สวัสดีครับผู้นิยมภาษาไทยทุกท่าน - Hello all the Thai language enthusiasts,

September update was finally finished with lots of new entries, phrases and sentences, images and sound files. I did so many things that I now don't know what and where to start in writing this blog. Well, I'll start from what you sent to us.

All the submissions and corrections that everyone had submitted to Glenn and I were entered first thing every time I opened the DBEdit. I also devoted more time to each individual Entry and Phrase by linking it to as many related words, phrases and sentences that I could think of as possible. I categorized them into different Categories, too, whenever possible. Take a look, for instance, at ตาย (definition # 1), and you'll see that, under related words, I've provided several synonyms ranging from those for the commoners to those reserved for kings, queens, royal family members and to the particular one only for the Lord Buddha. I also used the square brackets to provide special hints (for euphemism, vulgar, formal, very polite, transient slang, Royal Institute official coinage or spoken by a male or female, etc) for all the words, phrases and sentences entered in the hope that you can use them correctly and appropriately and thus can avoid the faux pas.

I also annotated many terms so that you will be understand their usage better.
For example:

• For ง้อ, I added: "If someone become งอน (petulant), you ง้อ him or her. So here you know that the colloquial verb ง้อ is usually used with งอน. (I love this style of defining thanks to my beloved Collins COBUILD on CD-ROM!)


• For ชีวัน I added: "The term ชีวัน is usually used in medicine or poetry. ชีวนะ is often used in medicine"


• For คำยี่สิบคำที่สะกดด้วยไม้ม้วนในภาษาไทย - 20 words spelled with 'ใ' in the Thai language, I provided the mnemonic to help aid your memory

Some new Categories that I created:

• Ghosts - Demons - Monsters - ภูตผีปีศาจและอสุรกาย (for you horror fans)


• Buddhism - พระพุทธศาสนา


• Figure of Speech -โวหารสร้างภาพพจน์ (for a Thai poetry lover like myself :-)

Old Categories got more additions. Lots of terms were added to
Business, Finance, Accounting and Economics - ศัพท์ธุรกิจ การเงิน บัญชีและเศรษฐศาสตร์ (contributed in part by David [Houston]). So I hope I make business and finance buffs happy. As for Fundamentals -
กระสวนประโยคพื้นฐาน (contributed by Jan), chapters 11-15 were entered and voice-recorded. I edited most of Jan's original phrases & sentences to give them a more natural and vernacular touch. Glenn's favorite, Immunology,
Genetics, Neurochemistry - ภูมิคุ้มกันวิทยา พันธุศาสตร์และประสาทเคมี, was appended with lots of new scientific terms. Working on this Category helped re-enliven my fond memories of sitting in those biology classes.

Having done all the above, I'm confident to say that the Dictionary of thai-language.com is by far the most comprehensive on the Web. Like I once told Glenn: My motto is that if you can't find it anywhere else, you'll find it here. If we don't have it, we will do our best to research and find it for you. We will make our best efforts to keep up with the ever-evolving world of Thai - English lexicography.

Until next time.
Peace.

นายไบรอัน

I uploaded Bryan's latest recordings, new entries, and corrections. This is a huge piece of work that he has been dedicated to for several weeks and we all must give him huge thanks for this. Look for his blog entry describing a summary of this work.

Glenn

Upgraded the message board software from UBB.classic™ 6.5.0 to 6.6.0.

Applied latest Windows Update patches to server.

Based on feedback and recent posting activity, I created some new forums in the message board, reorganized existing forums, and moved some existing topics accordingly.

There are now four forums in the language category. I added Linguistics & Advanced Topics and Transliteration & Loanwords. The latter should be self-explanatory. The former is meant to be a place for discussion of advanced linguistic concepts which may be beyond the interest level of beginning students. For example, phonemes, tone rules, etymology, the infamous "morphemes," Pali/Sanskrit, and the like.

The Thai Grammar forum is now designated for discussions of the fundamental grammar of Thai, without reference to arcane or specialized terminology. Here we'll study contemporary sentence structure with an emphasis on practical conversation.

In keeping with the primary focus of this web site, I moved the category which contains these four forums up above the "Travel/Culture/Living in Thailand" category and renamed it from "Learning Thai Language" to "Thai Language."

When you use the dictionary lookup with a Thai word, the search routine will now include a search within the alternate spellings that we have entered for some Thai words.

This part of the search occurs last, so if you reach 50 results first, then the alternate spelling search will not proceed.

Also, over the past few days, I've implemented some anti-spambot measures which reduce the ability of email address harvesters to abuse our site's community.

For users with very low resolution screens (640x480) or WebTV, you may wish to hide the left column. This new option is available in the site control panel. If you turn off the display of the left column, a link to the control panel will appear at the bottom of every page. When the left column is off, you won't see the mini-search box, the now online status, the list of recent visitors, the time in Thailand, and other info.

It has also come to my attention that our site does not display properly with older browsers which do not understand the new HTML 4.1 strict DTD. One of the best things about "strict" is that font styles propogate down into tables, like they always should have. For some reason, the early HTML specs did not specify that tables should inherit font styles from their parent. This has been fixed in the strict definition, and sites that use this definition (like ours) can simplify and reduce the amount of HTML drastically.

Unfortunately, older browsers, such as Internet Explorer 5.5 do not understand this new definition and they will display tables using the bad old behavior. This is why you don't see the correct font sizes on our site with IE 5.5. We recommend upgrading to IE 6.0.

The "strict" designation also enables a different interpretation of the HTML font sizes, such as "xx-small", "medium", "x-large", etc. This is why our font sizes are not correct in Google-cached pages--Google does not replicate the "strict" designation tag in the wrapped version of a page.

Implemented the new "arbitrary transliteration" feature.

Also, an interim upload of new entries from Bryan; he's still working on more new stuff which will be forthcoming. Now just shy of 23,000 dictionary entries.