At age sixty-one,
I’m learning a new language. Why? l live in northern Thailand. The culture here is generally gracious
and playful, and it would be fun to be able to participate more in what’s
happening around me. Speaking Thai is a good way to do that.
But studying Thai
means learning to sing a very long song.
That’s because Thai
is tonal. It is sung-spoken. So, in addition to memorizing words, I must also
learn a word’s tone on “a scale” in order to sing-speak and be understood.
The scale has five
tones: high, low, rising, falling, and middle. For example, “kau” pronounced
with a short rising tone means “he” but said with a longer falling tone means
“rice”. The syllable “maa” can be
pronounced five different ways and mean five different things--I think. Even with my
limited Thai, I could give you a lot more examples. If you’re confused, mai
bpen lai (no worries)—so am I.
As you can
imagine, tones lend themselves to a lot of word play that Thais enjoy, and also
make for sophisticated poetry and literature. But tones can be baffling to those learning the language. The more I study, the more confused I am. For the past ten weeks, throughout the rainy season, I have been studying for a total of one hundred twenty hours (not counting homework). Singing, confused, in the rain.
My teacher, Ahjaan Noi, keeps saying, “ Thai ngai! (Thai
is easy!)”
But Thai is not easy. When I visited America, my native
country, this past summer, many people asked casually if I’d learned to
speak Thai, “Asian” and/or Taiwanese, yet? For the record: there is no language
called Asian, just as there is no tongue called European. German, French, Hungarian, Polish and a
host of other languages are spoken in Europe. Asia is home to Mandarin, Malay, Khmer, Hindi, English and myriad other tongues. (There is no language called Taiwanese. I don’t live in Taiwan so there’s no practical point
in learning the languages spoken there right now. But I digress.)
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| Thailand is in Southeast Asia; Taiwan is an island off eastern China |
