QA3

 

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,  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.

Q. What on earth possessed you to start a task like this ?

(this is a comment that has been directed at me many times).

A. An unusual non technical question but a welcome philosophical invitation to reveal the motivation behind it all. At the beginning there was an urge to teach and to write. Conventional teaching was too restricted by rules and corrupted by an over dominant capitalistic society.

Conventional writing; substantial books on technical matters are fine but extremely dear and restricted to the privilege minorities. Computers on the other hand are popular and accessible to a much greater slice of the world population, more over languages are a minimal obstruction. Translations are easy with computers, very expensive when it come to books. So the basic desire being to produce a non discriminatory work the choice was easily made.

“FATE” came in the form of 2 facts. An introduction into the University of Melbourne by the late Dr. Uwe Radok , a brilliant meteorologist, at the time when academia was not quite dominated by managers and accountants. About a decade later an introduction into the world of agriculture and horticulture by Prof. Glyn Rimminton, an agriculturist now famous in many parts of the world across a number of disciplines.

The influences of the hundreds of people met during those years within and outside academia led to the concept of the Multilingual Multiscript Plant Name Database and to its implementation. The fact that twenty years later there is still no equal work anywhere responding to all the nomenclatural needs met by the MMPND is the most rewarding feeling and a source of greatest personal satisfaction. This is why the concept has been revived in 2024 in the present form.