I know that, I just wanted to make sure he didn’t accidentally say something accurate - the stopped clock cliche.
Even the rednecks on the coastal plain in Texas know it’s TIE-Land. Never heard it otherwise.
Before the DEA raided and took down the website Overgrow, I was known as Thai-Guy there. Nobody ever called me Thigh-Guy.
So the bottom line is that some Indian folks pronounce many (all?) T’s with a smidgen of h-like aspiration afterwards. Just like some (mostly elderly) Americans pronounce words such as “which” with a gentle h-like aspiration in front of the w sound.
And this somehow got morphed by the audience, not the speaker, into “Thigh-land” being the common pronunciation.
Sounds like TwitFace has turned into one hell of a game of Telephone.
Who do you mean by ‘the speaker’? Because D’souza, did, in fact, claim that ‘thigh-land’ was the most common pronunciation:
Yes, he eventually walked it back to the less inaccurate claim that it’s the common pronunciation in the subcontinent, but, even there, it’s more accurate to say that they would pronounce Thailand and Thigh-land the same way, and Trump didn’t pronounce it in the way they’d be pronounced there, so that’s irrelevant!
It’s possible D’Sousa improperly extrapolated from knowing that Thai and thigh start with the same sound in subcontinental accents, but if that were the case, a) one would assume he would know that sound is not θ, and b) why the hell would he extrapolate from Indian and Pakistani accents to English and Australian ones? So ‘pulled it out of his ass, not expecting to be called on it’ is rather the more likely case.
Yes, but Americans pronounce the initial /t/ sound in “tie” and “Thai” with an aspiration. Compare “tie” /tɑɪ/ [tʰɑɪ] with “sty” /stɑɪ/ [st˭ɑɪ]. The former is aspirated, the latter is not. However, in English, the aspiration is not phonemic; that is, not used to distinguish words. The phonemic transcription in slashes does not note it, while the phonetic transcription in brackets does.
I don’t know if it’s the same aspiration used in India. In many languages the difference between aspirated and unaspirated consonants is important (that is, phonemic).
To be precise, they pronounce English’s /θ/ phoneme, spelled as th in words like thing (but not as in this) as an aspirated (not “lightly aspirated”) unvoiced labiodental plosive [t̪ʰ].
Many Indians assume that the Th that begins “Thailand” is meant to be this same phoneme. It’s not because they pronounce all Ts that way. It’s because they don’t know that it’s meant to represent a different sound even though it’s spelled the same.
[quote=“Pleonast, post:46, topic:917541, full:true”]
Aspiration is fundamentally phonemic in many standardized Indo-Aryan (“North Indian”) languages like Hindi-Urdu and Bengali.
Standard Bengali has these distinct phonemic plosives and affricates—
/k/ /kʰ/ /g/ /gʰ/
/t͡ʃ/ /t͡ʃʰ/ /d͡ʒ/ /d͡ʒʰ/
/ʈ/ /ʈʰ/ /ɖ/ /ɖʰ/
/t̪/ /t̪ʰ/ /d̪/ /d̪ʰ/
/p/ /pʰ/ /b/ /bʰ/
Indian languages took the word “Thailand” from English, so Indians are pronouncing it the way they think it’s supposed to be pronounced in English.
The traditional name of the country is based on “Siam.” For example, the Bengali name for Thailand is শ্যামদেশ ⟨shyamdesh⟩ [ʃæmd̪eʃ]
Thanks all. It’s really interesting to delve into something we all use every day that many of us (or at least all of me) know so little about the nitty gritty details.
More correctly pronounced ‘Thalaphone’ here and in most parts of the English-speaking world, plus the inner planets.
There are a lot of Indians running around Bangkok, and as best I can recall, I’ve never heard one say “Thigh-land.”
The Irish (or at least Dubliners) say thigh-land. But they are strange with ‘th’. The sentence “I spent three days in Thailand” would come out “I spent tree days in thigh-land”.
That’s the first bengali word, I’ve ever seen on SDMB. Cool @Acsenray
It’s amazing the lengths to which conservatives will go to make it sound like something Trump did is absolutely, perfectly fine, even… sophisticated! Cosmopolitan! Yeesh.
FWIW, in Season 4, Episode 20 of USA’s reality series Chrisley Knows Best, Chase Chrisley pronounces “Thailand” on camera as “Thigh-land”. This sets up a one-liner where father Todd Chrisley makes fun of Chase’s pronunciation.
This originally aired Oct 4, 2016 and airs in repeats frequently. I just happened to catch a rerun of this episode last night, and remembered this thread.
Defending the indefensible is hard work.
[Moderating]
Although this thread was ultimately prompted by something Trump said, it is not about Trump. It is about the factual matter of the pronunciation of a word in various parts of the world. Leave the Trump-bashing (or Trump-supporter-bashing) to the political forums.
I think “most” is a gross exaggeration, but it is not a rare mistake by any means.
On the contrary, it is a rare mistake.