At Sunday school this past weekend, Eris's class was singing a Thai Christmas song. I knew it was a Christmas song because the first word was "Chritmat." (Thai does not have an "s" sound at the end of syllables; not so great for Eris and Hollis.) I've been trying to think of ways for us to learn more Thai, and thought it would be fun to help all the girls learn this song. Eris's teacher had handwritten the words in Thai for the students and one paper was transliterated into English characters for Eris, very thoughtful of her. After class, I asked for both versions, as I am trying to learn to speak Thai correctly through reading it.
Monday night, I set about the process of figuring out the words to the song. I didn't get a whole lot further than "Christmas." Philip purchased this great program for an iPad from which I have learned most of my Thai vocabulary. It's a dictionary that can provide English to Thai, English transliterated Thai to Thai with English definition, and Thai characters to English. I can even listen to the correct pronunciation of the words in Thai. I've been trying to learn how to hear the difference between tones this way. I still don't think I can tell the difference between dog and horse (maa high tone and maa rising tone) or many other words, but maybe it will come one of these days, or years. I thought that I could figure out the song using this program.
First of all, I had to read the characters. It appears that Thai like to write really small. Font on many food packages, flyers, maps, etc. is so small as to be illegible to us. I can barely make out the character, much less the microscopic tone and vowel mark above and below the consonant characters. I had the English transliteration to help me, but unless one has happened to be a foreigner and take a Thai class, she would not have a standard way of writing each sound. Just in the short first line, I made out that "bp" written "p"and "wela" was "vala."
Secondly, Thai does not separate words in writing. The teacher had separate word written in English, but there was no guarantee that the spaces indicated a new word or just a new syllable. Thai also has a lot of compound words, so sometimes I think I know a word only to realize that it is part of a compound word with a different meaning. For example, I was reading a story and was excited that I knew the word "dog." I looked up the next word which was "wild." Ok, the story was about a wild dog; wrong, the compound word "dogwild" is the Thai word for wolf. So in this instance, I knew the first word was Christmas, but after that I didn't know if the next phrase was "bpen wela" or "bpenwela." Turns out that both are possible and neither made much sense literally: "Christmas is hour/time word" or "Christmas yearly."
Another difficulty is that Thai often uses the same word for a verb, noun, and adjective. Without a better command of the language, there is not a way to distinguish between frequent and frequently or to guard and a guard. Also, many words can mean more than one thing: tii (falling tone) can be in, at, on, or place.
I won't bore you with all the details of this laborious process. With a combination of all the functions of the dictionary program, the transliterated and Thai words of the song, and my own tiny knowledge of Thai and a few good guesses, I ended up with the following:
Christmastime, Christmastime, Christmas time ??? Repeat
frequent(ly?) times preposition I/me/we/us dim ? spirit/heart cast away give/cry Chiiwit gloomy
guard look have who any silk/"word that makes a yes or no question" preposition await understand
news good today God give relationship heart I/me/we/us turn around
Jesus born in manger
Now if anyone can make sense of that, please let me know!
Philip was able to help me change "? spirit/heart" into "gloominess" or more literally "gloomy feeling." Then he had the idea to look online to see if I could find the words. I looked up "Christmas Bpen Wela" and found "Christmas Bpen Wela Haeng Kwam Rak." I know the word rak; it's love. The problem was I couldn't read the teacher's handwriting for those characters, and she had transliterated it "luk." (Thai often don't distinguish well between "r" and "l" and both make a "n" sound at the end of words; not fun for Meriel.) I also found that the name of the song translated into English is "Christmas is a Time for Love." I couldn't find further translation. Maranatha has a song with the same tune and the same first line, but, unless my meager translation is completely wrong, the rest of the song is completely different. I did find a YouTube video with clear singing and the words printed so I could read them. So now I know I have the correctly written Thai, and the girls and I can practice singing along with the video. Now we'll just have to get a human being to help us understand what we're singing.
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