![]() In Thailand, you are never taught English transliteration. Most Thai people don’t know transliteration. It’s for the Thai word for a “Film” ( ภาพยนตร์). All of them write the English transliteration differently. This is because there is no standard.įor example, take a look at this picture from 4 different transliteration/sites. This is why, as you’ve noticed, some sites use a different form of transliteration compared to others. Instead, learning all the Chinese symbols can take a long time. But for Thai, the Thai characters represent the sound, so If you learn to read Thai, you will know exactly how to pronounce the word.Īlso, learning to read Thai, although challenging, can be done in a short period of time. ![]() This is because Chinese uses symbols to represent words, Thai does not. I also think that if there was a standard, it shouldn’t be used. Unlike Chinese, which has pinyin, in Thai, there is no standard. But, if you write “kun”, you might pronounce it like the “un” in the English word “bun”, which is also wrong. ![]() But if you write koon, you might think it’s a long vowel and pronounce it for longer than you have to, turning it into another word (such as the Thai word for multiplication = คูณ). The “ อุ” is a short vowel with a sound like the “oo” in balloon. I’ve seen spellings such as kun, koon, kon. So how do you signify a longer vowel? Some people just write the vowel in English twice. I bet if you don’t know Thai and you try to pronounce “ meu” or “mew”, you will pronounce something totally wrong.Īs I mentioned before, Thai language has long and short vowels. The vowel “อือ” is commonly transliterated as “ eu“. The sound this word makes isn’t found in any word in English, making it hard to write transliteration for.Īnother very simple example is the word for hands “ มือ“. – Meaning if you ask 3 people to pronounce something written in transliteration, all 3 people will pronounce it differently.įor example, ก็เลย (meaning “therefore”) – you might spell it as gor loiie, go loey, go loei, etc. If you use transliteration, you will see there are a few sounds that are just very difficult to write in English. Thai has more/different sounds than English. Learn to read as quickly as possible, and you won’t have to worry about this. So if you see many variations for the same words, keep in mind it’s all up to interpretation. Which once again leads me to the point that only learning to read Thai is correct. Thai also has short and long vowels, so if you say “krap” but hold the “a” a bit too long, it’s incorrect. To me, it’s closer to “krap”, but unless you learn to read Thai, it’s up to interpretation. What about krab, krap, krub, krhup, or krhub? – which one is correct?Īs far as ( ครับ) Krap, I have also seen all those spellings online, and once again, it depends on how your mind thinks to write the sound. Hence, the real pronunciation is closer to “sawatdee” if I absolutely had to spell it. However, in this case, an “a” sound gets added. This is because in this part: สวั there is no “a” in between “ ส” and “ ว“. So what about swasdi? Why do some people write “ swasdi“. ![]() The problem is that “ ส” at the end of a syllable makes a “d” sound (hence sawaddee). So put it all together, and you get sawasdee. So why do some people write sawasdee? This is because these technically are also correct if you spell out each letter literally how they sound like. If you tried pronouncing all those, you would get close to the real sound, so how you spell it is really up to you. In my opinion, they are Sawadee, sawaddee, sawatdii. So from the above example, a few of the spellings technically get you “close” to the real sound. If they do, it’s just to show a foreigner how it sounds like, but there is no “standard” way. You will never see a Thai person use transliteration to write something. The answer is, unfortunately, no version is correct. For example: Sawadee, sawaddee, sawasdee, sawatdii, swasdi… which one is correct? Can I use all of them? What about this one? I am a man so I say: Sawasdee Krab, is it krab? krap? krub? krhup? or krhub? Very confusing for me as I am only just starting to learn your language.” “I find confusing how people use many different spellings for the same words.
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