Thanks for your well-considered suggestions. I can provide some explanation for the choices we have made.
- Some entries are very long, and as we add phrases, a single entry might be extremely long. We felt that by organizing a single word horizontally, you can see more complete sentences on a computer screen, which is, after all, wider than it is tall (for most screens). Also, as screen resolutions increase to 1280x1024, for example, our layout may seem more convenient to you. I will confess to being somewhat biased in this area:
- Our first notion concerning transliteration was not to have any on the site. Because a web site can offer audio files, this provides a much better way for the student to learn. And we advocate that all students should learn Thai reading and writing eventually. However, our early website which had no phonetics got a lot of criticism, as you might guess. So we have added it but it is a low priority for our development and editing time. In fact, many of the transliterations (they are generated by a computer program) are incorrect, as you've probably noticed.
- Once we decided to have transliterations, our most important goal was to provide a system that people can use without any prior instruction in the system itself. This rules out special characters and upside-down letters, and all non-standard, non-alphabetic characters. Our superscripted tone markers are very logical, and serve this primary goal well, and have received positive feedback. Nobody has ever needed explanation of the system (however, a key can be displayed by hovering the mouse over the large, main transliteration at the top of most entries).
- The biggest advantage of our system is that, because it is computer-generated, it is guaranteed to be consistent. To that end, we have spent a lot of time documenting exactly how the system works on these 2 pages: vowels, consonants. Our vowels page is the only one we know of which is provably complete (within Godel's limits) (since our 18000+ word dictionary is processed through it).
We are aware of Ms. Haas' Book and of course it is a reference standard, but it is also some 30 years old. The web is filled with people who are not just serious academic students of language, but ordinary people who want to get their feet wet without being intimidated by strange symbols.
Because of the computerized nature of our system, it's not difficult to make changes to the transliterations which appear across the entire site. In fact, I was considering making a change just now to eliminate the one "special" symbol we do use, which is an underline in the symbol we use for
โ.
Thanks again for your message,
Glenn
