Category Archives: language

LOVELY SLEEP

Published 2013 The Thai people pride themselves in the purity of their language. Few English words have infiltrated the common lexicon. Dtam-ruaat is the word for police. The diphonic annunciation can confuse most farangs. I thought for years that Dtam-ruaat meant ‘make blood’, however make blood is spelled Dtam-leuuat with a falling accent on the […]

The Tower Of Blather

I speak several languages with varying degree of expertise. All of them with a Boston accent. Linguists estimate that there are over 6700 languages spoken on the planet Earth with English acting as the prime lingua franca or most popular bridge language at present. Unfortunately silence is not a language. This morning at the Academy […]

Dtik Ang – Stuttering in Thai

My speech problems were many in my youth across the harbor from Portland, Maine. A stutter coupled with a lisp and stammer forced the school authorities of Falmouth Foresides to test my mental competence. The teachers were surprised to discover through a battery of intelligence exams that I was the smartest child within the school […]

Illiterati of the Modern Age # 1

Back in the early 1960s I attended a good Catholic grammar school on the South Shore of Boston. Dyslexia was considered a sign of the Devil by the Nuns of Our Lady of the Foothills along with writing with the left or sinister hand. The inability to decode words has been declared incurable by various […]

The Last Words On A Landline Phone

Some eleven years after the end of the American Civil War, Alexander Graham Bell uttered the first words over a telephone in 1876 to his assistant. “Mr. Watson – come here – I want to see you.” Since then millions of trillions of words have been spoke over landlines, however since the advent of cellular […]