How does one pronounce Thais...?

Subject: How does one pronounce Thais...?
From: The Og
Date: 11 Feb 25 - 11:27 AM

Suggestions on the pronunciation of "THAIS" as in "One time in Alexandria." ???

Subject: RE: How does one pronounce Thais...?
From: GUEST,keberoxu
Date: 11 Feb 25 - 11:29 AM

Rhymes with "Aida" as in the Verdi opera.

Subject: RE: How does one pronounce Thais...?
From: DaveRo
Date: 11 Feb 25 - 11:43 AM

It should have a diaeresis: Thaïs

Subject: RE: How does one pronounce Thais...?
From: GUEST,Steve Shaw
Date: 11 Feb 25 - 12:21 PM

I've always said "tie-eece" (not quite as exaggeratedly as it looks there!).

Subject: RE: How does one pronounce Thais...?
From: Robert B. Waltz
Date: 11 Feb 25 - 12:46 PM

Steve Shaw is right that it the "famous" pronunciation is "Tie-eece"/Tie-eece." However, the Greek name is Θαις (with diacriticals on the ι, but I don't know the HTML entity for that, and Mudcat isn't reliable on unicode in my experience). Thus the woman of Alexander the Great's time would have pronounced it with a "Th," not a "T" (and an a rather than the ie).

So it's a matter of choice: "Thay-ees" if one wants the Greek way; "Tie-ees" if one wants the operatic way. :-)

Subject: RE: How does one pronounce Thais...?
From: Monique
Date: 11 Feb 25 - 01:01 PM

The Greek name with the diacriticals would be Θαΐς. To get them you need to copy and paste the Greek name on this encoding/decoding tool -it's the one I use to post songs in different alphabets on Mudcat and it's worked pretty well so far.

Subject: RE: How does one pronounce Thais...?
From: DaveRo
Date: 11 Feb 25 - 01:27 PM

You could just use my addon, which handles the Greek, and other eastern European scripts, automatically:
https://revad.github.io/mudcat_tools.html
(Unless you use Safari.)

I suppose it was more 'Tha-ees' in the original Greek: Θαΐς
Wikipedia

I just listened to one of the Massinet arias "Thaïs, soeur des Karites" and ... it's not clear.

Subject: RE: How does one pronounce Thais...?
From: Robert B. Waltz
Date: 11 Feb 25 - 03:41 PM

Just a cranky comment here: I do know how to do Greek diacriticals. But mudcat has problems with at least some unicode characters -- in particular, ð, þ, and ?. I have had real problems with certain of my posts because of that. So I use HTML entities, because they reliably work on Mudcat -- but there aren't entities for Greek letters with diacriticals.

But, obviously, you folks got it to work. Wish I had a reliable list of just which things Mudcat allows. L-)

Subject: RE: How does one pronounce Thais...?
From: Robert B. Waltz
Date: 11 Feb 25 - 03:42 PM

See what I mean? This time I got eth and thorn but no yogh....

Subject: RE: How does one pronounce Thais...?
From: DaveRo
Date: 11 Feb 25 - 04:26 PM

Robert: see this post

Subject: RE: How does one pronounce Thais...?
From: robomatic
Date: 11 Feb 25 - 04:52 PM

You remind me of a good 2016 Druse movie nominated for an Oscar:

Theeb (Arabic: ??? dhib [ði?b], "wolf")


Can't wait to see how it appears on MC.

Subject: RE: How does one pronounce Thais...?
From: DaveRo
Date: 11 Feb 25 - 05:11 PM

Good film. I have the DVD ... somewhere

ذيب

Subject: RE: How does one pronounce Thais...?
From: Joe Offer
Date: 12 Feb 25 - 12:34 AM

Bob Waltz wonders what Mudcat allows.

Joe's answer: Standard ASCII. Anything beyond that is very unstable on Mudcat. It may work when you enter it, but then turn into gibberish later for a number of reasons. If you use HTML Ampersand codes for special characters and diacritical marks, they're usually stable.


Character encodings in HTML: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_encodings_in_HTML#Character_references

Subject: RE: How does one pronounce Thais...?
From: GUEST,keberoxu
Date: 13 Feb 25 - 11:32 AM

Actually I always assumed the vowels in Thais were
ah-ee rather than I-ee,
but it probably comes out the same.

Subject: RE: How does one pronounce Thais...?
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 13 Feb 25 - 12:02 PM

I have always heard it the way Keb just noted, with the ah-ee vowels. More like "Thaw-ees"

Subject: RE: How does one pronounce Thais...?
From: Robert B. Waltz
Date: 13 Feb 25 - 12:12 PM

This is off-topic even by my standards, but here are what a couple of Greek textbooks suggest for pronouncing α:

J. W. Wenham's The Elements of New Testament Greek (very popular in its field): pronounce "like a in French 'à la.'"

Clyde Pharr, Homeric Greek, revised by John Wright, section 501, Phonology, "a as in father (when short as in aha)."

Subject: RE: How does one pronounce Thais...?
From: GUEST,Grishka
Date: 13 Feb 25 - 03:34 PM

When performing a song publicly, it is advisable to pronounce the lyrics as the author may have done it, not necessarily "correctly" by linguistic standards. We hat this discussion e.g. about "Oh Rio!"

The song in question refers to the opera by Jules Massenet, based on the novel by Anatol France, thus a French pronunciation should be most adequate (i.e. T rather than Th). However, the usage in the verse metre of the song is such that of the two syllables of the name, the first one has the stress, so it's "anglicized", and you may as well pronounce the Th as you would in English.

For those who don't know this brilliant song and its author, see Wikipedia.

As for what characters Mudcat will "allow", i.e. store and reproduce faithfully, best rely only on the basic modern English alphabet. This problem is another long-runner, and the "solution" now in force seems less satisfactory to me than what we had decades ago. Anyway, for all other characters use a tool to produce HTML escapes, as described by the above posters. (I think I offered several such tools written by myself, which is not really difficult. You can ask ChatGPT to write one for you.)