![]() These missing sounds need to be taught – how to make them, how to position one’s mouth, what they should sound like etc. As there’s no Thai “sh” for Krishna, Thai speakers say “s” instead – Krisana (-sana because “sn” is not an allowed consonant cluster). Bha” group of Sanskrit letters, and there are no Thai sounds for ś and ṣ either. Full Thai spelling is ศรีนครินทร์ – Srinakarindra, and “Sinakarin” is what is left of it after all the rules are applied.įinally, and this is probably the biggest and the most obvious issue – some Sanskrit sounds have been totally lost. Second letter, ร, becomes silent and so words like Srinakarin are pronounced Sinakarin. In some cases Thai consonants become silent precisely because they are part of clusters that are difficult to say, notably in ศร combination which is important to us because it’s part of “Sri”. In any case, consonant clusters transliterated from Sanskrit need to indicate that they are, indeed, clusters and that inherent vowels need to be dropped. So, the rule for inserting “a” is there but it’s not applied when there’s a need for trying to sound like a foreigner. ![]() This rule isn’t fixed, however – proper pronunciation of fashionable words is a sign of social status so many Thais will say “blueberry” perfectly, but those who don’t care enough would still say “baluberry”. Every school child is taught English nowadays but without sufficient training and discipline even common words like “school” and “spa” (there’s spa on every street corner in Bangkok now) are pronounced as “sa-kool” and “sa-pa”. Any combination outside of these fourteen requires inserting a vowel, similar to “Intara” above. In Sanskrit there are hundreds and possibly thousands of them but in Thai there are only fourteen. There are rules to govern these changes, too.Īnother major area is consonant clusters. In the word ถนน – which is written as “th-n-n” implicit vowels are read as thAnOn. Depending on the position in the word they become “a” or “o”. Implicit vowels – one of the first things to learn when reading Devanagari, are present in Thai but their pronunciation is not fixed. There are rules to govern these changes as well. Sometimes, to an English speaker, this affects letters in the middle of words, too, like letter ล – “l” in the middle of ชลบุรี becomes “n” – ChoNburi. Thus words ending in “r” actually end in “n” and words ending in “s” actually end in “t”. Thus there are many cases where letters are part of the word but are silent and there are rules for when they are read aloud and when not.Īnother way of simplification concerns final consonants – whatever consonant appears at the end of the word it must make one of the eight permitted sounds. Sometimes it’s spelled “Inthara” – there are resorts and hotels with this name (to be fair, there’s also “Ramintra”). ![]() In this case “dra/tra” is retained but a vowel is inserted in the middle to make pronunciation easier – “intara”. In some cases full pronunciation is retained, however, like part of the official Thai name for Bangkok is “Mahintara”, which is basically “Mahindra”. “Indra” itself is อินทร์ – it has all the letters “i”, “n”, “d/t”, and “r”, but if you drop final “a” saying “Intr” becomes impossible so “tr” is dropped as well and pronunciation becomes just “In” – Pra In. First part is “Pra”, which is a honorific and doesn’t concern us here. Take Thai word for Lord Indra – พระอินทร์. In Hindi, for example, people drop final “a” so that Bharata becomes Bharat and Prabhupada becomes Prabhupad. Pronunciation standards were not maintained and rather the way the common people say these words became official, and so modern Thai has many rules to regulate this “corruption”, for the lack of a better word. ![]() With time, however, correct pronunciation has been lost even though spelling in many cases remained the same. Many modern Thai words have Sanskrit origins, too. ![]() Without going too far into history, Thai alphabet is part of a Brahmic family of scripts and as such, like Devanagari itself, was originally perfectly equipped for writing down Sanskrit. This post is meant to elicit feedback, please leave comments below if you think something in this article is factually incorrect. ![]()
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