Thai Lite

[PattayaOneTeam]

Adventures in Tinglish

by S. Tsow

Some readers may not be familiar with the word “Tinglish.” It refers to a hybrid kind of English often spoken in Thailand. Just as we have Hinglish (Indian English, achhchha!), Singlish (Singaporean English, lah!), and Jinglish (Japanese English, deska!), and a host of other inglishes, so we also have Tinglish: Thai English, spoken with Thai pronunciation, intonation, and sentence patterns.

It is not my purpose here to make fun of the English spoken by Thais whose mastery of the language is incomplete. Everybody has to struggle when studying a new language, and if the atrocities which we foreigners commit against the Thai language could be catalogued, they would fill a far larger volume than any that could be devoted to Tinglish.

(Test for the reader: Try pronouncing the name of the Thai prime minister, and see how well you do. His name is Abhisit Vejjajiva. An approximation of the correct pronunciation comes at the end of this column.)

Tinglish can cause misunderstandings which are often amusing, and I propose to list a few.

My source for these anecdotes is a dear friend and mentor, Fardley Nerdwell, whose girlfriend, Noy, provides him with a steady supply of Tinglishisms.

“Take the movie 'Iron Eagle,'” Fardley told me one day. “Noy thought it had something to do with ironing an eagle, as you would iron a shirt. She wondered how the eagle would react.”

“Probably with considerable outrage,” I surmised.

“One of her favorite singers is Juttin Timmerlay. Bet you can't guess who that is.”

That was easy: Justin Timberlake.

“There's also the movie star Boot Weelit.”

That was easy, too: Bruce Willis.

“Shot Put,” Fardley continued. “Guess who that is.”

That one stumped me. It was George Bush.

“One day she had to go to the hot peter to see a friend. It took me some time to figure that out. She meant the hospital.”

“I wonder how the two of you manage to communicate at all,” I said.

“It can get frustrating,” Fardley admitted. “The time I had the most trouble understanding her was when she came back from a trip to Hua Hin with her girlfriends. I asked what she had liked best about Hua Hin. She said, 'I like hot.'”

“Hot,” I echoed. “You mean she liked the warm weather?”

“Nope. Guess again,” Fardley said.

“Hot food,” I ventured. “She ate some spicy-hot food there and liked it.”

“Nope. Try again.”

I was baffled. “I like hot.” What could such a cryptic utterance possibly mean? The most sophisticated linguist, the most skilled cryptanalyst in the bowels of the CIA, would tear out his hair in frustration if he encountered this enigmatic statement in a coded message intercepted between terrorist groups.

“There's a town named Hot up around Chiang Mai, but you said Noy was in Hua Hin,” I said.

“Right. Think, man! When you go down to the beach at Hua Hin, what's the first thing you see?”

I thought. “Well, you see ponies on the beach giving rides to tourists.”

“Exactly. 'Hot' means 'horse.'”

“Ah,” I said, enlightened. “So Noy liked riding the horses on the beach.”

“Sometimes she inadvertently warns me against making a wrong decision,” Fardley said. “Once we were driving along and she suddenly said, 'One woe for life.' I was startled. At that very moment I had been daydreaming, wondering if I should ask her to marry me. And now, like a thunderbolt, the possible consequences of such a foolish decision came crashing down around my ears. If I married Noy, quite possibly I would have 'one woe for life.'”

“Nice of her to warn you,” I said.

Fardley chuckled. “Yes, but it was unintentional. She had merely been reading a sign on the back of the car in front of us. It was a Volvo, and the sign read 'Volvo for Life.'”

“That's a new one,” I observed. “I've heard 'Volvo' pronounced 'wowo' before, but never 'one woe.'”

“There's also a Khorat Hotel in Bangkok, and a famous country-and-western song called 'Writing Bahboo.' Bet you can't tell what those mean.”

I was stumped again. It turned out that the hotel was actually the Conrad, and the song was “Lightning Bar Blues.”

“One day she was gazing into a mirror and looking disconsolate,” Fardley went on. “She sighed, 'I am owned!' I was puzzled. Owned? By whom, pray? Did she find our relationship confining? Had she given her heart to somebody else? Had she been sold into slavery? But no, nothing so dramatic. She meant 'I am old!' At the advanced age of 24 she was imagining bags under her eyes.”

“Better to be old than owned,” I philosophized.

S. Tsow can be flamed, preferably in Tinglish, at [email protected]. (P.S. The name of the Thai prime minister is pronounced, not AB-bee-sit Vej-a-JEE-va, but, approximately, Ah-PEE-sit Weh-chah-chee-WAH.)

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-- Pattaya One 2010-11-10

[moo9]

How's your Thai? Or German, French?....indeed sometimes it is funny to hear Tinglish, but we better make no jokes about it unless our Thai is better.