A Sanitary Rubber Bag

As someone who used to sleep with a linguist I'm very interested in the co-development of language and culture. It's fascinating how a culture meets it's lexical needs and in turn how the vocabulary that is created further shapes the culture.


 Some may have heard my favorite example of this idea (because I talk about it all the time). Us gringo-farangs, generally think that your future lies ahead and your past is behind. For me this cultural bias wasn't challenged until I studied Quechua. In Quechua, the word  for future shares a root work with the word for behind and conversely the word for past shares a root word with forward. I don't pretend to understand all of the cultural implications of this paradigm but I'm guessing Back to the Future is not an intriguing film.

After a month in Thailand I don't feel ready to make sweeping judgement about the Thai language either, but I'll share an interesting observations. Thai is a mono-syllabic language, meaning that most simple ideas have one syllable words. More complex thoughts are made into words by stringing together several simple words. Here are some of my favorite Thai compound words (so far) broken down for you. Note that it may be impossible to over-emphasize the cultural importance of the first term on this list.



Meal- กินข้าว
gin-khaao- eat rice


Condom- ถุงยางอนามัย
thoong-yaang-a-naa-mai- sanitary rubber bag


Ice- น้ำแข็ง
nam-khaeng- hard water 


Economics- การแจกจ่าย
gaan-jaaek-jaai- the activity of exchanging money


Telephone- โทรศัพท์
toh-ra-sap- remote vocabulary

Nap- นอนเล่น
naawn len- play sleep


Development- เจริญก้าวหน้า
ja-reern-gaao-naa- to take a step towards progress