Yesterday morning’s Bangkok Post had an interesting caption to a photograph.  The picture is of a protestor outside the offices of the Land Transportation Department and his sign concerns the rise in fuel prices, which the government only sort of controls, and the implication for bus fares, which the government does control quite strictly.

 
The protest is of itself rather predictable.  The sign is not.  It is in wo scripts, Thai and English.  The Bangkok Post caption writer thought it was necessary to explain only the bit that was written in English.  Perhaps it was assumed even non-Thai readers could guess what the Thai says.  But ‘Tiger Eat Sleep’ was thought to be beyond the comprehension of the readers of the Bangkok Post.

Notice that I said the sign was in two ‘scripts’, not ‘languages’.  Most people would not recognize ‘Tiger Eat Sleep’ as part of the English language any more than Chomsky’s famous ‘Colourless green ideas sleep furiously’, a deliberately meaningless linguistic invention concocted to define what is and is not English. 

But maybe I am wrong.  I am beginning to suspect that, apart from English and Thai, there is a subversive hybrid third alternative out there, a language that uses words that seem to be English, but which is incomprehensible to English speakers.  It can be understood only by Thais who have been through any form of the ever-changing English language curriculum taught in the Thai education system.

My first inkling that there was a third language came when I decided to learn to read Thai by doing translations.  I’d got the basic grammar and cracked the Thai alphabet, and in doing so discovered the almost perfect logic behind the order of Thai letters (even more logical that the near symmetry of English alphabetical order).  So I could use a dictionary.  Translation just meant a lot of patient page-flipping.

It maybe took me half a day to do a paragraph, with a large portion of that spent in a futile search for words in the dictionary that turned out not to be words but names (no luxury of an upper case in Thai).  But at the end of that half day, I had learned quite bit and been paid for doing so.  Much more economical that me paying a teacher.

But then came the day when I was given an article to translate that already contained some English words.  I thought this would make it easier.  It drove me nuts.  Every time I thought I’d understood what he as driving at, an English language word would come along that just didn’t fit.  So I kept going back to check if there was another way of understanding the Thai.  I was trying to weave some kind of narrative path in the Thai that would connect these otherwise unrelated outcrops of English vocabulary, and I was not succeeding.

And every time I went in desperation to a Thai speaker to ask what the Thai meant, they just confirmed my first assumptions.  Eventually someone clued me in.  I’d understood the Thai correctly.  What I hadn’t understood was the English words. 

I was trying to understand them with a meaning you might find in a dictionary.  But the writer hadn’t used them with that meaning.  Somehow, they had acquired a special meaning, one found only when the word was embedded inside a Thai text and one that a normal native speaker of English couldn’t expect to know.

By this time I was just glad to get done with the frustration and ignored the English words, substituting them with something that seemed to make better sense.  I then waited for a protest from the original author.  Why had I removed the words that were already in English and started translating English into English? 

The protest never came and eventually I had chance to talk to the author.  It turned out that his understanding of these English words was highly idiosyncratic and rather different from the dictionary definitions.  But he didn’t know that.  He had in his mind concept X and believed that the English word Y conveyed that concept.  The fact that the rest of the English-speaking world thought that Y meant Z, not X, didn’t seem to trouble him.  And this ability to invent novel meanings for words hasn’t held him back.  He went on to work for the Word Bank. 

Over the years I became convinced that this third almost-but-not-quite-English is the product of the way English is taught in Thailand.  For example, this system, which lord only knows fails on many fronts, has been eminently successful in teaching Thais the non-existent English word ‘nowsaday’. 

This is in fact bound to happen in a system where teachers themselves are asked to teach what they don’t know, where social and intellectual control over students is much more highly valued than actually learning anything, and where examinations are a major tool in the system of control. 

Almost every farang in the land has at some point been asked to help with the neighbour’s child’s English homework.  This homework is almost always in the form of a test (which itself tells you something) but the embarrassing thing for the native speaker is that you can’t figure out the answer.  The latest one to floor me was a simple spelling test.  You were supposed to identify the correctly spelled word among 4 choices, two of which were ‘dinner’ and ‘diner’. 

You know what’s probably happened.  The teacher has taught the word ‘dinner’ and in a misguided search for something to set for homework has decided that knowing how to spell words in isolation is somehow an indicator of language competence.  And maybe ignorance or thoughtlessness has included a second, but perfectly spelled word into the list. 

So what you have to do in these situations is tell next door’s munchkin ‘This is what your teacher thinks is the right answer, but in real English, both these are right.’  Perhaps that way the schoolchild will successfully achieve mastery of this artificial construct that Thai schools teach and which is called in the syllabus ‘English’, but really isn’t. 

It could become a valuable skill in later life.  For example, there seems to be a pressing need right now for people who can misunderstand innocuous English speeches at the FCCT and translate them into something Thai that can be judged to be lèse majesté.