Learning a new language? Check out our free placement test to see how your level measures up! So we get si saplay (spray paint si from Thai meaning color and Thai pronunciation of spray) or muek mai knock (helmet using the Thai for hat and not, combined with English knock as in knock out) are so essentially assimilated that most Thai people don’t know they are blends of English. Loan blends fill the linguistic void without being awkward for the borrowed language speaker. The loan blend is prevalent in Thai, perhaps because Thai is largely an idiomatic language that tends to describe things as opposed to having specific words refrigerator is a cold cabinet, shoe is a warm foot, and a train is a fire vehicle. This is a loan blend, a word combing the English words check and bill into one word with a Thai pronunciation changing the L sound to an N. Maybe some icea cleam for dessert you get the idea, English words with a Thai pronunciation but at the end of the meal someone asks for the checkbin. You may go out for a beera (beer) and a Sateak (steak) with a side of fent fli (french fries) on the side. Remember Homer Simpson on the phone with Thailand, That’s some language you got there, you speak like that 24/7, huh? Even at first though if you listen closely you can pick up the tell tale loan words through the tweaked pronunciation.īoth “Hello” and “Bye-bye” are widely used, especially on the telephone where hello is usually followed by the Thai Satwa Di, so hello – hello. A first encounter with it for an English speaker may sound like a cat fight. Thai is a tonal language born of Sanskrit and Pali and unique to the country. English and Thai couldn’t be more different.
These are loan words and like everywhere else Thailand has taken plenty from English. Hamburger becomes h amburguesa in spanish, hampurilainen in Finnish, and hamburgara in Swahili. Others like hotel, taxi, hamburger, or telephone have been globally assimilated, taking on accents and pronunciation differences while still retaining a similarity to their origin. Words like computer, hard drive, internet, and monitor entered the language simultaneously the world over and have needed no adaption.
We take it with us when we travel whether it be the slow migration of cultures moving from region to region or a backpacker hopping on a jet to explore the world for a year before settling down to life, language is our most essential baggage.Įnglish has become the universal language of the world in the last half century and a lot of the reason for that is technology.
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