tho-hmwe-t'o-da

I like knitting. In Burmese.

That this phrase made the Lonely Planet phrasebook almost makes up for my other complaints about it...but not quite.

Photo: Bougainvillea in Bali.

Found in translation

Photo: Mekong river weed (khai pen) drying in the sunset on a plastic rice sack, Ban Xangthong, Laos.

I never get tired of coincidental links between languages - they may not have any meaning, but it's enough that they are funny. When I was taking a massage course in Chiang Mai this past week, they were careful to impress upon us the reason why Thai massages might start out too strong for us, and then just get more and more painful.

It turns out that "ow" in Thai means "more"! So the more you exclaim over the pain, the more it will hurt you...

On a related note, aroy means delicious in Thai. There was a saamlaw (motorcycle trailer/sidecar thing) driving around the neighbourhood yesterday with a recording going "aroy aroy!" (I think it was selling ice cream - something tasty anyhow). I was walking with two Filipinos, who burst into laughter. It turns out that "aroy" is the Tagalog equivalent of "ouch!"

Chalk and cheese

Photo: Banana flower salad, served in a banana flower segment, in Siem Reap, Cambodia.

By now in my travels I've visited five South-east Asian nations, and I can certainly see many threads tying the region together, from the ancient monuments to what I saw dubbed "Hindu-Buddhism", to fried rice and fish sauce. But amidst the commonalities, there are many distinctions as well.

A few days after arriving in Thailand, I laugh at my foolish former self that could ever have confused the sound of Thai and Vietnamese. Even though I hardly know any words of Thai, there is this really evident "Thai-ness" to the sound of it that wouldn't let me mistake it for anything else, although I'm not able to pin it down. (I hear Lao is hardly differentiable from Thai so I'll wait to be tested by that).

Likewise, when I had my first bite of an eggplant salad in Bangkok, the flavours cried out "THAI!", but I'd be hard-pressed to say why. The dressing was clearly composed of lime juice, fish sauce, rau ram, dried shrimp, chile, sugar - all of which could just as easily belong in Vietnam. But in the way they were put together, in the proportions and the cooking technique, there was no doubt where the salad came from.

I'm looking forward to many more such distinctive moments....

Going to the Mausoleum

Pictured: NOT the mausoleum, but a view of an Angkorian temple.

Ho Chi Minh's Mausoleum was an interesting rock and hard place in our tour of Vietnam.

It wasn't on our itinerary, in fact had been carefully kept off our itinerary, yet the very stubborn tour guide we were landed with in Hanoi was very insistent that we should go. We tried to be diplomatic and eventually pled exhaustion and the need for a late start that morning. And then after all that discussion, he brought us to the site anyhow and made us stand and take pictures while he told us things about the complicated embalming process that keeps the founding father's body intact (against his own express wishes). I am sure you will all be relieved to hear that the technology is being transferred from Russia to Vietnam so that he will no longer have to fly to Moscow for maintenance each year as in the past, but can instead be cared for at home. Embalming is a rather strange thing.

Going to the mausoleum used to have a different connotation though - apparently it used to be a commonly used expression for going to the loo. But one has to be careful about using it that way now, we were told.

As for us, we've evolved our own. Apparently the little kids growing up with my friend's mother used to use a decrepit governor's mansion for a loo while they were busy playing, and the expression stuck. "Going to the governor's mansion" has rather a nicer ring to it than going to see a man about a horse, at least.

Desho!!

Today is Japanese linguistics post day, apparently. Anyway, something else I have noticed a lot since I've been in Japan, is the way that many people, especially women (at least that is what I have observed) have of giving themselves a little muttered encouragement. Everywhere I go, I hear people talking to themselves in a quiet undertone, saying "desho!"

If I translate correctly, this means more or less, "let's do it!" (or maybe even "let it be so!") I have heard people saying it when rushing around frantically trying to get a lot of work done, or even just in the act of sitting down on a bus while wearing a kimono (which is probably quite hard work too). Whatever it takes to get through the day...

Ano...

Since arriving in Japan, I have received many compliments on my Japanese language skills, mostly totally undeserved. In fact I'm pretty disappointed with my poor ability, considering I did study quite a bit before I left; yet I continue to impress people by saying only a few words!

This is largely because Japanese people are generally very polite and kind, and also pleased to see foreigners taking an interest in their language and culture, I think. A little bit of effort goes a long way.

However, I do have one secret weapon, which I am happy to share. It's my opinion that the most rewarding word to learn in any language, the one that will help you the most with the least effort, is to learn the word for "ummmm..."

Hear me out. First of all, um is an excellent filler while you scramble frantically in your head for the word you need. It reassures your interlocutor that more will eventually come, and may even make it look like you are thinking deeply before choosing the appriopriate statement (a philosopher!) rather than flailing frantically and hoping to not come up with a random Spanish phrase instead.

Secondly, it's a very colloquial phrase, so it reassures people that you have spoken this language with actual humans before, and that you are not expecting them to speak in your language instead.

Lastly, it gives you confidence for both the above reasons, lending you the strength to go on! It will be short and easy to pronounce, too, since after all it's used for the same reasons by native speakers when they're not sure what's coming out of their mouths next.

In Japanese, it's "ano", with even accent on both syllables, though the ooooooooooooooo can be drawn out while you think. Especially for women, whose polite speech verges heavily on the self-deprecating, it's useful to begin an utterance with it as a sort of apology for interrupting or for requesting something.

It is important to try to get the right intonation. In Spanish, um is "o sea" (also fun to say!). There was one graduate student in Spanish Lit I remember who, though a native speaker of English, spoke very good Spanish. But while she spoke fluently and inserted o sea at regular intervals, it was always in this flat monotone which made it seemed pointless - if it's obvious your ums are scripted the whole effect falls away!

This is of course my foreigner's take on the whole matter. But whatever its true use in colloquial Japanese, my regular use of ano definitely helps me get up the courage to talk to people, and so I am grateful! Ano, arigatou gozaimashita!