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The thaiglish thread


BugJackBaron

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There seems to be quite a bit of Thaiglish in spoken Thai. Here is my take on a little

of what I've noticed recently.

"Too late"   this one I still don't quite know what would be the normal English or Thai.It doesn't seem to mean what we would mean.

"Ben"  obviously from the English "bent" when referring to a  tire low on air.

"spec"   from  "specifications. I had no clue what a Thai man meant when he asked me what my spec was..he was talking about what kind of girl I liked.

"fighting"   this one is the same in Korean English meaning giving a good effort I guess..as in a football game.

"slide" this is a  borrowing that is the same as English but I would be curious as to how it got picked up into general parlance.

 

 

What have you noticed? I am not counting the absurd number of borrowing of interjections such as

"wow" "oh my God"  "Oh no"  that are picked up from TV and games.

 

 

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Thai Airways has roster entries like Bangkok-London vv. (vice versa). The airline industry natuarally uses lots of English but I have never heard vice versa used like this. Bangkok-London/ London Bangkok is what I would expect. I think that something to expect with the adoption of English words is that they will be one syllable or abbreviated and not always be used in the same way as in English.

"Mouth" is a Thai word, I don't know how it is spelt, "มาวท์." It meant to speak ill of people when I heard it.


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Heres a few more, perhaps we could end up with a complete Tinglig/English dictionary

 

Tinglit/Thaiglish-English

---------------------------------------

dink - drink
erection - election
election - erection          
erectable - electrical
feenit - finish
howmut - how much
lock - rock
rock - lock
samor - small (not 'some more')
skew me - excuse me
stew me - excuse me
Wat Yoodoo - What are you doing?
wencum - When is he/she/it coming
where Hugo?  - Where are you going?
yewon hell  - Would you like help?

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birdeh    -  birthday

mou    --    mouse

mou   --    mouth

how -  -    house

howyu -  your house

howme - my house

baek  --    break

clut  ---   crutches

clut  - -   clutch

 

 

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On 06/03/2017 at 3:59 PM, tgeezer said:

 The airline industry natuarally uses lots of English but I have never heard vice versa used like this.

vice versa, as we can guess from the sound, is not English at all, it's Latin

you don't ignore that Romains stayed sometime in England and there are some Latin expressions in English ( vice versa is also used in French )

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21 hours ago, xkkpafi said:

Heres a few more, perhaps we could end up with a complete Tinglig/English dictionary

 

Tinglit/Thaiglish-English

---------------------------------------

dink - drink
erection - election
election - erection          
erectable - electrical
feenit - finish
howmut - how much
lock - rock
rock - lock
samor - small (not 'some more')
skew me - excuse me
stew me - excuse me
Wat Yoodoo - What are you doing?
wencum - When is he/she/it coming
where Hugo?  - Where are you going?
yewon hell  - Would you like help?

Could also be Screw me?

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vice versa, as we can guess from the sound, is not English at all, it's Latin
you don't ignore that Romains stayed sometime in England and there are some Latin expressions in English ( vice versa is also used in French )

I assumed that Thai was using the English vice versa from the way it was used. I have no idea what it means in Latin or French for that matter, but if the same as English then there is no way of determining which language the Thai comes from.


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You only have to look at how it's pronounced in Thai to see from which language vice versa was borrowed from.

 

Most, if not all, mainland Europe languages would pronounce the "i" in vice as อี, English is the only one that pronounces it ไอ

 

On the other hand, if you look at the Thai pronunciation of words using the metric system, like meter, liter, etc. , you can see they are borrowed directly from French:

mètre เมตร

litre ลิตร

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Big difference in the tone, water is high tone wheras breasts is mid tone. Thai people tend to like water to be said high and longish. My accent makes water nam and breasts nom.
The spacing in your post had 'big' on its own and I wondered how ตก could be droopy. Once I heard someone say of fruit trees, ตก and when I asked for a translation was told it meant abundant, I never bothered to look it up until juist now. I can't find anything but dropping or falling, but I think that if the tree had abundant fruit some would have fallen and some would be left on the tree, maybe making the branches droop. I wonder if I were to comment ผลไม้ตกมาก it might be interpreted as abundant fruit.


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18 hours ago, tgeezer said:

Once I heard someone say of fruit trees, ตก and when I asked for a translation was told it meant abundant

It is ดก with ด.เด็ก.   

ดก means prolific.  

ผลไม้ลูกดก = abundant fruit (tree)

พ่อลูกดก = a guy with lots of kids

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Ta awfully. I think that this isn't the first time I have made this mistake. If I can get it so wrong using Thai, imagine what misapprehension there must be among people who use transliteration!
This is how language changes naturally I believe.

Just had a look at the RID and see มากกว่าปกติ
ลูกดก of a woman who has had many kids at regular intervals.
So with ไม่มีเวลสไปชมน้ำตก he must have said นมตก falling mamaries, interpreted as droopy mamaries. Is there room for นมดก , of a cow, I wonder.


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On 3/8/2017 at 10:55 PM, Aforek said:

you don't ignore that Romains stayed sometime in England and there are some Latin expressions in English

the English has not only "some" Latin expressions.

Quote

About 80 percent of the entries in any English dictionary are borrowed, mainly from Latin. Over 60 percent of all English words have Greek or Latin roots. In the vocabulary of the sciences and technology, the figure rises to over 90 percent. About 10 percent of the Latin vocabulary has found its way directly into English without an intermediary (usually French).

 

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