Category Archives: Malay

The purge (aka just tidying away)

I’ve taken the past couple of days to (re)organise my languages (regarding both materials and in my head) – there often is way too much clutter to deal with!

Gone are Armenian, Bengali, Cantonese, Finnish, Hebrew, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish, Romanian, Russian, Tamil and Vietnamese; Swedish, which had made a quick but astounding comeback, was sent home as well (but I just couldn’t help dubbing it my ‘European Thai’ before, for its ability to regularly return from the Great Beyond). Although they were more like appendices, I’ve also had Faroese, Konkani and Marathi materials out too.

Despite, to all intents and purposes, existing in limbo, I’m keeping all things (Mandarin) Chinese, Esperanto, (Ancient) Greek, Hindustani, Latin, Polish, Turkish and Welsh, because the necromancer in me still feels way too attached to all the possibilities they offer, and I may always choose to spin the wheel of life and bring them back. For now.

หลักเกณฑ์การทับศัพท์ภาษาโปรตุเกส

“จง​ขอ​เถิด แล้ว​ท่าน​จะ​ได้​รับ จง​แสวงหา​เถิด แล้ว​ท่าน​จะ​พบ จง​เคาะ​ประตู​เถิด แล้ว​เขา​จะ​เปิด​ประตู​รับ​ท่าน เพราะ​คน​ที่​ขอ​ย่อม​ได้​รับ คน​ที่​แสวงหา​ย่อม​พบ คน​ที่​เคาะ​ประตู​ย่อม​มี​ผู้​เปิด​ประตู​ให้”

Mt 7:7–8

To my surprise, I’ve found out that the Royal Institute of Thailand has actually issued rules for the transliteration of foreign words into Thai! From all I’ve read about them, I should actually be surprised I didn’t think of looking it up before.

From what I can gather, and just as I’d imagined, they’ve come up with systems that attempt to reflect as much of the phonology of the original languages and yet represent as much of the original orthographic features and idiosyncrasies by the Thai script.

The languages whose standards have been published seem to be:

  • Arabic;
  • Chinese;
  • English;
  • French;
  • German;
  • Hindi;
  • Italian;
  • Japanese;
  • Korean;
  • Malay;
  • Russian;
  • Spanish;
  • Vietnamese.

That means that, contrarily to what the title of this post says, there doesn’t seem to be an official system for Portuguese.

For many features of Portuguese, I could actually come up with a reasonable basic system derived from common rules taken from the published standards that would also be valid for Portuguese – the representation of /ʒ/ by ฌ, for instance; for others, however, I wouldn’t be able to trace any parallels at all and would have to rely on examples found online and, well, my own whim – such as how to deal with unique sounds or raised (neutralised) unstressed vowels (to represent phonology or to reflect orthography?).