Quote:
Originally Posted by bjones6416
It is very common for the people born in this part of the country to not know ANY other language besides English, and I hate that.  |
The old joke is;
What do you call someone who speaks two languages? Bilingual.
What do you call someone who speaks three languages? Trilingual.
What do you call someone who speaks one language? American.
Quote:
When my nephew's Thai in-laws were here for a visit, they got very tickled at our difficulty in picking up on the tonal aspect of Thai. Change the tone and you may accidentally say something VERY different I guess!  )
|
VERY different, and sometimes embarrassing!
The word for 'water buffalo' is the same sound (with a different tone) than the slang word for 'penis.' You have to be verrrrry careful when you ask someone to hold your water buffalo...
Being deaf, I can't hear them very well, but Thai uses five tones! I had to learn to say them without being able to hear them.
The same word said with each different tone has five different meanings. You can use the Thai word 'ma' repeated five times with each tone and get the sentence 'the Thai silk is burning!' (This includes regional dialects.)
There are also some vocal sounds in Thai that don't occur in any other language, and took us years to be able to 'almost' say them correctly! The Thai "ng" sound is made in the back of the throat, almost with the nose!
There is a lot of tea grown in Thailand by the Hmong hill tribe villages, who sell it as mostly green tea with a little bit of oolong too. I never saw any that was processed into a black tea. The Hmong had to switch to tea growing when the governments cracked down on poppy production.
Stitchawl