It’s no surprise that this made communication between my wife Lamyai and me difficult, or that a sort of “pidgin” was invented, comprising English used in truncated and imaginative ways, colored by Thai words and rules. Because many Thais spoke English following Thai structure, the adjective frequently followed the subject, thus I had a friend who referred to my landlady as my “lady land.” So it was also in describing familial relationships. When Lamyai said “Papa Mayura,” she was talking about her cousin Mayura’s father, and when she said “young sister husband Lampong,” she was referring to her sister Lampong’s husband’s younger sister. After a while, such “backwards” construction was no problem for me.
Another verbal characteristic was the linking of words in the way Thais ran all their words together in a written sentence. Where in the West someone might greet another saying, “Hot enough for you?” Lamyai exclaimed “Hottoomuch-PapaIwantdie!” A limited vocabularly similarly led to pasting two or three words together to convey a longer message; thus, when she bought school supplies and uniforms for the children, the news was described as “buybookshirt.” Sometimes the words strung together were so creative I didn’t want to correct her. For instance, she didn’t know the word for the “balcony” that fronted the second level of our home, so she said, “papasitdowndrinkbeer,” a word/phrase crafted to describe what I was known to do there somewhat more than occasionally.
Further, there was a kindness that gentled some of her messages. I remember Lamyai asking, “Papa, take shower?” and my replying, “No.” Lamyai then said, “Maybe Papa not happy not take shower.” Someone in the West might have conveyed the same message by saying, “You stink! Take a bath!”
I wasn’t alone with pronunciation problems. Thais had them, too. The letter “s” actually presented multiple challenges. Appearing at the start of a word, as in Sukhumvit, the name of the main street in my neighborhood, it began with the sibilance familiar to all. But when the “s” came at the end of the word, inasmuch as Thais don’t have any words that end with that sound, it disappeared—my last name was, therefore, pronounced Hopkin—or it was turned into a “t” or “k.” Thus, I understood “but” meant “bus,” “Jonat” and “Kritee” were the names of two popular farang singers of Thai songs named Jonas and Kristy, and when Lamyai said “kit” and “sek,” she was saying “kiss” and “sex.” As in: “LamyaiwantsekPapatoomuch!” Finally, when an “l” appeared at the end of the word, it became an “n,” as in Orienten Hoten, and an “r” sometimes became an “l,” for example, “loom,” or disappeared altogether, as when the Central Department Store became “Centen.”
Add the charming tendency to put vocal emphasis on a word’s last syllable, thus my surname actually was pronounced Hop-KIN, tennis became “ten-NIT,” banana became “ba-na-NAH,” and my first name was “Jer-EE.” Further, an “a” was added to some words, so that steak was voiced “sa-TEAK”, small became “sa-MALL, sweet was mouthed “sa-WEET,” and the Land of Smiles was shortened and lengthened simultaneously, becoming “Land of Sa-MILE.”
Teachers of English in Thailand called all this “Thai-glish” or “Tinglish.”
Initially, I figured that for Lamyai, as for myself, that while there was far more to language than stringing words together, vocabulary was more important than pronunciation and tone. Thus, I carried my dictionary around with me and was always asking, “What’s the Thai word?” as Lamyai asked me, “How say Eng-LIT?” At the same time, I hoped that the situational context of what I was saying would make up for the way I mangled the ups and downs of the way Thai words were correctly vocalized.
In time, I came to understand Lamyai most of the time fairly easily, as her sometimes imaginative set phrases became a part of my own vocabulary. When she’d had one too many gin-and-tonics and pointed to her head with a finger and said, “Litten bit woo-woo-woo,” the meaning was not lost on me. Later, this was replaced with “litten bit dlunk,” but I didn’t consider that an improvement.
When I dropped my own conversational patterns and vocabulary down to her level, I wasn’t doing her any favors, however much it contributed to uninterrupted conversational flow. I even mispronounced some of the words as she did, saying “hab” for “have” and using the words “upstairs” and “downstairs” for “up” and “down,” etc. When I returned from a two-week trip to Burma with a friend and he’d given her a report, she told me, “Greg say talk about Lamyai toomuchtoomuch. TalkaboutLamyai. TalkaboutPhaithoon. Talk-aboutPok. TalkaboutMamaLamyai. Talkabouthou(se). Toomuchtoomuch. Greg say.” The error was that in letting this go uncorrected, I may have been aiding communication in the short term—whereas constant corrections to her speech or proper usage on my part would have slowed it—in the long run, it was a mistake.
One more factor contributing to our conversational success was that unlike many Thais with limited English, Lamyai was not shy about using what facility she had. If she knew, say, five-hundred English words, as soon as we were within conversational range (or on the phone) following any separation, she’d use at least four hundred of them four or five times apiece within the first five minutes. Many Thais, even when they actually spoke English well, were too insecure to speak at all to a farang. Lamyai, on the other hand, couldn’t wait to communicate all her news in my language and didn’t want to stop, the words tumbling forth in the manner of someone running downhill, moving faster and faster, until finally she stumbled and fell silent, ending many such raps with a pause followed by the phrase, “Don’t know Eng-LIT.” Together we then attempted to discover the word or phrase she wanted to vocalize, me searching (usually in vain) in my Thai-English dictionary, while Lamyai remained silent, frustrated.
We also depended on sign and body language and I sometimes found myself drawing pictures in my pocket notebook. Following my son’s visit, he told family and friends back in the States that Lamyai spoke English about as well as a second grader and he told me that he thought that was one of the reasons we got on so welclass="underline" we tried harder to communicate and for so long as the motivation to do so remained, we’d probably do okay.
Kreng Jai
My mother always said that a week was incomplete until you’d worked in the garden and got dirt under your fingernails, so when I fell in love with a rice farmer’s daughter and, later on as we planned to marry and built a house on the family farm, I looked forward to getting my hands into the soil, just as my mama advised.
Soon after we moved into the house, Lamyai decided to put in some fruit and vegetable gardens, to thin some old banana patches on the property and move a hundred of the young trees to another piece of land nearby. (She would then add two hundred pineapple plants between the trees and five hundred potato plants.) As Lamyai, her mother, her siblings, her two children and youngest brother all pitched in to dig up and move the bananas, I figured I’d just join in.
Boy, was I wrong! Not only did I not know what I was doing, my assistance was rebuffed. As I took up a machete to trim the leaves of the trees before replanting, I used the wrong (dull) side of the blade, causing several of those present to hide their laughter behind their hands. I knew they weren’t laughing at me, but embarrassed by my mistake; I had learned that the Thai response to embarrassment was laughter.