This is a continuation into the description of Thai phonemes of which pose difficulty to the typical native English speaker.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\u0e01<\/strong><\/p>\n This letter is best pronounced like a \u2018g\u2019. Some authors say that this letter is pronounced like a \u2018k\u2019, but they are wrong. Their insistance has led to foreigners mispronouncing many of the cities in Thailand. For example, Phuket is really pronounced \u2018puu get\u2019, while the Koh of Koh Samui is really pronounced \u2018Go\u2019.<\/p>\n the rule:<\/p>\n If the \u0e01 is found at the beginning of a syllable, pronounce it as a \u2018g\u2019.<\/p>\n If the \u0e01 is found at the end of a syllable, pronounce it as a \u2018k\u2019.<\/p>\n For example, the word Bangkok is written in Thai as \u0e1a\u0e32\u0e07\u0e01\u0e2d\u0e01. Although it\u2019s written as Bangkok in English, the correct Thai way to pronounce it would sound much more like \u2018baang gawk\u2019. Notice that the first \u0e01 was written as a \u2018g\u2019 and the second as a \u2018k\u2019.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u0e41\u0e2d\u0e30, \u0e41\u0e2d<\/strong> <\/p>\n \u0e2d<\/strong><\/p>\n This vowel makes the sound \u2018aaw\u2019, like in the word \u2018awkward\u2019. It\u2019s often transliterated as \u2018or\u2019, but this shouldn\u2019t be done – an English speaker would incorrectly pronounce it like the \u2018or\u2019 in the word \u2018organ\u2019. Here is another example: in Thai, the word for blessing is pronounced \u2018pawn\u2019, and is popularly used for names. Unfortunately for them, their names are transliterated as \u2018porn\u2019.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n One more note on transliteration with respect to my articles. I\u2019m not transliterating Thai letter for letter or to be consistent with someone else\u2019s way of writing Thai. Instead, I spell Karaoke in a way that best helps the American English speaker best pronounce each word.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A phoneme is the smallest segmental unit of sound used to form a meaningful contrast between utterances, from which words in that language or dialect can be created. Fortunately, most phonemes (sounds) that are used in Thai can be also found in English, but there are a few tricky ones of which I\u2019ll describe.<\/p>","protected":false},"author":59,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"content-type":""},"categories":[10208],"tags":[8244,192207,10177],"class_list":["post-1196","post","type-post","status-publish","hentry","category-beginner","tag-alphabet","tag-phoneme","tag-thai"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/thai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1196","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/thai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/thai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/thai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/59"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/thai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1196"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/thai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1196\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1206,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/thai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1196\/revisions\/1206"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/thai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1196"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/thai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1196"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/thai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1196"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nBest written as \u2018ae\u2019, the short version of this vowel sounds almost identical to the \u2018a\u2019 in apple.<\/p>\n