Translate Thai Phrase "phu ying na ruk"?

July 4, 2007 8:17 AM

ThaiFilter: A friend from Thailand had "phu ying na ruk" at the end of her e-mail message. What does it mean?
posted by tomwheeler to Society & Culture (4 answers total)

pooying = woman
narak = cute
posted by the cuban at 8:21 AM on July 4, 2007

What the cuban said. Web searches indicate that "phu ying" means "woman" or something related to women, and "na ruk" means beautiful. Therefore, "phu ying na ruk" = beautiful woman.

FYI, I used this page from fravia's search lores, linked to from metafiler yesterday. The whole phrase "phu ying na ruk" did not appear in google, but searching for "phu ying" did get a number of matches, which all seemed to have to do with women. "na ruk" was a similar search and result. Those search terms (meaning OR translated OR means OR in.english) are great in google to suss out english meanings of foreign words.
posted by splice at 8:51 AM on July 4, 2007

May I quickly point out that Thai is a tonal language, so you can't really tell if it's just written. You may want to ask your friend.
posted by konolia at 11:08 AM on July 4, 2007

Response by poster: Thanks for the insight. Indeed, since Thai is a tonal language and it had been transliterated into the latin alphabet, finding the exact meaning was not easy (despite my try at a Google search).

I think "Pretty Woman" is the correct translation. It was a reference to the Roy Orbison song and an inside joke I forgot about until now.

Thanks again!
posted by tomwheeler at 12:00 PM on July 4, 2007