Avoiding spelling mistakes. 

Accounting  

As all Thammasat University students know, the Thammasat Business School has a distinguished Faculty of Commerce and Accountancy with a Master in Professional Accounting program. In any faculty where the degree has an English name, it is important to keep in mind the correct spelling. If we wish to impress international contacts with our abilities, it is better not to spell the name of our professional specialty wrong. Yet in Thai English, the word accounting is sometimes seen spelled wrong as accountin or accountig or accouting.

As all Thais know, accounting or accountancy means measuring financial information about businesses and other economic groups or people. Measuring money is a very trustworthy job, so attention to detail is essential. Spelling words correctly in a foreign language also demands attention to detail, although it is a different type of attention. Many people around the world evaluate attentiveness without separating whether it is attention to numbers or letters. So, accountants who spell the name of their profession wrong may be considered as less serious or professional than those who spell it correctly. For this reason, it is worth taking a little time to focus on getting this detail right, to avoid giving the wrong impression when dealing with overseas clients and colleagues.

The noun accounting derives from a French term meaning to count, since that is what accountants do. The word accounting has meant to add up numbers for many centuries, since the 1300s. Yet only since the middle of the 1800s has the word accounting been used in English to mean the management of financial affairs, as it does today. Accounts are responsible for developing and using of a system for recording and analyzing the financial transactions and financial status of a business or other organization. In common English usage there is also a secondary meaning for the word accounting, meaning to justify actions or to know the state or location of something. This has been seen since the 1800s in such phrases as

There is no accounting for tastes.

This phrase derives from the Latin, meaning that there is no point in discussing matters of taste. The idea is that all people have individual tastes, and so it is impossible to justify or give serious reasons for backing up what the preferences of some people are, compared to other people. If the personal preferences of people are subjective opinions, there is no element of right or wrong. For example, if a brother and sister love to eat durian but their parents cannot stand the smell, the family cannot offer logical explanations of a matter of taste. They should not pretend to account for their taste about whether or not to eat durian, as if it were a matter of logic. As we see, accounting has a lot to do with thinking and being attentive and responsible. Spelling and other aspects of writing English or any foreign language are also dependent on these virtues.

If we examine the three most common ways of spelling the word accounting wrong, we see that they are all involved with forgetting to include a letter that is essential in the word: accountin or accountig or accouting. Writers of Thai English who choose the wrong spellings accountin and accountig forget that the word accounting must end with the letters ing, as do many English words. In English class, students are usually given long explanations and classifications of why certain words end with the letters ing. These rules are difficult to memorize and are usually not known to native English speakers. This takes time and is not practical for undergraduates and graduate students who are no longer taking classes in English language. Most native English speakers do not learn the classification systems about words ending with the letters ing that students of English as a foreign language are routinely expected to learn. One way to escape this difficulty may be to try to follow the example of native English speakers. They are expected to just get a sense of the language and recognize that many words in English end with the letters ing. Anyone who chooses the wrong spelling accountig should be aware that few longer words in English end with the letters ig.  If we see a longer word ending with the letters ig, we should have a feeling that something may be wrong. Among words ending with the letters ig are the short words

• big
• dig
• fig
• gig
• jig
• pig
• rig
• wig
• brig
• prig
• swig
• twig

Longer words ending with the letters ig are mostly unusual terms rarely if ever used by most writers of English. They include:

• bewig
• sprig
• unrig
• bigwig
• earwig
• periwig
• pfennig
• shindig
• hedgepig
• whirligig
• thimblerig
• thingamajig

Many people spend a lifetime of writing the English language without ever using a longer word that ends with the letters ig. There are always more common words with the same meaning that can be used instead. So writers of Thai English may safely avoid all longer words ending with the letters ig, and never use them in sentences at all. Shorter words such as big and pig should not be a problem. The wrong spelling accountig should raise an alert in the minds of writers of Thai English. We should sense that a longer word ending with the letters ig may pose a problem, and should be avoided. We can become out own spell check programs, by feeling that something may be wrong even if we do not know or have forgotten the precise grammatical rule for this feeling. This is how native speakers and writers of English use the language, and it is a much more time-efficient approach than expecting adult writers of Thai English to memorize long lists of grammatical rules.

For the wrong spelling of accounting as accountin, the final letter g has been left out. Sometimes when we try to type too rapidly, we leave out the last letters of some words. Here again an alert should be raised if we see a word ending with the letters ountin, since there are no words in the English language ending with these letters. The closest correct example would be in the noun mountain. Note that there is an extra letter a in the word mountain that separates it from the wrongly spelled word that ends with the letters ountin. If we remember the need for the word count inside the noun accounting, then we should probably never spell the word wrong as accouting. Here are some usage examples:

• A Thai company offering online accounting services to small business has taken a stride forward by raising $1.15 million (Bt38.1 million) in funding.
• General Electric disclosed Wednesday that it faces a accounting probe by US regulators, as it reported a nearly $10 billion loss in the last quarter due to charges linked to its insurance business and US tax reform.
• The United States is the No 1 market for TU’s frozen-food exports, accounting for about 50 per cent of total export value.
• Tesco did see annual sales grow by 3.7 percent in the 2016/2017 financial year – the first time in seven years Supermarket giant Tesco revealed Wednesday that it fell into an annual net loss of £40 million due to a costly accounting scandal at Britain’s biggest retailer.
• According to the Thai Accounting Standard (TAS) 21: The effects of changes in foreign exchange rates, an entity is required to determine a functional currency for its operation based on the primary economic environment in which it operates and to record transactions using that functional currency.
• Thai companies, particularly banks, should witness additional burden to comply with the new accounting standard approved on July 24, said experts from KPMG Thailand.
• Launched early last year, FlowAccount, which offers an online accounting service developed for helping very small businesses handle financial tasks, aims to serve 10 per cent of the roughly total 2.8 million small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Thailand within the next three to five years.

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)