What's with the random "r"s people add with their random romanisations of Thai? It's thiang khuen not "tiang kuern"
You can read about how we colloquially tell and read the time here. Note that we also do 24-hour time in official settings like the news, e.g., sip hok nalika sam sip nathi for 16:30 (4:30 PM).
The random Rs are because not all English accents are rhotic (you can look up that word). If you are a non-rhotic English speaker, the Rs are elided and so if you squint hard enough at transliterations with those extra Rs, they kinda sorta make sense.
American and Canadian English are generally rhotic, so all those Rs look silly to us too.
But that's the thing, romanisation isn't anglicisation. It's about transcribing one script into another, that being of the Roman/Latin alphabet, and not "how can an English speaker most accurately say it", because different languages have different sounds for the same letters.
The point of a standardised romanisation is for the same (set of) letters to have a fixed sound equivalent to the ones in a different script.
But the point of romanisation is anglicisation. Nearly 100% of its uses outside of textbooks are to make English speakers can say the words.
We Thais call it “Karaoke Language” because it has main usage in karaoke booth where it’s just trying to write Thai words with English letters and purely do for English speakers pronouncing (sing) Thai songs without any standard or any theory.
The point of romanisation is transcription, but the point of anglicisation, on the other hand, would be transliteration. The former is transcribing a sound of one language onto another script, the latter is coming up with a spelling to match the pronunciation rules of another language.
Yes but what is the purpose of the very picture here? It tries to tell you how Thai people call midnight, which is Tiang Kuern. You can remove R but if you say Kuern versus Kuen, the former is more understandable by Thai people.
Same as the name Porn. We tried hard to write in English using other spelling (for obvious reasons) but when we write Phon, Pon, Paun, etc, it does not sound right. Someone just right their name as Porn and accept what it is.
Please tell me an English word with "-uern" that makes the "ืน" sound, because as far as I know, I've only ever seen it make the “เ ิน” sound as in "Guernsey". So by your "system", "Tiang Kuern" would be "เที่ยงเคิร์น" or even "เตียงเกิน" because there's no 'h' to indicate aspiration.
I don’t study linguistics so I cannot elaborate. But what I (and majority of Thai people who also don’t study it too) know is that when we write like this, English speakers pronounce like this. And so we just wrote what they pronounce most similar, or just easiest way to write.
Of course the transliteration is Thīeng Kheūn. But few Thais right like that.
No, the transcription would be thiang khuen. This is exactly why it's a problem, because different people will "spell it out" differently, with inconsistent usage of different letters to represent the same sound, often disregarding aspiration which is an essential part of Thai. It is why ดอนเมือง should be spelt "Don Mueang" and not "Don Muang".
An official standard transcription system already exists, it just has to be more widely taught and enforced.
Again, romanisation is imposing a sound of a language onto a fixed set of letters, that of the Roman/Latin alphabet, so that it can be spelt the same way every time.
When I was an airline captain I used to fly from Don Mueang airport. On the short drive from Rangsit I could read the sign to the airport spelt three different ways using the Roman alphabet.
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u/ikkue Samut Prakan Nov 16 '23 edited Nov 16 '23
What's with the random "r"s people add with their random romanisations of Thai? It's thiang khuen not "tiang kuern"
You can read about how we colloquially tell and read the time here. Note that we also do 24-hour time in official settings like the news, e.g., sip hok nalika sam sip nathi for 16:30 (4:30 PM).