zanemay Posted January 31, 2005 Report Share Posted January 31, 2005 A lot of things change with time and my perception of the Thai language has completely changed with a couple of years of study. At first I was put off. Way off. We farangs all carry some ethnocentrism around and for me, being put off by the language went along with being put off by other things in Thailand. My very first experiences were in Chiang Mai, where I checked into a hotel in the old city, a lovely, quiet area of about one square mile. All was well until I tried to cross a street in order to get out of the old city. I was confronted by the most dangerous traffic I had ever seen. Motorbikes, cars, trucks and tuk-tuks sped along the three-lane road while desperate pedestrians perched on the curb waiting for a break. When one developed everyone ran like hell. There were no lights, crosswalks, or flyovers. Nor were there any elderly pedestrians. ?These people,? I thought, ?are stupid!? Being thoroughly grounded in science and logic, a few other engineering niceties confirmed my feeling, like the practice of dropping phone booths onto busy sidewalks already obstructed by other obstacles, thus forcing all pedestrians to walk out into hellish traffic. And constructing steps out of the slickest tile known to man, with the predictable result that after each rain arms, legs and hips are broken. With my ethnocentrism supported, I encountered the language for the first time. There were way too many letters (approximately 90 by some counts), all pushed together without spaces or punctuation, and there was a kind of four-story structure with consonants on the main floor and vowels and other mysterious marks in the basement, on the second floor and in the attic. ?This can?t work,? I said. ?It?s too slow to write. You have to stop all the time to make extra marks all over the place.? And the sentences, to the extent they have them, are too long. ?No wonder these people are backward!? Then there was the syntax and idiom. What a mess. ?What do you want me to do next (Mom)?? ?lang jak nan hai noo ja tham arai eek ka? ?behind from there give mouse will make what more?? ?I returned by taxi? ?nang roat glap ma? ?sit vehicle return come.? ?Where have you been.? ?bpai nai ma?? ?go where come?? The sound of the language was grating, especially when a couple of agitated pooying or drunk poochai got going. Right up there with Danish I thought, a language whose sound suffers from a scarcity of vowels. And more grating too than my American English with our guttural ?aeh, aeh, aeh? where other languages have a nice ?aah, aah, aah.? And nothing like the Standard of Beauty for all languages ? Spanish, which is like spoken music. That was then and this is now. Almost all of my first impressions have changed. Not my impressions of the traffic and engineering, which are confirmed every day, but my impression of the language. The Thai language is beautiful and elegant, and the written form is clear and phonetic. When you stop trying to sort out the syntax and just go with it, you see that it makes the language flow. Like any spoken language, syntax develops to facilitate smooth speech. And Thai people love to talk, talk, talk so they have to have a structure that accommodates floods of words. Now I see that a sentences like, ?lang jak nan hai noo ja tham arai eek ka? and ?nang roat glab ma? are nicely constructed and mellifluous. I also see that Thai people handwrite at a ripping pace (with wildly varying degrees of legibility), just throwing all those marks back at the words like darts. And hey! Who needs spaces!? It?s just a waste of paper. There are lots of hints (not foolproof) to let you know where words start and end. Some things still irritate though, like idiom. Figures of speech that aren?t in text books and dictionaries. (Some English examples might be: ?Shaq threw up a hail mary at the buzzer. Nothing but net!? [shaq vomited fish net at a buzzer during a hail storm??] or ?Don?t f--- with me, Jerk off! I?ll put out your lights!? [i don?t want to have sex with you, but I?ll turn off the lights so you can masturbate.]) They don?t teach idiom in my books and programs, and if they did they couldn?t teach it fast enough because it?s like an ever-expanding parallel universe. Almost as confusing as the idiom, is the incredible amount of abbreviation used in Thai publications. Between the idiom and abbr., using my dictionary, tediously going word by word through, I can usually get almost all of the words, but put together, I don?t know what the hell they mean! The worst thing though is children. All language learners have this problem - two and three year olds jabbering away with mum or a bpi-nong, using perfect pronunciation, tone and syntax. A few months after they take the tit out of their mouth they?re talking better than I ever will!! I had the same problem when I spent time around Mexican kids ? they could just roll those ?rr?s? and oom those umlauts so beautifully, but not me. No way. ?Adorable!? I would say to their mother, through gritted teeth. But mai bpen rai, I like the Thai language very well now. It sounds just fine, I?d love to be able to ?get it.? Another 100,000 words added to my vocabulary would help. Of course I have other things to do ? like Yao, Nit, Chit and Pit. At two a day (words, not girls!) ?hummm?maybe, just before I die, I?ll be able to say, ?I?d rather be cremated than buried please.? Zane May Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BelgianBoy Posted January 31, 2005 Report Share Posted January 31, 2005 Zane, Well written, thanks ! You might consider a blog...... BB Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lembeh Posted January 31, 2005 Report Share Posted January 31, 2005 While I enjoyed your post, I really cannot agree with your take on the language, especially this bit: >The Thai language is beautiful and elegant, and the written form is clear No. The written form is *not* clear. It may well be OK for "where you go" "what you do", but try expressing anything technical in Thai, and you will quickly run into trouble. It is often the case where one thai can write something, and another has to go back and ask the original author "what exactly did you mean by that?". For example, on one occassion I had some one stumped for several days over a document, as two clauses seemed to be completely identical. In the end they had to phone up the author of the document to find out what was going on. In one clause there was an "and" in the other an "or". And this was a (very) highly educated Thai!!! A *lot* of Thai documents pass over my desk, and more often than not I need to get at least two people to tell me what it says - sometimes with widely different results. One of the most pressing issues of developing countries is that much of technological development is in "English" (US or UK), and so, to get the benefit, you need to have a populace that is highly conversant in English (take Singapore as a good example). Thailand is missing out, and will contine to do so until it really tackles this problem. Currently, Thailand teaches a lot of technological subjects in Thai. What that has entailed is "translating" technical terms into "Thai". However, a huge amount of effort is wasted in "making" Thai equivalents of these terms, which of course are often not as precise, and do not convey the particular "nuance" of the original term. Of course, as a further down side, if you "learn" the term in Thai, the rest of the literature or technical documentation is wasted if it has not been translated! My (personal!) opinion is that Thai's have a very, very low ability to think "logically", i.e. to be able to construct a rational frame work of thought. My own personal belief is that "language" and "logic" are quite intimately related (and no, I do not have supporting evidence for this), and that, for whatever reasons, Thai is a language that is at "odds" so to speak with rational, logical reasoning. However, the use of Thai is of course deeply tied up with "being Thai" so to speak. In the long term it will severely hamper the development of Thailand. -j- Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nervous_Dog Posted January 31, 2005 Report Share Posted January 31, 2005 Interesting thoughts Josh, I also subscribe to the theory of the complexity of the language and the people ability, however, Chinese script would make that point even more interesting I suspect. n chinese, I remember a high ranking leader one day being eleted to some post and the Chinese paper we printed in AUst wanted to know how to pronounce his name, looking at the fax in sccript, they had no idea, but needded a "English"version of it so they would know! DOG Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
zanemay Posted February 2, 2005 Author Report Share Posted February 2, 2005 josh_ingu "One of the most pressing issues of developing countries is that much of technological development is in "English" (US or UK), and so, to get the benefit, you need to have a populace that is highly conversant in English (take Singapore as a good example). Thailand is missing out, and will contine to do so until it really tackles this problem." Zane: I spend a fair amount of time in internet shops and it seems to me that Thailand is achieving a big push towards English via use of the internet. So many people are trying to read and write English so they can write to, chat with and suck money out of farangs. What could be better or more motivating? Type a few strokes on your keyboard and have money flow into your bank account! Of course millions are using English for higher purposes on the internet...I just go to the wrong places. josh_ingu "My (personal!) opinion is that Thai's have a very, very low ability to think "logically", i.e. to be able to construct a rational frame work of thought. My own personal belief is that "language" and "logic" are quite intimately related (and no, I do not have supporting evidence for this), and that, for whatever reasons, Thai is a language that is at "odds" so to speak with rational, logical reasoning." Zane: Yes...that's just what I thought at first, likewise not supported. You would know much more than I and I defer to your experience. I just relate to Issan ladies and such folk and don't really expect higher-order thinking skills, not to say that I don't run into plenty of intelligent girls. I am a bit surprised to hear you say this about Thai's in general, particularly since you seem to work with well-educated people. Back to ethnocentrism! ZM Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
raysfla Posted February 21, 2005 Report Share Posted February 21, 2005 Can anyone help me translate into thai a classic line: "What's a nice girl like you, doing in a place like this?" thanks, Ray Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lembeh Posted February 21, 2005 Report Share Posted February 21, 2005 Hi Zane Sorry missed your reply earlier. Anyway, you said: > spend a fair amount of time in internet shops and it seems to me that Thailand is achieving a big push towards English via use of the internet. I understand your point, but mine is more that bar girls typing "Darling I miss you, buffalo shit too much and I need money" is not really what I am talking about. Funnily enough, I was talking to a thai taxi driver yesterday who was bemoaning the fact that two of his kids had finished uni in thailand and were unable to speak english. He realized that they would have many missed oportunities. I project that *thailand* has many missed opportunities as well. To bring in a high tech industry, you need a well trained, literate, educated work force. This Thailand does not have and is failing to get to grips with. >I am a bit surprised to hear you say this about Thai's in general, particularly since you seem to work with well-educated people. Back to ethnocentrism! One aspect of this is extremely intresting. having worked with chinese in Singapore and with Thai Chinese here, the differences in mind set are staggering in the ability to think and reason logically. Not sure this is "ethnocentric", as its *basically* the same racial group (much hand waving here) under different conditions. In this case the "race" question is some what nullified. I do work with educated Thai's (majority chinese heritage)- and I am not impressed. -j- Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jitagawn Posted February 22, 2005 Report Share Posted February 22, 2005 Khun bpen poo ying rip roy, ngaam mahk mahk-pom yak sahp wa khun tham arai teenee yoo :: Got it.? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SoiCowboyTony Posted February 24, 2005 Report Share Posted February 24, 2005 Beautifully stated, Zane! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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