Romanization of Thai
The international standard ISO 11940 is a transliteration system, preserving all aspects of written Thai adding diacritics to the Roman letters.In the process, it rearranges the letters to correspond to Thai pronunciation, but it discards information about vowel length and syllable tone and the distinction between IPA /o/ and /ɔ/.In 1842, Mission Press in Bangkok published two pamphlets on transliteration: One for transcribing Greek and Hebrew names into Thai, and the other, "A plan for Romanising the Siamese Language".For proper Thai words, the system is somewhat similar to the present RTGS, for instance with regards to the differentiation of consonants' initial and final sounds.Similarly, tones were not marked, as it was felt that the "learned speaker" would be so familiar with the Thai script, as to not need a transliteration scheme to find the proper pronunciation.He also opposed using a phonetic Thai spelling for any word of Sanskrit or Pali origin, arguing that these should be transliterated in their Indic forms, so as to preserve their etymology.