“Yes, but they were given to you in Thai, not English, weren’t they?” I countered politely. He shut up.
Yes, I’m having a rant but I will get it over as fast as possible, then I’ll feel much better. I don’t have enough decades left to make a difference around here, but if I inspire just one crusader to boldly go, split infinitives AND tidy up the transliteration of Thai, my time will have been worthwhile.
And before you get all smart and start the long winded explanation of why Thai has characters that should not be pronounced I DON’T WANT TO KNOW! OK? The idiosyncrasies of one language should not be passed on to another. Surely, one of the purposes of written language is to help us make the right noises with our mouths? So please can we stop adding letters which no-one is meant to use?
The French are into this, plus grande  of course, but not the pragmatic Finns. They pronounce every letter on the page – and would make noises for the punctuation marks too if they had their way!
It’s the ‘Suriwong’ hotel in the Night Bazaar, not the ‘Suriwongse’ and it’s ‘Seedornchai’ road not ‘Sridornchai’. (In fact, whenever you see an ‘r’ lurking behind an ‘s’, just ignore it).
And let’s have no talk of the sibilant ‘p’, either. There are those who say that the ‘h’ after the ‘p’ of Lamphun is to phersuade you to phush a little breath out to phsoften the ‘phee.’ Sorry! Niceties like this only help we foreigners look even more silly in the eyes of Thais, especially in that neat little town 45 minutes south of here! In fact, when joining in a toast a few years back at the Rotary Club of Lamphun (sorry, Lampoon), I was interested to hear all the men there loudly proclaim “Lumpoon!”
If my mythical future language crusader survives his first inevitable battles with the establishment and self-important academics, I would encourage him to go on to change Chiangmai to Chiangmy. To avoid people saying “Chiangmay”, as you would say ‘laid’, ‘paid’ and ‘raid’. With “my” you can’t go wrong. Sorry, rong.
So wot about Inglish?
We Brits have a certain reputation for fairness and compromise. So my critics (of whom there will be myriads, I know) are bound to say “get your own act together before sounding off at others.”
Absolootly! Let’s set a gud example and start at wons. Why do wee spel ‘phonetics’ like that insted of ‘fonetix’?
One last point. My Thai wife doesn’t agree with me on much, but she’s 100% with me on this. Provided we change the whole of English at the same time of course. The poor woman has been struggling to teach it for 17 years!

Editor