Avoiding spelling mistakes.

Penguin    

Even for students and ajarns who are not concentrating on natural history, it is a good idea to know how to spell the word penguin. It is the name of a noted British publisher, and so Penguin Books often appears in bibliographies. The Thammasat University Libraries own such books as The Penguin Dictionary of Chemistry; The Penguin Dictionary of Physics; The Penguin Dictionary of Commerce; The Penguin Dictionary of Politics; and many others. Also, typical publication information for Penguin Books includes the line

Harmondsworth, Middlesex, Penguin Books [1983]

If research papers or scholarly articles are written with the help of EndNote or other software that automatically copies the correct spelling of sources into papers, that is a great help. Yet sometimes it is necessary to type out an individual reference and on those occasions, it is best to try to avoid wrong spellings that occur in Thai English such as Pengiun and Pengin. This is one of many cases where the origin of the word does not assist us in remembering how to spell it. The word penguin apparently finds it source in the Welsh language, where in the 1500s a term pen gwyn meant white head, and penguins in Wales apparently had white heads. Nor can we associate penguin with a long list of words like it, because there really are no other words like it. Penguin is the only word in the English language ending with the letters guin. There are, however, some words in English that start with the letters guin and even though they have nothing to do with penguins, it can be useful to look at them, so that the letters guin start to look like a normal part of English to us. The word guinea, for example. The Republic of Guinea is a country on the West coast of Africa. Formerly known as French Guinea, the country is sometimes called Guinea-Conakry to separate it from other places such as Guinea-Bissau and Equatorial Guinea. Inspired by the name of Guinea, the Guinea fowl or Guinea hen, an African bird, is something like a pheasant. In old English novels, characters sometimes refer to a guinea, a gold coin that was circulated in the early part of the 1800s. Many readers will know about the expression a guinea pig, meaning someone used to try out something experimental. Guinea pigs are rodents kept as pets and are also used in laboratory experiments. For this reason, we may see such sample sentences as

• Ngam-Chit is trying to learn how to be a great chef, so she prepared a dinner and invited her friends Pakpao, Phairoh, and Saengdao to act as guinea pigs.
• The students were paid a small amount of money to be guinea pigs for the psychological experiment conducted on the university campus.

Students and ajarns who have visited British-style pubs will be familiar with the term Guinness, an Irish dry stout that is a bestselling brand of beer. Many bars and restaurants in Bangkok serve Guinness, reminding us that this is another English word, like penguin, in which the letters guin appear. There was also a famous English actor named Alec Guinness, who played Obi-Wan Kenobi in the film Star Wars. Thinking of any of these words can help us avoid trying to spell the word penguin the way we think it may sound, and choosing wrong spellings such as pengiun or pengin.

Thammasat

Of course, all students and ajarns at TU know how to spell Thammasat, but it is surprising all the same how often on term papers, abstracts, and other forms of academic writing it appears spelled incorrectly as Thammasart. As all Thais know, the name Thammasat derives from a Sanskrit term meaning Buddhist teaching. Since it is a name, spell check will probably not help us write it correctly. For this reason, it is important to keep ideas in mind about what the university name should look like. In Thai Romanization of names, there are often variants used, so that people you know may have one spelling in English for their first names, but a different spelling for the same name as an email address. This is quite usual in the Kingdom. However, in the rest of the world, it is considered a sign of good manners to spell names of places and people in the one correct way generally accepted by all. If an American graduate wrote to you claiming that he studied at Havad University, instead of correctly spelling the name as Harvard, you might doubt whether he was telling the truth. So to farang people, it is considered respectful to spell the name of a university correctly. Once again, a little story may help, such as describing a reunion of high school classmates who wanted to sit around and discuss old times. They might have met at Kasetsart University or Chulalongkorn, but instead

they sat at Thammasat and talked.

If this story will help us recall that the name Thammasat must end with the letters sat, then it will be useful.

Thailand     

Of course all Thais know how to spell the name of the Kingdom, but again it is surprising to see how many times the word is spelled wrong in term papers, abstracts, and other academic writing in Thai English as Thiland. This may be just be due to overconfidence, where writers become so familiar with a word, they no longer pay attention when they are writing it, and this kind of mistake occurs. Even so, in the rest of the world, it is seen as a basic sign of respect to spell a country’s name right, so it is always good to pay attention to this detail. Naturally Thailand is the land of the Thais, so we cannot have the word without both Thai and land. Even the most careless writer of Thai English is unlikely to spell the word Thai wrong as Thi. This kind of error mostly happens when a familiar word becomes part of a longer word, and so it is easier to get confused about the correct spelling. As long as we keep in mind the separate parts of the word Thailand, then we will be sure to spell the Kingdom’s name right.

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)