Question & Answer

 

I wish this blog would make communications easier like Flickr. However feedback comes anyway by other means.

Q & A

Q. Why romanize Thai names like หูควายขาว as “hŏo kwaai kăao” rather than “hu khwai khao” like most people and sites do ?

A. Two good reasons, always in the spirit of making things easily understandable : 

1. 1. One is with tone marks, the other without  tone mark. These help in the pronunciation.

This is equivalent to the Chinese romanization. For instance 柳叶紫珠 Liǔ yè zǐ zhū, instead of Liu ye zi zhu. Omitting the tone marks does not usually allow reverse searching for scripted names. I suggest to doubters to experiment with Google search for proof. Although searching for romanized names from original script is not 100 % sure to return the correct romanization j, it is 99% sure. A notorious Failed is the character 长 still associated with Zhǎng instead of Cháng when expressing “long”.

1. 2. The italic option is to distinguish our version from others by showing that it has been checked with a good comprehensive Thai reference.                  

Our wish would be to have such good references in Arabic, Hebrew, etc. but either we have not found any or we have not been able to use existing ones due to the difficulties of utilisation.