VB: “Standard Thai transliteration is clumsy”

OPT: “That doesn’t seem clumsy”

VB: “That’s what I said.”

Do I win something?
I don’t agree that Standard Thai transliteration is clumsy.

Oops. Oceo’s prize is the collected works of Sunthorn Phu, the ‘Thai Shakespeare’ (Pu - the ‘th’ is aspirated too, so Suntorn Pu is closer to what Thais say) :)
I’ve heard people try to get around Phuket by saying foo-ket, including my father. Imagine their relief when they find out it is an aspirated p.

I recently discovered the Vietnamese name Thuy is pronounced twee. With this knowledge I remembered Guy is pronounced gee in French and Les Tuileries is tweeleree so the th in Thuy could also be an aspirated t as in Thai transliteration of Sunthorn etc.

‘… the present Vietnamese alphabet, largely the work of French Jesuit Alexandre de Rhodes, who worked in the country between 1624 and 1644’ says wikipedia.

venomousbede - 11 February 2012 11:24 AM

Suntorn Pu is closer to what Thais say)

Not if the Thai also have unaspirated, unvoiced stops, which, apparently, they do.  A universal transliteration scheme of such a language cannot rely on the idiosyncratic features of another language.

But the Thai transliteration is supposed to help people who cannot read the Thai alphabet pronounce Thai. It only works if you have time to familiarise yourself with its idiosyncrasies which tourists do not. Recent travel phrasebooks recognise this though phoneticians/linguists/translators may stick to the old notation. I have an old English/Thai dictionary and it has “lawy” for what I would render as “lee-ow”. The transliterated Thai to English section includes ph words meaning aspirated p most users of the dictionary would miss.

Okay, so Thai has an aspirated p and an unaspirated p sound. These are transliterated as ph and p respectively. How would you recommend these two different sounds are transliterated?

One obvious alternative would be to transliterate aspirated p as p’ (p followed by apostrophe), as is sometimes done in other languages.

Fair point, there are alternatives. Maybe I’m just used to it.

I’d have pooh-poohed this transliteration in favour of Pu though I believe the American equivalent is poop. Is poo understood there? In the case of crab/poo the p is unaspirated.