Chapter 3

The Thai Alphabet:

It occurred to me that if I was to spend a considerable amount of time in Thailand then I should at least make some sort of attempt at learning to read the Thai alphabet. May said "at your age why bother?" A good incentive if ever there was.

Now if you ever glance at a Thai poster or newspaper you will notice that a page of thai script looks a bit like a printed-circuit board, complete with lots of circular holes, which has been attacked by Salvador Dali.

There are, in fact, forty four consonants to be learned, although a couple of them are obsolescent. This sounds like a lot but bear in mind that there is no upper and lower case. In our alphabet we have only twenty six letters - but we have to learn upper and lower cases so in fact we actually have to learn more. Think about it. Why is a capital "D" the other way round from a small "d"? and why is "A" so different from "a"?

So I set to, searched the net and started the slog of memorising them, their shapes, their names and what they sound like. It is an interesting complication that some of the letters are pronounced differently if they occur at the end of a word. This reminds me of Portuguese where an "s" at the end of a word is pronounced "sh". But, alas that's just about all I know about Portuguese.

So back to Thai consonants. For the first few hours of trying (spending about an hour a day) I really struggled. It was difficult to memorize these shapes which bore no resemblance to Roman, Cyrillic or any other script that I have ever seen. So being reasonably computer literate I wrote a couple of programs to help. These let me look at either the Thai character and/or its name and work more or less like flash cards. A great help.

Now six weeks later I can recognize nearly all of them.

Being in Phuket for the last few weeks has really helped because I'm not only surrounded by thai script but also with people who are only too pleased to correct my pronunciation (thank you May!).

So now just when I thought I was getting somewhere - I was hit by the Thai vowel system.

To put it simply - it can't be put simply. There are about fifteen vowel symbols. Some, as in English, follow the relevant consonant, some precede it, some are placed under it, some are placed over it and some -perhaps you've guessed - are placed in combinations of the above positions.

I'm in the middle of sorting these out now. Yes it is a bit complicated but no it is not impossible. Sixty million Thai people manage it. I shall persevere.

Oh yes I also forgot to mention that there are no gaps between Thai words. I console myself with the thought that we don't leave gaps between words when we speak and that seems to work ok!

Thai is of course a tonal language, like Chinese and the same word spoken with different voice inflection can mean something totally different. "Maa" for instance can mean "horse", "dog" or even "come" depending on how it is voiced. There are only five different tones used(low, high, medium, rising and falling). To be fair I should note that "Maa" is spelt slightly differently in Thai (มา, มัา and หมา ) depending on its meaning so it's not that bad. There are rather complicated rules for sorting out the tones to be used when reading Thai script but at least there are rules. I read somewhere that in Chinese there are no such rules - you just have to learn the tone for every word!

Well yes it's a lot to learn but there are a couple of things about the language which are some consolation. It is read from left to right, just like we are used to and perhaps even more importantly, for a person who wasted, according to my teacher, "both my time and his" for some years at school with Latin grammar (I really couldn't see the point then), Thai grammar appears to be a lot simpler. If you want the future tense of a verb just stick"ja" ( จะ) in front of it. If you want to emphasise something just repeat it. "Maak" (มาก) means "very much" so "maak maak" (มากมาก)would mean "very very much". This is good news.

A week or so ago I had a small triumph, the sort of thing which makes it all worth while. I suddenly realized that the letters in the middle of local car and motorbike tax plates don't say "NINA" they say "ภูเก็ต" or "Phuket".

A small step, perhaps, but a step nevertheless.

So ok I've got a long way to go but the journey looks like its going to be fun.