สำนักราชบัณฑิตยสภา

The Journal of the Royal Institute of Thailand Romanization, Transliteration, and Transcription for the Globalization of the Thai Language 838 Vol. 31 No. 3 Jul.-Sep. 2006 Initial Final Thai consonants N- -N π ≥ B- -P ∫ P- -P ª PH- -P º æ ¿ F- -P Ω ø M- -M ¡ Y- - ¬ R- -N √ L- -N ≈ à W- - « S- -T ´ ∑ √ » … H- - À Œ - - Õ The General System of transcription provides only an approximate pronunciation for non-Thai speakers. The exact pronunciation can be acquired only from the Thai characters themselves, or with the use of a dictionary. Thus, the omission of diacritic marks may cause am- biguous or mis-pronunciation, e.g. the word “south” ( „µâ - “tai”) and “to die” ( µ“¬ - “tai”) cannot be distinguished. 2.4.4 The Current Ro- yal Institute Romanization Sys- tem (1999) The Royal Institute in- troduced the currently used trans- literation system in 1999. This was an adaptation of the 1968 system modified in order to elimi- nate some ambiguity. Due to the influence of English pronuncia- tion, “ ® ” and “ © ™ ¨ ” cannot be distinguished. Phonetically “ ® ” should be transcribed as “c” and “ © ™ ¨ ” should be transcribed as “ch”. Most of the Thais, however, tend to pronounce “c” as /k/like in the familiar English words, e.g., cat, code, cut. The pronunciation of “c” in the words like “cell” and “city” are surprisingly ignored. Thus, the consonants are left untouched. Regarding the vowels, some ambiguous issues are finally resolved such as introduced in the following table: VOWEL OLD SYSTEM NEW SYSTEM Õ÷ Õ◊ u ue Õÿ ÕŸ u u ‡Õ◊ Õ– ‡Õ◊ Õ ua uea Õ— «– Õ— « ua ua ‡Õ◊ Õ¬ uai ueai Õ«¬ uai uai Another improvement is that all the diphthongs with final “ « ” are replaced by “o” such as in the following table: