ศาลาชุมนุม

[pensive]

A bit beyond me, I'm afraid, though the reference to 2000 years is interesting. I guess you are referring to Khmer, as I believe Thai is only 800 years old?

[Tgeezer]

As for the word “อุณหภูมิ”, it seems that some people didn’t realize that the final consonant “ณ” is not pronounced. Because of this, they usually pronounce it as
[อุนนะพูม] or [อุนนะหะพูม], which is not correct.

Sorry I should have made my reply and question to you, Pirin.
How important are tones? In order to misspell the word the writer must have heard three syllables mid-high-mid, not mid-low-mid
Is it perhaps the case that the word cannot be confused with another word that makes this error insignificant ?

[Richard Wordingham]

A bit beyond me, I'm afraid, though the reference to 2000 years is interesting. I guess you are referring to Khmer, as I believe Thai is only 800 years old?

No, I'm referring to the genetic ancestor of Thai. I don't know whether the speakers would yet have called themselves [dai].

A curious feature of the tone systems of Chinese, Miao-Yao, Vietnamese and Tai-Kadai is that early loans indicate a common system of early tones (three live tones and one dead tone). This commonality is easier to understand if the different tones are the remnants of final consonants, and the correspondences therefore chiefly indicate that these final consonants were transmitted accurately in borrowing. I believe that Khmer is one of the languages that preserves these final consonants, though I have never actually looked at a detailed comparison of tonal Vietnamese and atonal Mon-Khmer languages.

[Richard Wordingham]

How important are tones? In order to misspell the word the writer must have heard three syllables mid-high-mid, not mid-low-mid

Actually, they're more likely to be heard as mid-mid-mid because of the tone neutralisation of unstressed /a/.

[Pirin]

As for the word “อุณหภูมิ”, it seems that some people didn’t realize that the final consonant “ณ” is not pronounced. Because of this, they usually pronounce it as
[อุนนะพูม] or [อุนนะหะพูม], which is not correct.

Sorry I should have made my reply and question to you, Pirin.
How important are tones? In order to misspell the word the writer must have heard three syllables mid-high-mid, not mid-low-mid
Is it perhaps the case that the word cannot be confused with another word that makes this error insignificant ?

When both [อุนนะพูม] and [อุนหะพูม] are pronounced, the second syllable is not stressed, so they can sound almost the same.

To tell you the truth, I usually hear as if both [อุนนะพูม] and
[อุนหะพูม] were mid-low-mid.

In addition, if you watch Thai television, you might find that some announcers pronounce อุณหภูมิ as [อุนนะพูม] and even with the tones, mid-low-mid.

Should you want to see some examples of the unstressed syllable in a word, please have a look at how you pronouce the word "table /ˈteɪ.bl/" and "comfortable /ˈkʌmp.fə.tə.bl/" in English.

This example shows that the syllable 'ta' in "comfortable" is pronounced differently when it is not stressed.

By the way, to me, the obvious reason why it seems to be common for some Thai writers to spell "อุณหภูมิ" incorrectly is that this borrowed word is not easy to write.

[Toffeeman]

I am familiar with this word as I listen to the weather forecast on the radio every morning at 7.25am. I know it means temperature but haven't really listend for the exact proniunciation as I am more interested in the numbers that come after it.

But what is interesting to me is that if I saw this word I would instantly read it as: อุนนะพูม and give the last syllable a rising tone. To me the hor hip would change the last syllable into a high class syllable with a soft ending therefore a rising tone. Now at least I know how to pronounce it correctly tone wise.

[Richard Wordingham]

But ho nam only applies to resonants (ง ญ ณ น ม; ย ร ล ว), and for etymological reasons the sequence หณ with ห being ho nam does not occur. (The only word I could find with the sequence is เคราหณี, which has an implicit vowel between ห and ณ.)

[ohmmo]

อุณหภูมิ อ่านออกเสียงว่า อุน-หะ-พูม
บางคนออกเสียงอักษรนำว่า อุน-นะ-หะ-พูม (ไม่แน่ใจว่าออกเสียงเช่นนี้ ถูกต้องหรือไม่ เพราะบางคำที่เป็นอักษรนำ สามารถออกเสียงได้สองแบบ)

อุน-นะ-พูม ชัดเจนครับ ว่าเป็นการออกเสียงที่ผิด

[Richard Wordingham]

"อุณหภูมิ" ไม่มีอักษรนำครับ

[Tgeezer]

"อุณหภูมิ" ไม่มีอักษรนำครับ

I think that in ohmmo's post อักษรนำ, simply says 'preceding character'.