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.
THE NATION October 2, 2012 1:00 am
My favourite quote undelined in bold.
Migrated
Perhaps they could just try saying them properly, as opposed to 'loaning' them and then changing them into unrecognizable retard talk.
Kom-Pew-Thuurrr.
No, computer.
Guy Manpoof sux nuts for $$.
Tomcat trained. Satisfaction guaranteed.
I am sure Thais dont need the president of a language association to tell them to ignore the new spellings.
I ting good welly mush.
There are few problems in life that cannot be solved with toast.
One of them, however, is opening a can of corned beef with that stupid key. This cannot easily be done at the best of times, and toast is of surprisingly little use in resolving the issue.
how do you pronounce all the words loaned to the english language from other languages?Originally Posted by The Perfect Present
i imagine quite a few non-NES speakers would hear you saying their words in english and think you speak "retard talk" too. or do you say those words exactly as they're pronounced in the original language, leaving NES to think you use "retard talk"?
I agree with you Crew.
Gods be good; another clusterfuck!
Look in any good dictionary (English-Thai), So Sethaputra's for one, and the pronunciation is just fine.
So, what are they on about?
Frederick Douglass: Find out just what any people will quietly submit to
and you have found out the exact measure of injustice
and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these
will continue till they are resisted with either
words or blows, or with both.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn;
“Don’t believe them, don’t fear them, don’t ask
anything of them.”
I pronounce them in their native form, then upon completion of the sentence I mention the reason for such pronunciation to the listener, as a means of education.
---Update---
I kinda like when they say Dino-Sao though.
They can be cute little things.
wow, you must be a real hit at all the parties.
Sure am.
I blame the Yanks.
---Update---
Shouldn't they waste time on something else then?
How about changing the entire English language to the way the average Thai on the street speaks it? You could condense it down to one word. "You!"
It would also solve their worries about "Getting ready for ASEAN". All Thais would be fluent "New English" speakers.
of course, being a phenomenon exclusive to Thai...
The irony is in the fact that the Thai pronuciation is slightly closer to the original (computare) than the English equivilent Online Etymology Dictionary
Or that the link mentions nothing of it.
mmm, it sort of does though... Our use of the word 'computer' comes from the French word, 'computer' which comes from the Latin, 'computare'... it is an English borrowing, of a French borrowing of the Latin word, 'computare'
Sure does. Is Kom-Pew-Thuurrr closer to it than computer?
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