Thread: Why does "Thai" have an "h" in it?

Lots of places around HK such as Fuk On, Heng On, Fuk Yoo, Fukuoka, Cantonese is funnier than Thai spellings / pronounciations.

Originally Posted by November Rain

Jeeze, Smeg, were you hard up for an idea for a thread? Slagged off everything else in Thailand, have you?

Spotting criticism where there is none are we?

And then there's you slagging off the most popular thread of the evening and then providing some input yourself. That's real clever.

Originally Posted by dirtydog

Shouldn't it be "TIE" as in Tieland?

Or Tailand? Presumbly that'd be confused by even more people with Taiwan.

Originally Posted by November Rain

holiday makers refer to aspirations to visit Fuck-it.

an advertisment from Brisbane.

Originally Posted by November Rain

Jeeze, Smeg, were you hard up for an idea for a thread? Slagged off everything else in Thailand, have you?

to be fair it aint really a bad thread NR.

for instance I learnt this .......

Originally Posted by Dan

Because it's spelt มหิดล - The last letter is (confusingly) pronounced as an l when it's at the start of a syllable but as an n at the end

Originally Posted by Spin

Does this explain why thais mess up L and N when speaking english. like dubben(double) and appun(apple)???

Originally Posted by friscofrankie

^ yes

quite interesting.

Originally Posted by Spin

Originally Posted by Dan

Because it's spelt มหิดล - The last letter is (confusingly) pronounced as an l when it's at the start of a syllable but as an n at the end

Does this explain why thais mess up L and N when speaking english. like dubben(double) and appun(apple)???

Yes, Thais don't have a trailing L sound at the end of syllables (like we dont have a leading NG sound). When a word like Hotel is transliterated (not translated) into Thai they use the Thai L letter ล (Lor Ling - the monkey). The problem is that when ล appears at the end of a syllable in Thai is pronounced N not L so Thais read the word and correctly (in their minds) say Hoten.

But it does not seem to me to explain why the Thai word มหิดล should be transliterated as Mahidol.

When the last letter ล appears at the end of a syllable it changes its sound to N. However, the transliteration has not taken into account the change in pronunciation so when the english transliteration is read by a foreigner they pronounce it Mahidol instead of Mahidon. The transliteration of the trailing ล has been done literally using its basic sound instead of taking into account the end of syllable modifier.

Should be transliteraed as Mahidon I would say.

Same goes for King Phumipon Adunyadet. His name ภูมิพลอดุลยเดช is normally transliterated as Bumibol Adulyadej

This does not take into acount the change in pronunciation of Lor Ling (twice) and also Chor Chang. The trailing Chor Chang has been transliterated as a J which is a close approximation of CH. I think it should be transliterated as T to take into account the modifier which causes Chor Chang to be pronounced T when it appears at the end of syllables.

Thats my take but I learned Thai from a book and I struggle in even basic verbal conversation so I could be talking bollocks.

Why does Thames have an H in it?

Why is ThaTon pronounced TaDon?

Why is Croquet pronounced Krokay?

Why is Read pronounced Reed, but if you say it in the past tense Red?

Why will this thread probably make the century?

^WORD HISTORY:
The modern spelling of the word Thames illustrates an interesting phenomenon in the history of the English language. The Thames is first mentioned in English around 893 in King Alfred the Great's Orosius. At the time it was called the Temese, a form believed to come from an earlier, unrecorded English *Tamisa. The spelling Thames, which first appears in 1649, is an example of the kind of “learned” respelling that went on in English from the late Renaissance through the Enlightenment, when the prestige of Latin and Greek prompted scholars to “correct” the form of many English words. The a in Thames is etymologically correct, since the Latin forms had that vowel, but the h is a “learned” error, added in the mistaken belief that Thames derived from Greek. Such errors were common, and many words that had nothing to do with Greek were respelled to make them look Greek; two other examples are author (ultimately from Latin auctor) and Anthony (from Latin Antonius), with the h added as if these were based on Greek words with a theta (th) in them. In many cases, the pronunciations of these words changed accordingly, yielding what linguists call a spelling pronunciation; author is now pronounced with a (th). The pronunciation of Thames remained unchanged, however, providing an etymologically explicable example of the notorious discrepancy between English spelling and pronunciation

Perhaps this was adopted for transliteration by Thais from early British visitors around the time of the late Renaissance (1649)

The BTS station "Phrom Prong" for example, I keep hearing tourists saying "From Frong"