ISO 11940-2 is an ISO standard for a simplified transcription of the Thai language into Latin characters.
The full standard ISO 11940-2:2007 includes pronunciation rules and conversion tables of Thai consonants and vowels. It is a sequel to ISO 11940 , describing a way to transform its transliteration into a broad transcription.
The standard ISO 11940 (to be renamed 11940-1) defines a strict and reversible transliteration of Thai orthography into Latin characters, by means of a host of diacritics. The result bears no resemblance to Thai pronunciation. The additional standard ISO 11940-2 describes a set of rules to transform the transliteration resulting from ISO 11940 based on Thai orthography into a broad transcription based on pronunciation, using only unadorned Latin letters. All information on vowel length and syllable tone is dropped, as well as the distinction between IPA /o/ and /ɔ/.
The standard explicitly mentions that whenever the full pronunciation of each word is necessary or needed, conversion of long vowels can be devised and tone rules can be added to the system to achieve the full pronunciation of each word. However no rules are included how to achieve this.
Although the standard is described as a procedure acting on the Thai orthography, the system is based on the pronunciation. Its rules can therefore be also described in terms of Thai phonology. Prominent features of ISO 11940-2 include:
Transcription is according to pronunciation, not Thai orthography, especially notable in final consonants. Vowels are transcribed in sequence as pronounced, not as written in Thai script. Implied vowels, which are not written in Thai script, are inserted as pronounced. Written silent letters are omitted.
The result of applying the rules described in the standard is almost identical to the transcription defined by the Royal Thai General System of Transcription. One exception is preceding a syllable initial vowel by ⟨'⟩, representing the Thai null consonant อ, obviating the need to insert a dash in some words to preserve syllable boundaries. The other exception is the retention of the aspiration characteristic of the alveolo-palatal affricate. So while Thai ฉ, ช, and ฌ, are represented by ⟨ch⟩ as in RTGS, the Thai letter จ is written as ⟨c⟩.
In each cell below, the first line indicates International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), the second indicates the Thai characters in initial position (several letters appearing in the same box have identical pronunciation). The third line shows the ISO 11940-2 rendering.
| Labial | Alveolar | Palatal | Velar | Glottal | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nasal | [m] ม m | [n] ณ,น n | [ŋ] ง ng | |||
| Stop | tenuis | [p] ป p | [t] ฏ,ต t | [tɕ] จ c | [k] ก k | [ʔ] อ ' |
| aspirated | [pʰ] ผ,พ,ภ ph | [tʰ] ฐ,ฑ,ฒ,ถ,ท,ธ th | [tɕʰ] ฉ,ช,ฌ ch | [kʰ] ข,ฃ,ค,ฅ,ฆ kh | ||
| voiced | [b] บ b | [d] ฎ,ด d | ||||
| Fricative | [f] ฝ,ฟ f | [s] ซ,ศ,ษ,ส s | [h] ห,ฮ h | |||
| Approximant | [w] ว w | [l] ล,ฬ l | [j] ญ,ย y | |||
| Trill | [r] ร r | |||||
Of the consonant letters, excluding the disused ฃ and ฅ, six (ฉ ผ ฝ ห อ ฮ) cannot be used as a final and the other 36 collapse into a very small repertoire of possible final consonant sounds and corresponding Latin letters. The consonants ย and ว when used as finals, form diphthongs and triphthongs with the preceding vowel, and ISO 11940-2 uses the vowel letters i and o in such cases.
| Labial | Alveolar | Palatal | Velar | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nasal | [m] ม m | [n] ญ,ณ,น,ร,ล,ฬ n | [ŋ] ง ng | |
| Stop | [p] บ,ป,พ,ฟ,ภ p | [t] จ,ช,ซ,ฌ,ฎ,ฏ,ฐ,ฑ, ฒ,ด,ต,ถ,ท,ธ,ศ,ษ,ส t | [k] ก,ข,ค,ฆ k | |
| Approximant | [w] ว o | [j] ย i |
The basic vowels of the Thai language, from front to back and close to open, are given in the following table. The top entry in every cell is the symbol from the International Phonetic Alphabet, the second entry gives the spelling in the Thai alphabet, where a dash (–) indicates the position of the initial consonant after which the vowel is pronounced. A second dash indicates that a final consonant must follow. The third line contains the ISO 11940 symbol used.
| Front | Back | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| unrounded | unrounded | rounded | ||||
| short | long | short | long | short | long | |
| Close | /i/ -ิ | /iː/ -ี | /ɯ/ -ึ | /ɯː/ -ื- | /u/ -ุ | /uː/ -ู |
| i | ue | u | ||||
| Close-mid | /e/ เ-ะ | /eː/ เ- | /ɤ/ เ-อะ | /ɤː/ เ-อ | /o/ โ-ะ | /oː/ โ- |
| e | oe | o | ||||
| Open-mid | /ɛ/ แ-ะ | /ɛː/ แ- | /ɔ/ เ-าะ | /ɔː/ -อ | ||
| ae | o | |||||
| Open | /a/ -ะ, -ั- | /aː/ -า | ||||
| a | ||||||
Thai vowels come in long-short pairs, forming distinct phonemes, but ISO 11940-2 represents both by the same symbol. Also the two phonemes IPA o and ɔ share a single Latin letter o.
The basic vowels can be combined into diphthongs and triphthongs.
| Long | Short | ISO 11940-2 | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Thai | IPA | Thai | IPA | |
| –าว | /aːw/ | เ–า | /aw/ | ao |
| เ–ว | /eːw/ | เ–็ว | /ew/ | eo |
| แ–ว | /ɛːw/ | – | – | aeo |
| – | – | –ิว | /iw/ | io |
| เ–ียว | /iaw/ | – | – | iao |
| เ–ีย | /iːa/ | เ–ียะ | /ia/ | ia |
| –ัว | /uːa/ | –ัวะ | /ua/ | ua |
| เ–ือ | /ɯːa/ | เ–ือะ | /ɯa/ | uea |
| –าย | /aːj/ | ไ–*, ใ–*, ไ–ย, -ัย | /aj/ | ai |
| –อย | /ɔːj/ | – | – | oi |
| โ–ย | /oːj/ | – | – | |
| –ูย | /uːj/ | –ุย | /uj/ | ui |
| เ–ย | /ɤːj/ | – | – | oei |
| –วย | /uaj/ | – | – | uai |
| เ–ือย | /ɯaj/ | – | – | ueai |
A diacritic is a glyph added to a letter or basic glyph. The term derives from the Ancient Greek διακριτικός, from διακρίνω. Diacritic is primarily an adjective, though sometimes used as a noun, whereas diacritical is only ever an adjective. Some diacritical marks, such as the acute ( ´ ) and grave ( ` ), are often called accents. Diacritical marks may appear above or below a letter, or in some other position such as within the letter or between two letters.
H, or h, is the eighth letter in the ISO basic Latin alphabet. Its name in English is aitch, or regionally haitch.
The Thai script is the abugida used to write Thai, Southern Thai and many other languages spoken in Thailand. The Thai alphabet itself has 44 consonant symbols, 16 vowel symbols that combine into at least 32 vowel forms and four tone diacritics to create characters mostly representing syllables.
Romanization or romanisation, in linguistics, is the conversion of writing from a different writing system to the Roman (Latin) script, or a system for doing so. Methods of romanization include transliteration, for representing written text, and transcription, for representing the spoken word, and combinations of both. Transcription methods can be subdivided into phonemic transcription, which records the phonemes or units of semantic meaning in speech, and more strict phonetic transcription, which records speech sounds with precision.
Finnish orthography is based on the Latin script, and uses an alphabet derived from the Swedish alphabet, officially comprising 29 letters but also has two additional letters found in some loanwords. The Finnish orthography strives to represent all morphemes phonologically and, roughly speaking, the sound value of each letter tends to correspond with its value in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) – although some discrepancies do exist.
Œ is a Latin alphabet grapheme, a ligature of o and e. In medieval and early modern Latin, it was used to represent the Greek diphthong οι and in a few non-Greek words, usages that continue in English and French. In French, it is also used in some non-learned words, representing then mid-front rounded vowel-sounds, rather than sounding the same as é or è, those being its traditional French values in the words borrowed from or via Latin.
A caron, háček or haček also known as a hachek, wedge, check, kvačica, strešica, mäkčeň, paukščiukas, inverted circumflex, inverted hat, or flying bird, is a diacritic (ˇ) commonly placed over certain letters in the orthography of some Baltic, Slavic, Finnic, Samic, Berber, and other languages to indicate a change in the related letter's pronunciation.
A digraph or digram is a pair of characters used in the orthography of a language to write either a single phoneme, or a sequence of phonemes that does not correspond to the normal values of the two characters combined.
The Royal Thai General System of Transcription (RTGS) is the official system for rendering Thai words in the Latin alphabet. It was published by the Royal Institute of Thailand.
In linguistics, vowel length is the perceived length of a vowel sound: the corresponding physical measurement is duration. In some languages vowel length is an important phonemic factor, meaning vowel length can change the meaning of the word, for example in: Arabic, Finnish, Fijian, Kannada, Japanese, Latin, Old English, Scottish Gaelic, and Vietnamese. While vowel length alone does not change word meaning in most dialects of English, it is said to do so in a few dialects, such as Australian English, Lunenburg English, New Zealand English, and South African English. It also plays a lesser phonetic role in Cantonese, unlike in other varieties of Chinese.
Hebrew uses the Hebrew alphabet with optional vowel diacritics. The romanization of Hebrew is the use of the Latin alphabet to transliterate Hebrew words.
Dutch orthography uses the Latin alphabet. The spelling system is issued by government decree and is compulsory for all government documentation and educational establishments.
The Uralic Phonetic Alphabet (UPA) or Finno-Ugric transcription system is a phonetic transcription or notational system used predominantly for the transcription and reconstruction of Uralic languages. It was first published in 1901 by Eemil Nestor Setälä, a Finnish linguist.
There are many systems for the romanization of the Thai language, i.e. representing the language in Latin script. These include systems of transliteration, and transcription. The most seen system in public space is Royal Thai General System of Transcription (RTGS)—the official scheme promulgated by the Royal Thai Institute. It is based on spoken Thai, but disregards tone, vowel length and a few minor sound distinctions.
The orthography of the Greek language ultimately has its roots in the adoption of the Greek alphabet in the 9th century BC. Some time prior to that, one early form of Greek, Mycenaean, was written in Linear B, although there was a lapse of several centuries between the time Mycenaean stopped being written and the time when the Greek alphabet came into use.
The Rheinische Dokumenta is a phonetic writing system developed in the early 1980s by a working group of academics, linguists, local language experts, and local language speakers of the Rhineland. It was presented to the public in 1986 by the Landschaftsverband Rheinland.
ISO 11940 is an ISO standard for the transliteration of Thai characters, published in 1998 and updated in September 2003 and confirmed in 2008. An extension to this standard named ISO 11940-2 defines a simplified transcription based on it.
The modern Corsican alphabet uses 22 basic letters taken from the Latin alphabet with some changes, plus some multigraphs. The pronunciations of the English, French, Italian or Latin forms of these letters are not a guide to their pronunciation in Corsu, which has its own pronunciation, often the same, but frequently not. As can be seen from the table below, two of the phonemic letters are represented as trigraphs, plus some other digraphs. Nearly all the letters are allophonic; that is, a phoneme of the language might have more than one pronunciation and be represented by more than one letter. The exact pronunciation depends mainly on word order and usage and is governed by a complex set of rules, variable to some degree by dialect. These have to be learned by the speaker of the language.
Daī-ghî tōng-iōng pīng-im is an orthography in the Latin alphabet for Taiwanese Hokkien based upon Tongyong Pinyin. It is able to use the Latin alphabet to indicate the proper variation of pitch with nine diacritic symbols.
