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.