing if there is more than one frequent pronunciation.

For 'cake' my concern is just with the vowel length. I have seen the Siamese spelling เค็ก, but almost all the evidence I can find indicates a long vowel. All the Thai spellings I've seen do indicate a high tone. For the next three words, I have seen spellings ท๊อฟฟี่ ก๊อล์ฟ กร๊าฟ which indicate a high tone, but only in the case of ท๊อฟฟี่ is it the commonest spelling. I've seen spellings indicating short vowels for the 'golf' and 'toffee' words, but they may just indicate the pronunciation of a minority who follow the English pronunciation. Finally, for the 'graph' word, my question is just over the tone.

Any information specific to Northern Thai will be of great interest. I do have Udom Runrueangsi's 'Lannathai Dictionary', but that added to the confusion rather than clarifying it.

[sabaijai]

Puzzling over English loan words written in Lanna script: I think Richard has definitely reached the outer limits of obscurity now!

I can't answer your questions (not even sure I understand them) but you do see considerable variation in the ways English loan words are spelt in Thai. There are loose rules (I think there's a thread on this already, right?) but they're not always followed.

I personally can't recall ever using any of the words in question when writing Thai, maybe ก๊อล์ฟ once or twice but I've not had occasion to ponder 'toffee' or 'graph'. The transcriptions don't look unusual to me however.

[Rikker]

Here are my phonetic spellings of the words you asked about:

[เค้ก] - This is indeed a long vowel, but then, เค้ก is the correct spelling per RID (and the common one, from my experience).

[ท็อฟฟี่] - The presence of ฟ in the next syllable seems to help produce a real syllable-final ฟ, by assimilation.

[ก๊อบ] - Note that speakers skilled at English may pronounce the ฟ, but the tone would be the same.

[กร๊าบ] - Ditto of the above. Some will say [กร๊าฟ], but many (most?) won't, and it won't affect the tone.

This is a really interesting issue for the Thai language--I'm not sure exactly what the motivation is, but there are many English borrowings which do not use tone marks in the official spellings, even though they do not match their phonetic spelling. And what I find most odd is that many of the ones that are in RID don't have pronunciation guides!

So why are the official spellings ทอฟฟี่, กอล์ฟ and กราฟ? What's the reason for not using tone markers? In many other words the official spelling uses a tone mark: ก๊อปปี้, ก๊อซ, แก๊ส and ก๊าซ, to name a few.

Here are a few more like the first group:

คอมพิวเตอร์ [ค็อม-พิว-เต้อ], some also say [คอม-พิว-เต้อ]

อินเตอร์เน็ต [อิน-เตอ-เหน็ด] also often spelled อินเทอร์เน็ต, which I think is the official RID spelling, although it's very rarely pronounced with ท in middle syllable, from my experience

นอต [น็อต], meaning knot/nautical mile; also nut, the counterpart of a bolt

เต็นท์ [เต๊น], "tent," some might actually say [เต็น], but I've always heard [เต๊น]

I wonder why this is... (This is thread hijacking.. sorry. Others, please ignore me for the time being and answer Richard.)