Green Wood Doesn't Burn Well

(Note to Reader: Today we’re back to “River Crossings”, excerpts from our stay in Thailand a few years ago. We will intersperse these with “Real Time” reports from along the road as we make our circuitous journey back home to Australia. For today, please enjoy…)

The Thais must be a very clever people. We’ve been studying ‘reading and writing’ for two weeks, and our brains are about fried. Language is such an interesting thing. Last night we went to see one of our missionary kids star in the high school play, “The Miracle Worker”. Tony said he could really relate to Helen Keller, stumbling around bumping into walls, screaming and throwing tantrums because she wasn’t understood. As you can recall, she just needed to COMMUNICATE! One of the students in my class at language school laughs now that she’s realized that during the first month of school, she kept going up to strangers and saying in Thai, “Hello, what’s my name?” ...Oh how we can relate! Let me give you a little language lesson. Apparently, consonants (all 44 of them) can appear anywhere in the word, you just work it out how they relate. Vowels (I think there are something like 24 or so) fit in BEFORE and AFTER, ABOVE and BELOW the consonant. Then of course you have the five tones, marked for the most part, above the word. CRAZY? You’re right. I asked why there were FIVE separate letters for the sound TH and the teacher just said, “Ask the King who created the alphabet 500 years ago”. I figure he was bored and didn’t want anyone to be able to read. Mind you, if you use the WRONG letter for the sound ‘TH” no one will understand it, or even be able to guess what you meant to say.

Then there’s the spoken language which we’ve mentioned before. With five tones, you can say, for example, the word MAI, five different ways; down, falling, level, rising and high, thus enabling you to say, using ONLY the word, “MAI”, great sentences like “Green wood doesn’t burn well does it?” Very handy.

Let me tell you a story about “MAI”. Every day we stop on our walk home from school and buy fruit from a vendor with a little sidewalk cart. For about 75 cents, he gives us 1/2 lb of fresh fruit in a plastic bag, all cut up and ready to eat. Now the Thais like to walk along and eat this fruit, using a wooden skewer that the vendor kindly sticks in the sack. We find these wooden sticks of no value, because we bring the fruit home and put it in a bowl. The skewer is called… you guessed it: a “MAI”. But it’s the MAI that goes waaaayyyyy up in tone, like you’re saying MAAAIII?????

Ok. So we don’t want the sticks, and in order to say, “No thank you, I must say... wait for it... “MAI OW”, only this time the MAI is a falling tone, like the Doppler effect you’d hear from someone falling off a cliff.

I say, “MAI Ow”, but accidently, in my excitement say MAAAI??? OW...... which means, “I WANT STICKS!”

He nods and adds a couple more to the sack. I shout louder (this will help?) I WANT STICKS!!  So I get more and more as I shout louder and louder.  We walk away with a sack of fruit and 15 sticks. Guess he thought we were going to walk along with a crowd while we were munching on our fruit.

I’m going to have to work on my tones. Maybe tomorrow I can say, “I do not require the addition of those annoying little wooden objects”... or something. Have a great week, and don’t just shout louder when you’re misunderstood! 

Love ya,

Marsha

“They said, ‘All right, say ‘Shibboleth’. If he said, ‘Sibboleth’, because he could not pronounce the word correctly, they seized him and killed him at the fords of the Jordan. Forty-two thousand Ephraimites were killed at that time. (Judges 12:6)