Everyday Thai Greetings
After a year of being in Thailand, I could hear the gaps between the words in Thai greetings most of the time. Let me explain to non-linguists. When you start to learn a language, it seems as if people are talking extremely quickly. You don’t know where one word finishes and the next one begins. If you don’t know that, you can’t look words up in a dictionary.
Being Too Good
Therefore, the point when you can hear the subtle break between words is a very important milestone. Anyway, that took about a year, and so I was able to start talking to people in a very simple way. That usually starts with a greeting followed by some confusion. For example, a good linguist also has to be a reasonable mimic in order to get the accent right. So, if you ask someone how they are in their language, and your accent is good enough to make them think that you speak the language better than you do, the reply will probably be more than you can handle.
For example, if you ask ‘How are you today?’, you want them to reply, ‘Fine thanks. How are you?’ (because you have learned how to say that you are fine too). However, if their answer is, ‘Oh, so-so… My lumbago is playing me up again, so I’m on my way to catch the 2:45 bus to the hospital in town where I have an appointment with a specialist’, the chances are that you won’t understand. Having too good an accent is a drawback in the beginning. These situations should lead to humour, not embarrassment. If you end up laughing with your interlocutor, you may become friends, but if you end up feeling embarrassed, you may stop trying to learn the language completely.
Thai Greetings
I couldn’t actually speak Thai, but the villagers couldn’t speak English either. From my perch outside the shop where I go for a beer every evening, I would say to the shoppers I knew: ‘How are you today?’, usually in Thai. However, they had mostly only heard me speaking English previously, and with my foreign accent, probably couldn’t understand me, since most of the villagers have never met a European before. They might even have assumed that I was speaking English or even Welsh, since I am from Wales. Nevertheless, they would hold up their bag of purchases for me to see. Then I noticed that in similar circumstances, my wife would ask: ‘What have you bought?’, not ‘How are you?’
Likewise, when walking on the street. I would say, ‘How are you?’, and they would tell me where they were going (to the market, or to town). I heard others asking, ‘Where are you going?’, not ‘How are you?’ It got me thinking, why don’t Thais enquire after each other’s health, and the only reason I can come up with is that, in a poor farming community, most people have bad backs or whatever, so it is more interesting to ask about something else in standard Thai greetings.
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