Observations on Language and Community Living

In George Orwell's book 1984, which was about a fictitious totalitarian government. They created a completely new language (related to English) called Newspeak that embodied the principals of the ruling party to remove the "unneeded words" from English and add new ones. The big word/theme of the book was doublethink which meant that you say one thing but think another (if the Party tells you that 2 + 2 = 5, then you doublethink that 2 + 2 = 5 and you don't question anything). This of course embodied the very nature of the totalitarian government and enabled them to hold a deeper control over their people through language. George Orwell as well as many other people (including SIL) would agree that in order to learn about a culture it is necessary to learn the language of the culture.

I had a lesson tonight from Tong and I learned a bit about classifiers and how to talk about many things and possessing things and stuff like that. Something I found interesting is that the statement "mii dinsaaw kii theeng krup" means both "how many pencils do you have?" and "how many pencils are there?". I find it striking that one of these questions implies ownership and the other implies only the existence of pencils, but in Thai they are equivalent ideas. In English, the questions "how much money do you have?" and "how much money is there?" are dramatically different questions and can cause someone to become offended if the stakes are high enough.

If China, Vietnam, Laos and all the countries in the surrounding area are anything like Thailand in this respect, it's not surprising that they are more ready to accept Socialism. For Americans, possessions are what defines us, and our language makes it very difficult to forget about ownership. This might explain some of the hostile feelings towards Communism. However, I'm not particularly sure how far this would extend, as there is an intrinsic hierarchy of Thai society, and the flat level of importance of the theoretical socialist society would be disagreeable to Thais, I would think.

The past couple of weeks I've been helping out with the youth group at Chiang Mai Community Church; last night's discussion struck me as interesting. We were talking about a description of the Early Church in the second chapter of Acts and the topic of conversation drifted to the notion of selling all your possessions to give to the poor. Understandably, these farang teenager boys had a difficult time accepting this idea. Someone mentioned that they don't think the poor deserve to be helped since they had the same chances and they didn't take advantage of them. Another kid disagreed saying that isn't necessarily the case, it's just hard to give someone so much of your own possessions to the extent that their possessions exceed yours, and do this purely out of goodwill. One guy summed up it up nicely by saying that in Jesus' days, all they had was their sandals and cloak, so it must be easier for them to give up everything since they had less to give up than we do. Most people agreed with this last one.

I would be curious to see how Thais would answer that question. I have a feeling that the number of cultures in existence that would gladly give all to anyone is minimal to none. However, I could be wrong about this and I actually hope I am. Perhaps it's just my Western notion of possessions that makes it difficult for me to fully understanding this passage. I've heard a lot of people say that it doesn't actually mean to sell anything - it's just about attitude. I'm not sure exactly what it means, but I'm pretty sure Thais are closer than I am to start!



As a post script, blogger is now offering a new feature to upload videos, so I've taken advantage of this and I'm posting a short clip that I took about a month ago when I went to see the elephants. If you can't see the video, it's of two elephants that are playing soccer and one kicks a nice goal into the corner.

Language Learning

I started Thai lessons last week. My khruu, or teacher, is a young married guy named Tong. I finally learned some much needed phrases like "what is this?" so now I can go around learning Thai anywhere I go. This past weekend I walked down to the old city: the part of the city that existed before industrialization, it has a wall and moat around it; however the wall has long since crumbled and the moat now has fountains in it. I suppose that's what industrialization does. The city has sprawled much farther than the reaches of the wall, but the old city retains a much different atmosphere; hence why I like walking around there.

Anyway, this particular weekend I decided to sit down outside a museum to write in my journal. Eventually a teenage girl walked up to me to "ask a few questions". I found out later from Melinda that this probably meant she was taking English in school and probably had an assignment to go find some farang to talk to. We ended up talking for over an hour. She taught me the hours of the day (which are actually quite complicated) and a few other useful things like "knife". I taught her some useless things like how to say "y'all" with a southern drawl. I might have taught her something else, but the point is that I was a good conversation partner! Her name was tangmo, which actually means "watermelon". Now, when a Thai tells you what their name is, they're actually telling you their nickname. Real names are much longer and hardly ever used. I'm told that these nicknames also serve as pronouns, so they're usually short one or two syllable words that are usually assigned in the first few years of their life (but not at birth).

For lunch we typically cross the street and eat at Eddie's, a nice 20 baht restaurant that has good kraphao. If I'm in need of change for the songthao I usually go to the grocery store and get some ice cream to quench the burn from the kraphao. This week was a week of daring change so I bought a bag of rambutan. On my first attempt I didn't know how much it was going to cost because fruit is sold by the kilo. I ended up breaking a 1000 baht bill on 2 baht worth of rambutan. So that was strike one for me.

The next day I decided that I didn't like the extra grocery bag that they gave me, so I pointed at the bags and said, "nii arai khrup", which was supposed to mean "what is this", but judging from the look on her face I'd guess that I got a tone or vowel wrong (strike two). It turns out that a bag is called a thoong. So today I used my new knowledge: "mai thoong khrup", which was supposed to mean "no bag please" but, as I now know, I actually said something more along the lines of "that's no good" or "that's not cheap" with a very rude style (strike three, now I have nothing to lose).

Dear cashier-at-Tesco-Lotus-who-is-working-tomorrow, please forgive me when I attempt to say "mai aaw thoong", which is supposed to be correct grammar. I'll probably mess up a tone or vowel. Please be gentle on me.

Traffic

Today I had the aggressive song tao driver from work. I've had him once before, he always takes the unintuitive detour that miraculously becomes a shortcut due to his excessive speed. It's actually quite entertaining. I took a picture of a songtao as I was hopping off. I'd say there's 16 people in that one, but that can easily increase to 23 at peak rush hour. When there's five or six people on the back it gets tough to hold on.

I took the next picture of Chiang Mai-Lamphun road. This particular image has been engraved onto my mind as I've spent about ten minutes every week day staring down this road in wait for the blue song tao. I've become so numb to absurdities in traffic (like the lady carrying all her groceries on the motorcycle) that I hardly notice anything except the shade of blue associated with my songtao route.

The trees that line this road were planted by a former king to give him shade as he drove to his vacation home in Lamphun. There is so much traffic on this road that they considered chopping down the trees to make extra lanes for traffic, but to chop down these trees would be disrespectful to the king. When Mark was here we were marveling at this sense of respect, something we felt is lacking in American culture.

When I first arrived, the first shocking thing to hit me was people driving on the "wrong side" of the road. You may know that vehicles in Thailand drive on the left as they do in England, but it's the motorcycles driving on the right side of the road that scare me. So if anyone reading this is planning on coming to Chiang Mai, I've put together a list of de facto traffic laws that will save you much astonishment and shock.

1. Smaller vehicles always yield to larger ones. Whenever a motorcycle attempts to pass a car, there is always a moment of assessing the size of the oncoming vehicle before making the attempt.
   
2. Motorcycles have a looser set of rules to abide by. Driving on the left is required, unless you're only going a couple blocks real slow, then its OK to drive on the right. Motorcycles are smaller, so they can fit in places cars can't. They can even drive off the shoulder or on the right side if it means passing a few extra cars.
   
3. A stop light means "stop if you're going to get hit", otherwise the intersection is free game. You might notice a two second gap between red and green lights; in America this is observed, in Thailand this is taken advantage of. Other than this two second gap, the light is mostly observed though.
   
4. No more than three persons may ride a single motorcycle. Of course, there are exceptions to this. If a whole family needs to go somewhere, small child may ride in front of the driver.
   
5. Most important: Maximum traffic throughput is always reached when Tim Kellogg tries to cross the street with an open cup of coffee. (So far it's been well proven)
   

In The Matter of a Week

It's been a while since I've last posted. Perhaps this is because there is so much going on. Tonight Mark, the other intern, left for his home in Texas. So the past week was spent fitting in all the things he wished to do while he was still here.

One day we went to a Lahu village, which was probably the best day so far. I entirely loved the small town feel of the Lahusi and their genuine hospitality. I also enjoyed the food, some of it a bit strange. The thing that struck me the most was how different Lahu culture is from Thai culture. Yes, the Lahus came from Burmese hills, but it can't make that much of a difference, can it? Not only is the language different, but the food is also entirely different, the attitudes, values, and world views are all different also.

Thursday night I went to a Blindside concert. Blindside being a band that I've loved since 8th grade. I saw them once in high school during a summer music festival, but Chiang Mai, Thailand was the last place I would have thought to see them again. The show was good, but I have to say that the Thai bands that warmed the stage were just as good. Reckless Madness was probably the better of the two Thai bands. I'd label them somewhere in the hardcore/metal genre, but quite good at it. I should warn you that I've been a huge fan of heavy metal and hardcore for years now, and these Thai guys can really belt out some good riffs.

Friday we hired some guides from the Chiang Mai Rock Climbing Association to take us climbing in the hills outside Chiang Mai. These were world class rock faces and were entirely fun. The rocks aren't worn out from too many climbers: there's still plenty of vegetation and interesting rock outcroppings. In fact, the rocks are still sharp enough to leave good sized cuts on my hands. The guides were helpful and showed us some very nice climbing routes as well as a beautiful 180ft rappel into a cave.

Yesterday I walked down over the moat and into the old city. I grabbed some food from a street vendor then walked around for a couple hours. I passed lots of wats, I feel as if there was on every street. I stopped at a street cafe and ordered a rambutan smoothie. Rambutan is a fruit found in Thailand, you can get it at just about any market. So I'm putting a picture of some Rambutan here so you can see what It looks like.

While on the topic of fruit, I must say there's so many different kinds of fruit here, some that I love, some just aren't all that great. One such fruit is the durian fruit, a large spiky fruit that grows all over Thailand, Malaysia, and Southeast Asia. It's hard to crack open, but at once you are hit with a shock wave of stench. The odor is so bad, in fact, that there are "no durian" signs in hotels and public transportation. I also hear that eating durian with alcohol can have fatal effects. The fruit comes in stringy pods that surround the seeds. They remind me of Martian offspring arriving in a self-protecting escape pod.

Perhaps thats it for this post.