Ok, it’s really not that hard to grock.

So I started school back this week, taking five classes which mostly seem pretty fun … in case you’re interested here’s the workload:

• JA211: Japanese Conversation
• TH247: Introduction to Readings (seems to teach critical reading and analysis skills, probably not too hard)
• SN343: Introduction to Spanish Literature (looks really fun)
• FL346: Northern Thai Languages and Writing Systems
• JA201 LEC: Japanese Reading Skills
• SK202: Sanskrit 2
• JA201 LAB: Japanese Listening Skills

The Japanese coursework represents a change in their curriculum for this year, they had previously started the second year by teaching 600 or so Kanji characters but now they focus on reading the characters and understanding the grammar first. I’ve only had one class so far, but it seems like they want us to be able to understand passages writing at about a 3rd grade level, be able to translate them into Thai, stuff like that. They don’t seem to interested in our ability to translate Thai back into Japanese just yet (well the conversation class does that but at a different level).

The Spanish lit class starts with early writings by Columbus and moves through modern writers like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Julio Cortazar and Juan Rulfo. In some cases, the texts have been simplified for a foreign audience, other times they just provide notes to help us understand more.

In FL346, we will study three different dead languages which were used mostly to write stone inscriptions like this one 500+ years ago in Northern Thailand (and parts of Burma and Laos). I will post more on this as I understand it, it’s fascinating to see how the early writing system and grammars all influenced this modern system. I don’t really grock enough yet to explain it tho.

Part of me was a bit worried that studying five (well eight if you could all three languages taught in FL346) different languages in the same term would be hard, or more so that I wouldn’t have enough time to dedicate to all of them. This blog posting makes some good points that it is actually a good thing to do. Basically it says that studying more than a few languages at once might make things slower going at first, but that it would pay off in the long-run by forcing your brain to work in new ways. I think that this is especially true for languages with different writing systems and radically different grammars. (My friend Alan claims that I am the only person he knows who is making linguistic preparations for his past lives by studying four different dead languages).

That being said, I am going to focus on just these languages for now … I’ll keep working on Lao / Issan with the girls at work, and will keep working through the Pimsleur Vietnamese CDs in preparation for my trip next week, but am not going to spend too much time on anything other than my coursework for a while.

In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, the vast majority of the “enlightened” world hangs out taking drugs (Soma) and ignoring reality.

All members of society are conditioned in childhood to hold the values that the World State idealizes. Constant consumption is the bedrock of stability for the World State. Everyone is encouraged to consume the ubiquitous drug, soma. Soma is a hallucinogen that takes users on enjoyable, hangover-free “vacations”.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World)

The dominate society leaves little room for its members to have any form of creative thinking, artistic ability or individuality. The government pretty much makes sure that people are kept happy with massive doses of Soma so that they stop thinking and don’t cause problems.

They are told that there is another group of people called Savages who they are pretty much raised to think are stupid people who live off the land, away from technology and away from Soma. There are Savage villages setup for people to go see, kept almost like a human zoo where the dominate society can go see how the lesser-people live. The book goes on with some characters meeting the Savages and their lives being changed by them. That’s not really the point of this post, the point is that when I was taken to a Hmong village in Laos, I totally thought of the book.

The Hmong are a hill tribe who live in the mountains of Thailand and Laos (and a few other countries) and who were royally fucked by the USA government during the Vietnam war.

In the late 1950s, southeast Asia, including Laos, was viewed as an important region to the West. With the fall of China to communism and the rise of Communist rebellion in Vietnam, the US sent elite soldiers, the Green Berets, to train Hmong guerrillas to oppose the Vietnamese and the Pathet Lao communists of Laos. Though the Hmong had no desire to play political roles for other nations, they loved freedom and know that there would be little freedom under Communism. They were threatened by the intrusion of North Vietnamese troops into Laos, so the U.S. then encouraged them to fight and provided training and weapons. With CIA assistance, General Vang Pao became the leader of a secret army of 9,000 Hmong men in 1961. Laos was officially neutral as the Vietnam War broke out, and the US had signed an international agreement, the Geneva Accords, intended to keep Laos neutral and prevent fighting there. In reality, this agreement gave the Communists the upper hand, for they flagrantly violated the agreement. Responding to the presence of active North Vietnamese troops in Laos, the US tried to oppose them without appearing to violate the Geneva Accords by secretly recruiting freedom-loving locals to fight the Communist — and these freedom-loving locals were the Hmong.

…

The loss of 60,000 American lives for a no-win war in Vietnam was a tragedy to the huge nation of America, but it was a relatively small percentage of the nation compared to the loss the Hmong people suffered. In 1969, at the time when Congress first learned of our secret war in Laos, about 18,000 Hmong soldiers had already been killed in battle died, and many women and children had died as well. The Hmong were taking a great risk in boldly fighting for the United States, trusting that we would stand by them. But in 1973, the U.S. began to pull out of Laos, leaving the Hmong on their own to fight thousands of North Vietnamese troops in Laos. By 1975, Laos had fallen completely into Communist hands, and the lives of all Hmong people who helped fight the Communists were in jeopardy. More than 100,000 Hmong fled to Thai refugee camps. Many would be killed along the way, especially when crossing the Mekong River to get to Thailand. An estimated 30,000 Hmong would be killed by Communist forces while trying to reach Thailand. Over 100,000 Hmong people died as a result of the war, and today nearly every Hmong family in the US has terrible tales of loss and tragedy relating to the war.

After taking over Laos in 1975, the Pathet Lao Communists stated that they would wipe out the Hmong. A Vietnamese broadcast apparently called for genocide against them. From 1976 to 1979, there were credible reports of chemical warfare used against Hmong villages. The world tried to ignore these reports, and some influential voices in the United States tried to discredit the evidence, claiming that the “yellow rain” that had been used to kill Hmong people was just natural bee feces, not a chemical toxin. By the time overwhelming evidence had been gathered to shatter the “bee feces” theory, the media no longer seemed interested in exploring charges of genocide by Communist forces.

The United States, recognizing the sacrifice made by Hmong soldiers to fight for the U.S., began accepting Hmong refugees into the United States in December of 1975. By 1990, about 100,000 refugees had entered the United States. Today approximately 250,000 Hmong are in the U.S., and a similar number still live in Laos. Over 5 million Hmong people are in Southern China, also under Communist rule.

(http://www.jefflindsay.com/hmong.shtml)

As we were nearing the Thai border on our boat trip down the Mekong river, we stopped at a Hmong village that was setup along the river bank. The village in many ways felt like the Savage village in
Brave New World. As each boat parked, the big tall white tourists were greeted by dirty, brown naked kids who took tried to sell us handicrafts. I was lucky in that most of the kids seemed to ignore me for the adults, who would easily buy the stuff they had for sale. The village was setup to look very traditional, but to me it felt like it was setup to handle tourists and didn’t really show a traditional way of life. Of course, as I write this, I am wondering that if perhaps dealing with tourists in this fashion has become a traditional way of life; replacing traditional slash-and-burn agriculture and the need to frequently move that comes with it. In a country where there education is still developing and where ethnic minorities often struggle for full recognition, this may be one of the few ways to make a living.

The only photograph that I shot is the one above, of the western ball-cap sitting in a pile of grass. It seemed to sum up the contrast of the whole place, and also leave open lots of questions. Was the ball-cap a gift from a Westerner, or was it made in China or Burma by one of the Hmong and brought back once the factory work stopped.

Anyway, most of the people I met there either didn’t speak Lao or just didn’t want to talk to me. Hopefully I’ll be able to study Hmong language before I head back.

So I just got back from an amazing trip in Laos. I flew from Bangkok to Luang Prabang with my mom and step-dad, spent three days there, then two days heading up the MekongRiver and two more days in Chiang Rai, Thailand. Probably the most exciting part of the trip was getting to explore the Lao language, which I have heard described as being aboutas close to Thai as Portuguese is to Spanish, except that there is a slightly different writingsystem used. I had made some linguistic preparations before going, mostly just learningthe new consonants and vowels and studying up on some vocabulary. The bulk of the work I did was up there, mostly just sitting and talking to people and reading a Lao /English dictionary. Most people have a good knowledge of Thai (likely from exposure to Thai TV) but few can read and write Thai. The Thai writing system is somewhat more complicated; if you are interested in the language at all, I would highly recommend taking aday to familiarize yourself with their alphabet before going.

One big reason that the writing system is easier is that in 1975 the government drasticallysimplified the alphabet, removing redundant letters and changing the way that foreignwords (modern ones and those of Pali and Sanskrit origin) are spelled.

Just as with the Thai language, Lao divides its consonants into three groups: low, middle and high. These groupings along with a few other factors helps to determine the tone of a word, but there is not a one-to-one relationship. For example, just because ຄ is a low

consonant, does not mean that words which start with it will have a low tone. I guess thisshould be pretty obvious since there are only three groupings and Thai has five tones and Lao has five or six depending on the region. The following chart shows the Lao consonants, their IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) equivalent and the corresponding Thai alphabet and its IPA equivalent. You will notice that in many cases that a single Lao letter maps to more than one Thai letter. In two cases, there is a change in pronunciation between the Lao and Thai letter, I colored these rows gray.

The spelling simplifications generally make pronunciation easier, but for students with knowledge of Pali or Sanskrit we lose the ability to figure out the meanings of unknown words based on their root. For example, the Thai word ศาสตร์ (science, knowledge) is pronounced สาด and comes from the Sanskrit word शास्त्रम् (scripture), in the modernized

version of Lao that same word is written ສາດ which phonetically is the same as the Thai

word, but we lose the hints which help us figure out the meaning if we donʼt already know it.

(Note that the IPA words pretty well to romanize Thai and Lao, but there really is no perfect way. Learning how to pronounce the letters really isn’t as hard as it seems and should be a first step in learning either of the languages. If the Lao or IPA words are not showing up properly, you may need to install additional fonts which are linked below. You can also download this as pdf)

Consonants