New Thai spellings for 176 loan words

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PeteC
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New Thai spellings for 176 loan words

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Maybe someone can post the list when it's published. Pete :cheers:

http://www.nationmultimedia.com/nationa ... 91505.html

New Thai spellings for 176 loan words
PAKAMARD JAICHALARD,
SUPINDA NA MAHACHAI
THE NATION October 2, 2012 1:00 am


The Royal Institute has come up with new spellings of 176 words borrowed from English in order to better reflect how they are pronounced in Thai.
Tone marks - wanayuk in Thai - will be added to those words when they appear in the new edition of the institute's official dictionary.

They include words such as computer, quota, calorie and radar - all spelt without tone marks.

The 176 words were identified by the institute's recent survey of 300 experts, including board members, organisations and language scholars. There were both negative and positive views on the changes.

Kanchana Naksakul, a board member and Thai-language teacher, said yesterday the idea was to make the written words correspond with the way they are pronounced.

"Words should be written as pronounced," said Kanchana, who is also president of the Thai Language Teachers' Association. "Those who disagree with the new spellings can ignore them. Many words these days are not written the way suggested by the institute anyway."

Most of the Royal Institute board agreed to the changes but another survey will determine whether they agree to change the spelling of all the words, Kanchana said. If the majority of the respondents agree to all the changes, the new spellings will appear in the dictionary's next edition.

Chinnapat Bhumirat, chief of the Office of the Basic Education Commission, said the Royal Institute's plan was a good start. He suggested that the change shouldn't only ensure that written words are closer to the English pronunciation - it should also cover the syllable stress and the emphasis on long or short sounds in a word.

This would help Thai students pronounce English words correctly.

Chinnapat also proposed a "brainstorming" session for those involved to thoroughly review and correct words.

Wattana Boonjob, a language expert at the Fine Arts Department's Literature and History Office, urged that the changes reflect not just the words borrowed from English, but the entire language.
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Re: New Thai spellings for 176 loan words

Post by Terry »

prcscct wrote:..................Chinnapat also proposed a "brainstorming" session for those involved to thoroughly review and correct words..............................
Well, that could be interesting :roll:
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Re: New Thai spellings for 176 loan words

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I'm so tired hearing Chevrotlet pronounced ChevroLET. I hope they fix that one. :laugh: Pete :cheers:
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Re: New Thai spellings for 176 loan words

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prcscct wrote:"Those who disagree with the new spellings can ignore them. Many words these days are not written the way suggested by the institute anyway."
So, we suggest a new spelling but up to you whether you use it or use the old one. Nobody is listening to us anyway. But I go to a lot of cocktail parties wearing my impressive uniform.
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Re: New Thai spellings for 176 loan words

Post by VincentD »

Until they 'unlearn' how to pronounce words the way they are spelt in Thai, there will always be a problem.

- 'Stick' (สทิก)will be pronounced 'Sa-tick', same with 'Snake(สเนก) and 'Sa-nake'. สนุก - Sanuk - enjoyment - if spelt letter for letter in English - would be pronounced as 'snook'.
- There is no 'V' in the alphabet.
- the word 'it' and variations (sit, bit, etc) will typically be pronounced 'ists' (they can't clip the 't'). But they can do it if it is spelt in Thai. (อิท).

Tongue twisters in a Thai classroom is hilarious. Think the British comedy television series 'Mind Your Language' with Jeremy Brown (Barry Evans) - the episode where Ms Courtney takes over the class and Su-lee, who always mixes up her R's and L's, gets a 'perfect' tongue twister.
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Re: New Thai spellings for 176 loan words

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We should probably forget about this. Below article means to me nothing more will happen in this or the next lifetime. Pete :cheers:

Spellings of English-Thai words not settled
The Nation October 3, 2012 1:00 am

Royal Institute secretary general Kanokwalee Chuchaiya said yesterday that correcting the spellings of the 176 words borrowed from the English language so they included tones to reflect how they are pronounced is a huge issue that needs several more steps.

She said the institute was conducting a survey on the issue and would wait for its official result before deciding on future steps.

Once this is done, another opinion poll would be needed to set guidelines on how best to implement the changes, she said.

She also confirmed that the latest edition of the institute's official dictionary would not include the 176 words in question because the manuscript had already been submitted to the printing house.
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Re: New Thai spellings for 176 loan words

Post by Roel »

But there will surely be a cocktail party where a very important person will give the first printed copy to an even more important person.
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Re: New Thai spellings for 176 loan words

Post by HHTel »

It is almost impossible to transliterate English words into Thai. When teaching English I always frowned upon students trying to write the English word in Thai. It simply doesn't work. The Thai language has no 'V' ,'SH','TH' and so on. Try writing an English word into Thai then without the knowledge of the correct English spelling, translate it back into English. You'll more often than not get an entirely different word!
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Re: New Thai spellings for 176 loan words

Post by Korkenzieher »

@VincentD - there is a rule covering when the default 'O' vowel gets promotes to a short 'A'. Becker 'Beginners' book refers to it. That rule is the reason why Thais put that 'a' into words like 'S-a-Pain' for Spain, and it is basically to do with what are legal and what are not legal consonant clusters in Thai. It is the same thing that makes ถนน Ta-non, and not To-non.

An interesting selection of 10 of these new words are available on Mod's Youtube feed - http://www.learnthaiwithmod.com/2012/10 ... new-words/
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Re: New Thai spellings for 176 loan words

Post by VincentD »

Korkenzieher wrote:@VincentD - there is a rule covering when the default 'O' vowel gets promotes to a short 'A'. Becker 'Beginners' book refers to it.
KKH
My point exactly. That is why they have to 'unlearn' that particular rule in order to be able to pronounce the English words the way they are spelt in English.
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Re: New Thai spellings for 176 loan words

Post by Pleng »

prcscct wrote: The Royal Institute has come up with new spellings of 176 words borrowed from English in order to better reflect how they are pronounced in Thai.
I wish English would learn that Thais never look after the word they borrow. They take them, treat them like crap, then hand them back in a state that is barely recognisable to the lender!
VincentD wrote:Until they 'unlearn' how to pronounce words the way they are spelt in Thai, there will always be a problem.

- 'Stick' (สทิก)will be pronounced 'Sa-tick', same with 'Snake(สเนก) and 'Sa-nake'. สนุก - Sanuk - enjoyment - if spelt letter for letter in English - would be pronounced as 'snook'.
- There is no 'V' in the alphabet.
- the word 'it' and variations (sit, bit, etc) will typically be pronounced 'ists' (they can't clip the 't'). But they can do it if it is spelt in Thai. (อิท)
The first thing we are taught as students of Thai language is to forget trying to compare sounds from Thai language with that of English. Yet when Thai's study English, the first thing they try and do is map their letters to ours. They even go so far as to map lor ling (ล) to an 'n' sound (it's usually an 'l' sound) if it appears as a 'final consonant' in an English word, just because that's how they do it in their language... apple, double, central... all become appen, dubben, centran.
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Re: New Thai spellings for 176 loan words

Post by Roel »

Pleng wrote:They even go so far as to map lor ling (ล) to an 'n' sound (it's usually an 'l' sound) if it appears as a 'final consonant' in an English word, just because that's how they do it in their language... apple, double, central... all become appen, dubben, centran.
That is a known universal linguistic phenomenon (I copy-paste because it is already written so much clearer than I could explain it myself):

One important difference between first language acquisition and second language acquisition is that the process of second-language acquisition is influenced by languages that the learner already knows. This influence is known as language transfer. Language transfer is a complex phenomenon resulting from interaction between learners’ prior linguistic knowledge, the target-language input they encounter, and their cognitive processes. Language transfer is not always from the learner’s native language; it can also be from a second language, or a third. Neither is it limited to any particular domain of language; language transfer can occur in grammar, pronunciation, vocabulary, discourse, and reading.

One situation in which language transfer often occurs is when learners sense a similarity between a feature of a language that they already know and a corresponding feature of the interlanguage they have developed. If this happens, the acquisition of more complicated language forms may be delayed in favor of simpler language forms that resemble those of the language the learner is familiar with. Learners may also decline to use some language forms at all if they are perceived as being too distant from their first language.

Source: wikipedia
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