Anyone who had seen the names of Thais will be impressed by how long the names are. Some of the names of people and streets seem to be at least 15 characters long. Last names seem always seem to be long. When we were at the bi-monthly get together of Lucia’s classmates at Chiang Mai University, one of them asked me what my name was. I told him that it was ‘Dennis’. His response was ‘That’s it? Just Dennis?’ I explained to him that, in the US, we don’t have long names like the Thais do. In actuality, the Thais compensate for the long names by giving their children nicknames that are very short. Typically, their nicknames are less than four letters in length. Many times, the nicknames have a slightly negative connotation. Lucia’s nickname is Pom. Lucia said that in English, this translates to the word ‘chubby’. Lucia doesn’t like the word very much and in the US everyone calls her Lucia. But in Thailand, all her schoolmates called her Pom.
While the westernized Thai names seem long, many times the same name written in Thai script is much shorter. I think I finally figured out the reason for it. The Thai alphabet actually consists of something like 44 consonants and 48 vowels. In addition, words are pronounced with one of five different tones. The five tones are low, middle, high, rising, and falling. The same word pronounced with different tones may have completely different meanings in the Thai language. It is therefore very difficult to represent a Thai word with our crummy 26 consonants and vowels. The only way to reasonably represent all these sounds and tones is to use several roman letters that, pronounced together, closely approximate the correct Thai pronunciation. When a Thai name is written phonetically in English, it takes lots of English letters to approximate the sound of the Thai name. In addition, there are frequently several spellings for the same Thai word. This is because of the different ways people try to represent the way the word is pronounced in Thai. While we were in Thailand, someone made the comment that the Thais speak with their mouth open; implying that us westerners speak with our mouths more closed. That makes sense because, in order to speak a language with a much more robust set of sounds, a person will have to articulate or move their mouths more.
There is a lot of subtlety in pronouncing Thai words. As I mentioned, the 44 consonants, 48 vowels, and five tones makes for speech elements that are totally foreign to us foreigners. When I try to pronounce a Thai word, Lucia will frequently correct me and have me pronounce it repeatedly. I think I am pronouncing it pretty close to hers but obviously I am not. I purchased a Thai language CD-ROM from Rosetta Stone. It was the introductory version which includes the first 22 lessons of the entire level 1 course. The CD provides pronunciations of short Thai sentences and phrases and you repeat it into a microphone. The software compares your pronunciation with the CD pronunciation. At first, I did miserably and was getting frustrated with it. I had Lucia try it and her pronunciations were not much better than mine. Sometimes mine were better. When I read about the use of tones in the Thai language, I realized that I needed to try to replicate the tones more exactly. After that, my scores started to improve.
I stopped working with the course when Lucia and I started planning our trip to Thailand. I hope to get back to learning more Thai once I finish this journal. One aspect of the Rosetta Stone course is that, while it does display the sentences in Thai script, it does not show the westernized (or roman) words. I discovered that sometimes what I heard as a ‘t’ sound was actually a ‘d’ sound or vice versa. I think have the western spelling of the words would provide cues to help discern similar sounding sounds. I had searched for a English-Thai dictionary so I could look the words up but I really had a hard time locating one on amazon.com or barnesandnoble.com. Fortunately, I saw one at a convenience store in Krabi. It provides 3-way translations (English, Thai script, and Thai roman). It is not as robust a dictionary as I would like but it should really help once I get back to taking the Thai language lessons.