Simplicity and Double Entendres: Language Lessons Part 2

At its most hopeless, my progress with Thai sounds something like this:

Me: What's that?
Some Patient Thai Friend: That's a dog.
Me: Ok, good now how do you say that in Thai?
Friend: Maa.
Me: Maa?
Friend: No, that's the word for horse.
Me: Maa.
Friend: No, that means come.
Me: Maa.
Friend: Maa, maa, maa. Do you understand?
Me: Maa maa maa maa maa maa, etc etc.

And if it's not some issue with tone, then it's the unique Thai letters- dt, or bp, or my favorite, eu, which sounds like someone with lockjaw who just stepped in shit.

But I have to remind myself when I'm going blind in front of the chart of 44 consonants, that beyond its sounds Thai is a very simple language. The basic vocabulary is much smaller than English and most words longer than one syllable are compounds of shorter words. For instance: "rian" means study. So classroom is "hong rian" (literally: study room) and school is rongrian (study building). And Hotel is rongraem (overnight building).

So despite my struggles to choke down the 36 vowel sounds, I've got my foot in the door with these compound words. For each short word I learn, I've learned one half of about twenty more words. Last night I used this to my great advantage, foraying for the first time into humor, long a bastion for the fluent here in Thailand. I knew the word for water, "nam" and the word for ice, "nam kaeng." But last night it was explained to me that "nam kaeng" means literally, strong water. And "kaeng" in Thai also translates to the word erect and erection. As simple as that I had my first double entendre. The stiffer the drinks the stronger the feelings, etc etc. We got about 10 minutes of laughs out of it, mainly I think out of relief that we could communicate more than just "where are you from" and "what's your name." My real personality could finally shine through. Off-color humor, long a staple of my English-speaking interactions, could once again be mine.

is, am, and are vs. the Thai people: Language Lessons Part 1

Thai is a language without articles, without plurals, and very few prepositions. Verbs are not conjugated and when at all possible the subject of the sentence is dropped. The result is a language that relies heavily on context- you've got to be paying attention to know what you're talking about. One phrase can be used in different settings to wildly different ends. For instance "mai chai" (literally "not yes") can be used for "incorrect," "not yet," or simply "no."

So when Thais attempt English, it's the little words that take them for a ride. Filling in around the nouns and verbs can be a daunting task. But in English, until you can wield conjunctions and prepositions and phrasal verbs, you can only hack away at the bigger concepts- you can be "stuck" but not "stuck up." And so Thais approach these two and three and four letter words with an attitude that alternates between recklessness and fear. There are either too few helping words and my student gives me something raw and uncut like "I shopping sister at Robinsons." Or at the other end of the swing, there is my favorite internet cafe, where the sign over the toilet reads, "Please do not throw some tissue down upon the waters." An orgy of short words, where prepositions come in groups and inopportune plurals abound. It sounds almost biblical.

They are wary of "any" I think in part because they know the dangers of its misuse. "Some," on the other hand is a slippery one, cropping up in all kinds of speech, both casual and formal. I think my students believe they are protected by its ubiquity, and so they salt their language with it, figuring it will find its own way to the meaning of they say.

But for all the time I spend beating down the "He is have fun" and "Where do you go?" I occasionally get something like this: The other day, responding to a prompt for the word "record," my student Mun gave me the sentence, "You have a short record of social service." Humbling indeed.

nam prik maeng daa

Nam prik maeng daa is Thai for cockroach chili sauce. I know this from experience.

I went to a market the other day just to poke around. I am not very good at putting myself into situations where I have to speak Thai. However, I can read that script although I usually don't know the meaning of the words. So I decided to walk up to a food cart, pick something off the menu and order it, come what may.

I went to a guy making nam prik, which is chili sauce ground up with a wooden mortar and pestle. I had eaten several nam priks before, including one with pork and another that you dipped fish into. This was a good place for me if I was feeling reckless with my Thai, because the guy has to constantly check in with the customer about what he's grinding up- more chilis? fish sauce? I would have to speak Thai back to him or I wouldn't get my food.

So I read "nam prik maeng daa" off the menu and they guy looked a little surprised. But I wasn't going to waver. So he leans over his cart of ingredients to a stack of dried fish. He lifts them up and underneath there is a pile of steamed cockroaches. And these are big boys, like one filled the palm of his hand. He takes one and splits it open. Inside the body is some black lozenge thing, maybe its heart or stomach apparatus. He holds this to my nose and asks me if this is really what I want. It has the funkiest odor, like a turpentine or fermented dish detergent. I've already committed myself to this though, so I say of course, yeah sure.

He proceeds to shred the bug body in his hands and toss it in the mortar along with some rotting fish carcas floating in brown liquid, and like 10 pickled chilis. The result is a greenish-black sludge that he puts in a little plastic bag. I tried to eat it later in the day, but the chilis were too much for me. But even though there were enough chilis to knock me out, that pungent cockroach flavor managed to get caught in my mouth. I was tasting it for the rest of the day, like I'd rinsed with wood stain or something.

I just read in the New York Times that according to Michael Pollan, Americans are relying on a diet that is made from fewer and fewer species, much to the detriment of our health. I would like to see him come here and flesh out his diet with some insect friends. In Thai that would be, "hiu ma-laeng," or "I'm hungry for insects." He could buy maggots fried in soy sauce on the street, or ants in chicken soup. Or maybe he wants some nam prik maeng daa?

Photo of Chiang Mai's Sunday Walking Market

12/06 At 6 PM when they play the king's anthem on the city's loudspeakers, this whole scene freezes and goes silent. Then the song ends and it's like someone pressed play again.

let down by language

The most foreign part of a foreign language? For me, it's at a live concert, right when the band has finished a song and the crowd is sweaty and breathless from dancing. Right then, when you're zoned in with the music and the other people, the singer throws off some one-liner, something to warm the crowd up and hold their attention during the wash of the drummer's outro and the retuning of the guitars. Right then, he says something casual and off-the-cuff, maybe about their tour or a fan's shirt in the front row.

I know what it should sound like: "Mr Michael Gordon on bass, everybody." "How you doing out there, Chicago?" "This next one's off our new album." And I know how to respond, maybe politely or with a little encouraging laughter and applause. And easy as that everybody's closer for it and primed for the next number. But in Thailand its just gibberish to me. I have absolutely no idea what he said. Right at that crucial moment, when the guy's knitting up the crowd, I'm bounced out to the edges. And again I'm a naif, unprepared, and told in so many incomprehensible words that I'm not really ready for this experience.

The Circus Comes to Town

Tonight I met a group of traveling clowns in the minutes before an impromptu show at Tha Phae Gate, the tourist center of the city. They are the Cyclowns, so named because they travel only by bicycle. They have been on the road for six years, living off hat passing and strangers' generosity. In that time, so they claim, over one hundred musicicans and street performers have joined and left their group. Sometimes their numbers swell to as many as 15, when I saw them tonight they were 6.

With their muttonchops and whiny fiddle they gave off an air of old-world Europe, like gypsies. Their clothing featured horizontal stripes, which made their socks clownier and and their shirts more Frenchified. I spoke to one guy, the fiddler, who had been travelling with them for three years. He said they had no clear plans for the future. Half the group wanted to return to China and the other half wanted to push on to Malaysia. This wouldn't be the first time their group had separated- they keep in touch via myspace and sometimes reunite after many months in different countries.

Their act was largely non-verbal, no doubt honed during their last two years trekking across Russia and then China. The music was campy and their magic tricks watchable but unremarkable. I looked around at the audience and saw a large number of backpacker types in their twenties, people who also had been on the road for some time. I watched them watch the show, and I realized that the real entertainment for them was not the magic or the music. These clowns were people who had made the peripatetic lifestyle a sustainable thing. They were travelling the world and they didn't ever have to stop. That was as much something to stare at as any trick they might pull out of their pockets. The backpackers in the audience were probably the ones keeping the Cyclowns afloat. I imagined the travellers whose money was running out were the most generous when the hat was passed, sending with the Cyclowns their vicarious dreams of endless roaming.

I must admit I was taken with the Cyclowns' ambience, and with what seemed to me like a need for a group historian. I could play Tom Wolfe to their band of Merry Pranksters. I the young Cameron Crowe and they the hard-living rock stars. I would travel with them with my short hair and conservative dress, bearing the brunt of their anger at the man and at the close-minded, untravelled West they had left behind. But secretly they would be grateful for my documentation, for ensuring that their legacy lived beyond their myspace friends and the memory of the few who saw them. But the more I thought about that constant travel - two years through Asia! - the more it began to seem as confining as any static lifestyle. The fiddler who had been with them for three years, what else could he do now, after so long on the road? I thought of the Flying Dutchman, and Charlie on the MTA. There certainly is a romanticism to that gypsy way, but maybe it's something I see only with the clarity that comes from a rooted life.