Written by Boonlua Debyasuvarn
Translated by Peera Songkünnatham
Illustrated by Adrian Beyer

[คลิกที่นี่เพื่ออ่าน “ภาษาไทยเป็นภาษาที่ทันกาลหรือไม่” ในต้นฉบับภาษาไทย]

In 1967, the Malaysian Society of Orientalists organized its second annual conference under the theme “The Modernization of Languages in Asia.” Among the languages discussed were Malay (including the Brunei variety), Bahasa Indonesia, Pilipino, Japanese, Chinese, Tamil, Bengali, Arabic, Hindi, Sanskrit, and Thai.

In the opening address by Tunku Abdul Rahman, the first Prime Minister of independent Malaya (1957-1963) and then of Malaysia (1963-1970), he grouped Thailand with Japan and China as nations to learn and profit from since the three “have always been free and independent” and “had their own indigenous languages for centuries past.”

The Malaysian premier, who had ancestral and educational ties to Siam, could in fact speak Thai—a “notable exception” as the Thai Renaissance man So Sethaputra put it. In So’s cogent case for “The United States of S.E. Asia” published on The Bangkok Post in 1959, he singles out language as “the real stumbling block to integration”:

True, a Malay can freely enter into conversation with an Indonesian, or a Lao visitor can read the signs in Bangkok streets, and thousands of Cambodians including the King and Queen of Cambodia understand the Thai language. But few people in the Federation of Malaya, with the notable exception of Tuanku Abdul Rahman, speak Thai, and few Thai men understand the native languages of Burma, Malaya, Vietnam, and the Philippines […]

If Thai was more mature and had a greater gravitational pull than neighboring national languages, what could Thais learn from neighboring nations thus perceived to be something like “little siblings”?

Mom Luang Boonlua Debyasuvarn (1911-1982) was no stranger to learning and teaching as an outsider. As a willful girl of royal blood and Buddhist faith from Bangkok, she spent her formative teenage years in a convent school in Penang, an outsider even among her Thai classmates who mostly came from merchant or civil servant families in the Thai South. As an adult, she was an outspoken and all-too-often isolated education official and literature professor, more at home among foreigners than among Thais. As an elder, with still-pioneering contributions in literary criticism and liberal education, she came to be regarded by young Thai radicals of the 1970s as a “liberal aristocrat,” according to a source in Susan Fulop Kepner’s capacious biography A Civilized Woman: M.L. Boonlua Debyasuvarn and the Thai Twentieth Century (Silkworm Books, 2013).

“Is the Thai Language in Step with the Times?” is an article about what Boonlua learned from the 1967 international conference in Kuala Lumpur. It was solicited by The Social Science Review, a journal that functioned as an East-meets-West intellectual and literary repository and forum under the helm of its first editor Sulak Sivaraksa.

Up until then, the 1960s for both Thailand and Malaysia saw the buildup of the gathering storm of racially-inflected political violence that would forever fracture each country’s nationalist ideals. In that age of national consolidation in Asia, national identity became so intertwined with the state that more people found it sensible, if not natural, to define themselves and others by country of origin rather than ethnic background. The evolution of this feeling left a trace in a 1967 Social Science Review article titled “The Troubles of People of Thai Ancestry in Kelantan” (ความเดือดร้อนของคนเชื้อชาติไทยที่กลันตัน) by Chawalit Panyalak. After reporting the situation on the ground and going into how and why the Thai state’s recent attempts of resettlement and consular outreach were largely ineffective in uplifting the livelihoods of the nearly 20,000 ethnic Thais among the 570,000 in the border Malaysian state, the author had this telling thought:

First of all we have to decide whether these people are Thai people or Melayu people. If we judge by race and way of life, they are most definitely Thai. But almost all of them were born in Malaysian territory; most have lived there for generations, and they have lived through joys and sorrows alongside Melayu people all this time. Even though at this moment some are treated like alien residents (khon tang dao), I am confident that one day the government will happily embrace them as citizens. What’s more, their status is similar to that of Thai Muslims in our southern region, even though the problems they face differ. Therefore, as long as we still consider the latter group to be Thai people, there is no reason to deny that those people of Thai ancestry are not Melayu people.

That is to say, once these people are accepted as Melayu people, then only one problem remains: how to help them become good citizens of Malaysia going forward?

Boonlua, who often represented Thailand in international education conferences, balked here at calling herself a Thai representative, instead finding “conference attendee from Thailand” more accurate. She knew that people judged her country by her conduct, and her conduct by her country:

The hard part was that the Thai person, if they were not careful with words, could be accused of one-upmanship against others whose countries had just become independent. […] My guiding principle was that I must make the conference attendees, both Westerners and Easterners, feel that I spoke humbly. This method, I’ve observed, always yielded good results; it gave people the impression that our Thailand was full of similarly positive qualities, an impression that at times went farther than what I wanted to suggest and had to be corrected. I have also observed that whenever a Japanese person attends an international conference, they’re often very careful not to make others feel like Japan is way ahead of its neighbors. They tend to speak little in public, claiming they are not good at speaking Western languages. They might have a number of reasons for doing that.

Suddenly, Boonlua went off, but not off-topic:

Speaking of, I’m going to seize the opportunity to make a related observation. These days, I hear the following kind of comments more and more from Thai people who went abroad: ‘They wanted to know if Thailand has … like them, so I hit back with, Oh? Thailand never was … like them.’ I want to say that behavior of this sort does not at all benefit our country. Acknowledging, to the contrary, that we’ve run into all the same problems as they have, but perhaps at different stretches of time, to varying degrees, and due to different causes, will foster sympathy. Eventually, people from this and that country will let us in on the true state of their country as if unburdening themselves to a real friend. We will return home with an understanding of many issues about which they could not speak publicly.

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The most interesting thing about Boonlua’s article is not the conference, however; it is the title. The linchpin of the whole article is her unusual Thai translation for the word “modern”: than kān, back-translated here as “in step with the times.” It sounds ludicrous today to question whether Thai is a phasa samai mai (modern language) or whether the Thai language is than samai (modernized). But ask, Is the Thai language than kān, and one is caught wondering, what makes a language than kān?

Having teased the reader with the curious question, Boonlua takes her sweet time getting to the answer. After drawing on several conference papers, especially “Modernization or Westernization” by Karl M. Heidt from the Goethe Institute, Kuala Lumpur, Boonlua arrives at a relativist concept of modernity, where “the times” to be in step or out of step with vary depending on the needs of the society in question. It is remarkable that Boonlua’s ideas here come off more fresh and eclectic than many academic writings of today that espouse critical theory and interdisciplinarity. Despite her closing complaints about the underdeveloped state of subject-specific terminology in Thai, the thrust of her article actually demonstrates the unique affordances of intellectually rigorous writing for a non-specialist readership. When the writer doesn’t have standardized translations of jargon to fall back on, the writer has the freedom to rethink and the responsibility to think through key concepts for the reader.

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Is the Thai Language in Step with the Times?

I received an invitation to write an article for this magazine (for an issue about language and books) about a conference in Kuala Lumpur which took place in late September to early October 1967. The conference was organized by the Malaysian Society of Orientalists; this was their first international conference. The theme in English was “Modernization of Languages in Asia.” I contemplated for a long time how to go about writing such an article. If I were to write with an emphasis on linguistics, which is a science, a branch of the social sciences that pertains to language, those who are not linguists would probably find it boring, as linguistics is full of technicalities that to the uninitiated are not only incomprehensible but usually also considered outlandish, nonsensical, or to put it simply as Thai people do: bonkers. But to write about language without any reference to linguistics nor any use of its techniques would make the linguists fidget. Even at the conference, some linguists expressed great worry that language education might replicate the old way before the birth of linguistics that had led to many misconceptions and faulty methods of teaching; that had made language learning difficult, accessible only to a select few, and highly resistant to the correction of misconceptions.

The fidgeting linguists deserve sympathy, actually, since other branches of knowledge have made numerous advances. For example, physics, a science of natural phenomena, has advanced to the point of making nuclear bombs. Medicine is now capable of heart transplant surgery. And yet the matters of language, a tool peculiar to humanity, still lag behind. Language enthusiasts are akin to physicians in the early nineteenth century: some put stock in new scientific research while others continued subscribing to the old textbooks in an era where the old way and the new way of medical treatment were still unbridgeable. It is now more than halfway into the twentieth century, and language enthusiasts still don’t see eye to eye.

After much contemplation, I decided that as people’s interest in language remains divided along contrary principles and methods, to privilege any one approach would be inadvisable; it is necessary to touch on a little bit of everything. But due to the fact that fewer people understand the principles and methods of linguistics, fewer words will be devoted to it. Other approaches have to come first, and I’d like to talk first in the general sense.

As the reader of this article may be new to language study and may not understand the distinction between language science and language non-science, I’d like first to give a little explanation.

Language enthusiasts may be divided into the following groups:

First, the language professionals; for example, writers, orators, teachers, public relations experts, advertisers, lawyers, judges, and many others. This group zeroes in on word usage, the degree of intensity of each word, its ambiguity or clarity, whether a longer or shorter sentence is preferable, et cetera.

Second, the Thai-language schoolteachers. Interested in methods of language instruction, in the hows of teaching so that their students can use language effectively, they care about grammar, including sentence structure, rules of forming a sentence, different word classes and types; for example, how to identify a noun, a verb, the subject or the object in a sentence, etc. Aside from schoolteachers, this second group also includes those whose jobs are related to teaching work, that is, curriculum implementers, teacher trainers, and teaching advisers.

Third, those interested to learn about language in general. Some are interested in words, some in sentence structures and other structures. For example, those who take up the question of the differences between pen and khü [both translate to “to be” —trans.] and their occasions of usage; those who are interested in psychology who want to know, for example, the listener’s reaction to a class of words: they may be characterized as those interested in cultural tradition. This group may be further divided into more subgroups. In Thailand, I haven’t met many who are interested in the sounds in particular, but there are a few, all of whom have been exposed to local dialects.

Fourth, those interested in the origin of words. They investigate how a given word was used in a given era, where rajasap or royal language came from, how a word has evolved in its meanings over time, and whether it is changing now. This group is called philologists. Some of them use scientific methodologies in their research, while others do not.

Meanwhile, the linguists, or those who study linguistics, are concerned with scientific methodologies first and foremost. Once they understand the overarching scientific methods with which to study languages, they choose a language and one of its aspects as their subject of research. Because research is time-consuming, a single researcher cannot really cover every aspect or multiple aspects of a language. A linguist might only research into one aspect of one language, for example, one might specialize in the sounds in the Thai language, how many vowels, consonants, and tones there are; another might delve into the comparisons between the sounds of various local dialects; yet another might study sentence structure. Just one specialty per researcher. As far as I know, the sounds of the Thai language have not yet been fully mapped out by linguists. This is because the Thai researchers usually have the research opportunity during their study abroad towards the completion of their degree, and once they return to Thailand there’s no opportunity to continue the research. Among linguists of other nationalities, few are interested in Thai: this fact will be relevant to the conference in Kuala Loompoor (spelled this way following the local pronunciation).

This Kuala Loompoor conference, it can almost be said, is a pointed reproach to linguists. The president of the organizing association wrote a booklet saying that Western linguists were incapable of helping people in Asia who were trying hard to develop their own languages for modern use; that Western linguists were primarily interested in minority languages such as those of forest peoples in Africa or the Indians in America; that some Asian languages still lack grammar rules, so there is no basis on which to teach students, neither is there a person to whom one can turn for help in researching the standards of correctness; and that one cannot keep waiting for linguists: since there is a need for language usage and teaching in school, rules have to be created for this purpose—which translates to total unreliability and widespread chaos.

This conference, the president of the Malaysian Society of Orientalists hoped, was to bring people in Asia together to ponder the aforesaid problem. They managed to secure some funding for hosting the conference; Tunku Abdul Rahman agreed to be the sponsor. The conference ran from the 29th of September to the 1st of October, but since people took it very seriously, some days the conference went on until 10pm. Outside the conference space, people argued nonstop, with barely an interruption even during whichever banquet they were invited to. Most of the attendees were people in Malaysia, naturally. Other nations had one or two people each, except for Indonesia which had five. But in this conference it didn’t matter so much who was a representative from what country, as some language professors of one nationality turned out to be specialists of an altogether different language. There was a Sanskrit expert who was a young Englishman, a person from India who specialized in sociology and philosophy, an ethnic Dutch person but born in Indonesia who knew a variety of languages and therefore specialized in linguistic comparisons primarily pertaining to culture. The most time-consuming part of the conference involved technical matters.

Actually, the most informative way to tell the story of a conference is to summarize the papers handed out in that conference. For this conference, however, the organizers were rather unequipped financially to hire a dedicated typesetter which you might find in a conference of the United Nations or a large association that some of you may have attended. The conference handouts were ridden with typos as a result. Beyond financial wants, contributors to the conference were wanting for time. Their submitted papers were written in a rush; then, they asked for edits or additions, creating trouble for the secretary of the Society, and of the conference too, who was filling in as the typesetter. So an agreement was made: each contributor would take back their paper and revise it to their satisfaction before sending it to the secretary, and then the Society would look for funding for publication and advertising. For this article, I will go into some of the papers as time allows and as given permission by the respective author. I should also mention that even now I have not received the revised papers; all I have are the conference handouts with occasional errors.

The papers, like the people at the conference, seemed to fall squarely into three groups. The first belonged to the linguists; their papers showed new research and made use of new techniques. Another group went into problems of national or official language designation in their respective country, the ways in which the problems were resolved, and what other problems lay ahead. The remaining papers I group together for convenience’s sake as those interested in multiple aspects of language.

Some of you who have never heard about problems with language in various Asian countries may wonder what kind of problems they are, so allow me to touch upon them. Those of you who know this already may find it tedious to sit through; feel free to skip ahead.

As is well-known, countries in our part of the world were colonized by European peoples for at least two generations, mostly for longer and mostly under changing hands: Indonesia, for instance, used to be subjected to England, and then Holland; the Philippines was under Spanish rule, and then American rule. In the conference, Asian nationalities that were never colonized for long included Japanese, Thai, and Chinese.

All the countries that are former long-term colonies encounter similar problems with language: once they gain independence, people cannot agree on whether to keep using the colonizer’s language, that is, one of the European languages, or to use one of the native vernaculars as their official language going forward. In the interest of time I will only scratch the surface, starting with Malaysia. You already know that during British rule, a variety of ethnicities with different languages and cultures settled in Malaysia under the British government’s protection or support, or in some cases following Britain’s own trade needs. Rubber plantation laborers, for instance, were for the most part Tamil people from the south of India; there were also Tamil people from Lanka. These two groups speak the same language and share the same culture, but nowadays they legally belong to different nationalities. Before, Malaysia, Lanka, and India used to fly the same flag under British rule.

When Britain governed Malaysia or any other country, it was typical that English was to be the language used in governmental and general affairs like trade, whereas other languages were used in the household of the various nationalities and cultures. In government primary schools, Malay was the medium of instruction—but only at that primary level. Those who weren’t Malay by birth sent their children to schools that used English as the medium of instruction. In Malaysia, therefore, two types of government schools existed at the primary level: the Malay schools and the English schools, to call them simply. The secondary schools were English-only.

Of the Chinese in Malaysia, some were concerned about their original culture and made their young learn Chinese, while others did not care so much and sent them to learn English in government-run or government-sponsored schools. Of the Tamil both of Lankan and of Indian origin, however, there did not appear to be autonomously established schools; most sent their young to English schools, while those who sought to transmit their original culture sent the children to India to live with the grandparents. But it can be said that virtually everybody who had been educated in Malaysia was literate in English and could speak their parents’ original language. In English that language is called “mother tongue,” which I will render in Thai as phasa nam nom “breast milk language” for the time being until someone coins a more felicitous term. If I were to simply say phasa mae, I’m afraid some of you might take it to be a swearword. [Translator’s Note: Thai people append “(your) mother” or “(your) father” to a word to express anger or other strong emotion in reaction to that word. Nevertheless, the term phasa mae is used nowadays with no qualms.]

Once the aforesaid disagreement emerged after independence, one camp recommended the use of English as the official language. They were of the opinion, or in truth the feeling, that they could not use their own languages, since the words did not exist even for various subjects at the secondary school level. To use Thai to illustrate the point, the words phumisat “geography,” konlasat “mechanics,” khemi “chemistry,” phichakhanit “algebra,” did not exist prior to the time we established secondary schools and came up with the terms. But when they had only ever used English in secondary schools, trouble befell the teachers. A language that hasn’t been used for academic, official, or general affairs for three human lifespans is akin to a person who’s been asleep or quarantined from the outside world and missed out on flourishing and growing their vocabulary in step with new ideas and new objects of use. Hence, people in newly independent countries found the situation very awkward and saw no solution to it.

But another camp did not easily give in; they were convinced that the language of the “old master” had no place whatsoever in an independent country, that they should try to rework a language of their own into one fit for official and educational use. Finally, as is commonly known, newly independent countries decided to adopt a language of their own for official use. Another problem followed immediately: which language of their own? In Indonesia, there was Javanese with over 30 million regular speakers, but also a larger number of Indonesian citizens who did not speak it. As is commonly known, the Indonesian government settled on a branch of Bahasa Melayu that was commonly spoken in Sumatra but had also long served as a trade language in the archipelago south of the Melayu peninsula as well as the peninsula itself. This language was far from undeveloped, with literature, poetic speech, similes, and other usual features of a moderately developed language. To compare, it was akin to the Thai language around the reign of King Rama II. The number of people who spoke it as their breast milk language was lower than that of Javanese, however. This Melayu language was designated by the government as the national language and renamed Bahasa Indonesia. For its part Malaysia did not run into this problem; the Melayu language was the obvious choice. But it did not end there, since there were many citizens known as “bazaar Malay” who were not born Malay and knew Malay without being literate in it or knowing its grammatical forms. Thus, it was necessary to compromise by allowing the continued usage of English as an official language for the time being as each works on modernizing their preferred language.

Before I move on to other topics, I should first mention in case you didn’t know that some countries have multiple official languages. For example, Singapore has four: English, Melayu, Chinese, and Tamil; but only Melayu is the national language. Malaysia has two official languages, namely English and Melayu. Indonesia still occasionally allows the use of Dutch in official affairs, although Dutch is not considered an official language. (This I may have misunderstood as I heard two people say different things; perhaps one could check with the Indonesian Embassy.)

The international conference held in September 1967 was divided into the following major topics:

1. Issues about the national language
2. Language standard
3. Academic terminology
4. Grammar
5. Language in society (the modernization of language and its relationship to tradition and culture)
6. Theories of the modernization of language

You will see that Topics 2, 5, and 6 are the most important, whereas Topics 1 and 3 are sort of like introductory topics to get on the same page and compare notes. But as it turned out, the conference attendees couldn’t stop arguing over Topics 1, 2, and 5 until they wore themselves out. By the time we reached Topic 5, the discussion had become very sluggish. During Topic 6, it basically became a series of lectures by a handful of experts. The Thai representatives (or more descriptively, the conference attendees from Thailand, since in truth we were not national delegates) had a bigger role to play when everyone else had worn themselves out. This was because the preceding discussions didn’t really excite the Thai people the way they did the others. Once in a while, when the president had us go around the room for every country’s input, I could only say that Thailand had also experienced such issues, which had by then resolved. Speaking at this conference was, I’d say, hard in a way and easy in a way. The hard part was that the Thai person, if they were not careful with words, could be accused of one-upmanship against others whose countries had just become independent. In addition, people embroiled in a heated debate usually don’t like being made to feel that their issues are inconsequential. The easy part, on the other hand, was that we didn’t need to bring up much scholarship, because most people weren’t that interested in the Thai language initially. Only in the last few days did Thai begin to pique their interest. By that point we were on familiar terms with one another; I could speak somewhat loosely or even let my ignorance show and still be easily forgiven. Still, my guiding principle was that I must make the conference attendees, both Westerners and Easterners, feel that I spoke humbly. This method, I’ve observed, always yielded good results; it gave people the impression that our Thailand was full of similarly positive qualities, an impression that at times went farther than what I wanted to suggest and had to be corrected. I have also observed that whenever a Japanese person attends an international conference, they’re often very careful not to make others feel like Japan is way ahead of its neighbors. They tend to speak little in public, claiming they are not good at speaking Western languages. They might have a number of reasons for doing that. Speaking of, I’m going to seize the opportunity to make a related observation. These days, I hear the following kind of comments more and more from Thai people who went abroad: “They wanted to know if Thailand has … like them, so I hit back with, Oh? Thailand never was … like them.” I want to say that behavior of this sort does not at all benefit our country. Acknowledging, to the contrary, that we’ve run into all the same problems as they have, but perhaps at different stretches of time, to varying degrees, and due to different causes, will foster sympathy. Eventually, people from this and that country will let us in on the true state of their country as if unburdening themselves to a real friend. We will return home with an understanding of many issues about which they could not speak publicly. Besides, they will also think highly of Thai people as caring, kind, and sincere.

During the discussion of Topic 1, namely, issues about the national language, they asked the Thai people to describe the situation in Thailand. We (there were three of us) said that nowadays there weren’t any issues, even as people in some provinces spoke another language as their first language (or breast milk language). Once those people began formal education, they understood that the Thai language was necessary for them. If they did not learn Thai, higher education would be cumbersome for them, as would communication with people throughout the country, and their advancement prospects would suffer. As for the issue of which local dialect should be picked for communication countrywide, or as the official language, or as the national language, it is to be expected that we naturally picked the local dialect of Ayutthaya, which was our capital city for more than three hundred years. When we established our new royal capital of Rattanakosin, the elite bureaucrats were people from the old capital. It could be said, therefore, that the Ayutthaya dialect has been in use as the language of communication for all Thais for nearly five hundred years. We tried to speak carefully so that our country didn’t come across as superior to others in the region. The Japanese representatives spoke even more briefly than we did; they said that the issue with the national language for the last 70-80 years was that the differences between the spoken language and the written language had become too great, and so efforts had been made to bring them closer together little by little. But problems remained with the writing system (which consisted of three types of characters, and currently the Roman alphabet was being considered for adoption.)

Topic 2, on linguistic standard, was the subject about which the linguists were most worried. It was a very long debate between the linguists and the language-ists. The young men linguists insisted that it was impossible to prescribe a linguistic standard, that such a standard had to be allowed to emerge naturally. But the language-ists who were schoolteachers objected that if no standard at all were prescribed, how would they go about teaching students and pointing out what was correct and what was incorrect? In Malaysia, for example, different states had different norms and different pronunciations: would they rather leave this be indefinitely? No resolution came out of the very long debate—among fellow Malaysians, no less—and it was surprising that no one thought to ask the Thai people or the Japanese people about it in the entire session. The following session under Topic 3 on academic terminology still saw people going back to the debate on standards. This topic of academic terminology featured written contributions by attendees from almost every country. The issues are interesting, but very difficult to understand if we don’t know their languages, so I will only briefly go into them.

Of note is the case of the Philippines. This republic had the difficulty of having adopted two Western cultures from being under Spanish rule for three hundred years and under American rule for almost half a century. The Philippines includes about seven thousand islands and about one hundred spoken languages. Some are closely related enough to count as the same language, but many are too distant from one another for that. In any case, speakers of different languages can’t talk to one another, and there are thirty two million citizens. A representative from the Philippines said in their paper that the government had made the decision even before gaining independence that a national language must be found, and after a considerable amount of debates, the Tagalog language was chosen. Despite not being the breast milk language of most citizens, it was more widely understood than other languages. But after independence, not that much money was devoted to the development of this language. Only recently was there a robust effort. Nowadays, Tagalog is officially called Pilipino (please don’t change P to F because the f sound doesn’t exist in this language). Presently the government is hard at work accelerating the language development. One big problem is the urgent need for new terminology for various academic subjects. The creation of new words follows the path taken by other languages; that is, some words are taken from a local language equivalent, while some use preexisting words but ascribe a new meaning to them for a particular field the same way the Thai word chintanakan has existed for a long time but is used today in educational studies to mean “imagination.” Otherwise, some words are borrowed directly from English or Spanish with slight modifications; some are borrowed without modifications from Bahasa Melayu or Bahasa Indonesia, both of which are in the same language family as Pilipino; and some are taken from a Western language and used as is.

The creation of words, or we may call it the coinage of terminology, looks to be the same in every country in that the “gurus” do not agree. Some hold that there ought to be no borrowing from any Western language, while some think English should be off limits, whereas others think Dutch should be. Some say, this word is too difficult. Some say, this word should not be used in this or that way. As for the Philippines, probably due to them being accustomed to American liberty, according to the paper there have been multiple groups of people who created new terms and then attacked one another. But in Malaysia, from what I learned outside the conference proper, the Dewan Bahasa or the government institute of language has somewhat of a hegemony; whatever they say must be so. Textbooks, for example, go through a review board of editors who check the written language and correct what they deem improper prior to approval for use. In the case of Tagalog, the paper provides the following examples of disagreements: some experts suggest the use of bilunram [bilnuran] in place of aritmetika and tenlap [tanlap] in place of telebisuon [telebisyon], while some suggest that dalubhayupan ought to be used in place of zoology as dalub means knowledge and bhayupan [hayupan] means animal, so the word is more easily understandable to people in general. It is also claimed that a newspaper named Taliba has experimented with accessible-at-all-costs language which turns out to sell well and enjoy a wider readership than English-language papers or other Tagalog papers that try to follow the experts’ suggestions. Below are some examples (the Philippines paper, page 17):

Pipiling Candidato para Mayor
2 pang suspect sa Hazing
Aprooado [sic] na 71 Appointment
2 inaresto sa pagpatay. Nahuli dahil sa ginawang sketchea bass sa statement ng mga witness

As for the Indonesian language, one paper details many interesting matters concerning prefixes and suffixes. The examples below demonstrate the borrowing from English and Dutch with modifications according to Indonesian prefixes and suffixes (page 11).

ENGLISH	DUTCH	BAHASA INDONESIA
nation	natie	bangsa
national	nationaal	nasional kebangsaan
nationalize	nationaliseren	menasionalisir menasionalisirken menasionalisasiken menasionalken
organ	orgaan	organ
organic	organisch	organis
organize	organiseren	mengorganisir menorganisasi menoganisasikan mengorganisirkan menorgankan

It can be seen that in Indonesian, the coinage of terminology is a problem that extends beyond the questions that we have in Thai of how fitting a given word is and whether it is convenient to use. As shown in the examples from the paper (which shows the author to be knowledgeable in both linguistics and other aspects of language), many further difficulties are explained, but those of you who have not studied linguistics in considerable depth might find them boring, and those of you who are actually interested should in my opinion wait for the book they are going to publish, because you will then get to read the revised papers. In this article, other interesting matters await.

Up next is the noteworthy matter of grammar. As I have mentioned, during the conference the linguists were worried that some people would arbitrarily come up with rules with no basis on research. The amount of people who countered that they didn’t have the luxury of time to wait for research was considerable. But an interesting paper which I have excerpted below stated that once the new theory of linguistics was brought to bear on Bahasa Melayu to research and write out its structure, then nothing would prove too arduous provided that experts had time to do the research. The author of this paper used a simple diction—I can’t quote the entire paper here, nor do I have the ability to translate it into Thai, so I can only excerpt. I believe that the reader, even those unacquainted with linguistics, won’t find it too difficult. You only have to know and acknowledge that the research on and description of structural characteristics of a language can be done in a scientific manner that is more useful than our traditional methods. Consider medical studies as a point of comparison: traditional medicine has been a boon to humanity and kindly cured many diseases for innumerable people, but the ability of our honorable traditional practitioners is no match to that of the scientists who discovered antibiotics. The efficacy of traditional medicine is less certain and swift than that of present-day medicine. And some people may still be successfully treated by traditional medicine, but in general modern medicine is more reliable. We did not forget the kind acts of traditional doctors; we only turned to a faster and more certain path. And there is no such thing as one hundred percent certainty; improvements and modifications are to be expected. All these are analogous to matters of language. I have taken the following excerpt from a more-or-less accessible portion of the paper by Mr. Liaw Yock Fang:

A TRANSFORMATIONAL APPROACH TO MALAY SYNTAX
by
Liaw Yock Fang
Nanyang University Singapore

I am now going to describe and analyse the most complex part of the verb phrase, that is the main verb or the verb proper. Firstly, there are transitive and intransitive verbs. Everyone knows that the transitive verb must have a noun phrase that is of the form NP V NP. Example: Die menulis surat; Consider the sentence Dia balek rumah. It is also of the form NP V NP. Is balek a transitive verb? No, it is not, for we cannot say *rumah di-balek dia. However; we can say Surat di-tulis dia. So the elementary distinction between transitive verb and intransitive verb is that the transitive can undergo passive transformation whereas the intransitive cannot. The formula or rule will be:

24    Verb   (Intransitive verb (Vin)
                     (Transitive verb (Vt)
25    Vin:    Vin + (Adv-manner)
26    Vt:      Vt + NP + (Adv)

But this distinction is too generalized to be of any use. A transformational grammar should have as detailed categorization and subcategorization as possible. Consider the following sentences:—

         Dia menjadi guru
         Dia menangkap guru

Menjadi and menangkap are both transitive verbs and they have a noun as object too. But menjadi is another type of a transitive verb from menangkap. We can say Guru di-tangkap dia but not *Guru di-jadi dia. I will begin with intransitive verb. At least two types of intransitive verb should be distinguished. First is the ordinary intransitive verb like dudok, pergi, lari……… The second type is the kind of intransitive verb that must be accompanied by complement, for example, masok sekolah, naik darahjatoh sakit……… These verbs cannot undergo any passive transformation, the complement is part of the intransitive verb. We can express the intransitive verb in the following formula:—

27  Vin               (Vin               )+(adv)
                            (Vin+complement)
      Examples: Dia pergi/tidor/lari
                            Dia masok melayu/sekolah
                            Dia jatoh hati/sakit/misktn
                            Dia naik geram/girang/menpelai

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Aside from problems of grammar, one person engagingly discussed the problems of life changes in Asian and African nations. This person has traveled to various countries and sought to study the problems concerning systemic life changes in those countries with a heart full of compassion and vicarious joy. An excerpt is provided for you below. To save time I did not translate it into Thai, and my understanding is that people who are interested in an article such as this will probably be able to read it without much difficulty. I would like to later include the entire paper when I am given permission and once it has been revised (Heidt’s paper, page 5).

MODERNIZATION OR WESTERNIZATION
(A Sociolinguistic study based on observation during the past ten years of socio-linguistic developments in connection with National Language drives in Indonesia, East Africa, Malaysia and the Philippines)
by Dr. Phil. Karl M. Heidt.

As the situation exists today, the modernization of national languages of Asian and African newly emerging nations hinges on a number of extra-linguistic facts, considerations and aspects: the existing languages should by the modernization process be made adequate means of gradually coping with the aspects of modern education, science and technology; they should be able to cope with the problems arising from cultural borrowing, and they should efficiently cope with the changes in social behaviour. At the same time, they should be instrumental in retaining and promoting the cultural identity of the speech community. There are certainly more items to be added!

A few decades earlier, the maybe most outstanding step in this direction has been made by the Turkish leader Kemal Ataturk in 1928. An analysis of his modernization programme reveals that hardly any aspect of life in the Turkish society of those days had remained untouched. His language modernization programme as well as its implementation was only a small by very significant part among the total amount of changes and reforms of Turkish society. The idea behind his aims was obvious: to pave a road between Turkey and modern Europe for an easier two-way traffic in education, technology, culture, science etc., for the benefit of the whole nation. Not only the romanization of the script in replacement of the inadequate Arabic script (inadequate as relative to the phonological system of the Turkish language), but also the incorporation of numerous words from the spoken language into the “written language” have added much to unite the Turks linguistically.

Every language is in a constant process of linguistic change and development, i.e. in a process of relative modernization “from inside”. But only a few languages are in need of guided modernization. Because very little experience exists on such lines, modern linguistics cannot be expected to be of too much help yet. Special prescriptions as to how to proceed do not exist yet. And, moreover, in spite of many common aims and ideas, the background facts of history and society differ from case to case. Generally, the writers and intellectual leading personalities as well as, nowadays, the mass media of a given speech community endorse by actual usage of newly developed forms their “official validity”. In some western countries, Language Academies endorse the validity by subsequent official incorporation of new forms into the language after these forms have been accepted by the speech community. These Language Academies consisting of philologists, linguists, teachers, writers, scholars etc. also prepare the details of change-spelling projects on a nationwide basis, if the actual need for it is felt by the speech community. The value of these Academies lies in the fact that they enjoy the confidence and support of the majority of the population.

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Some of you are probably growing impatient wondering when we’ll get to the point stated in the title, namely, is the Thai language in step with the times? In what ways is it in step or out of step? And how is this related to the conference? Now, the opportunity has arrived to examine it. With issues of language, a variety of aspects must be taken into consideration, some of which I have cited in the examples above. For this issue of whether or not a language is in step with the times, one must ask, What is the measure of being in step with the times? When for example one says, This country is still lagging behind, that country is not lagging behind—what does that entail? In this age, advancement and backwardness are measured in terms of the sciences or the tools arising from scientific knowledge. If a country has many such tools, then it is considered very advanced. But there is another, less common measure of lagging behind or being in step with the times: the needs and desires of a society, considered independently of other societies. For example, suppose that, say, Society A lives on an island full of food and objects of use that adequately satisfy its people’s needs and desires without having to rely on scientific knowledge like Western nations. This society also has no pressing issues, no problem with the sexes, no crime. When any sort of hardship strikes, the people band together and resolve it as one. A society such as this, if we adopt the measure commonly used by Westerners, may be called technologically backward, but if we think from another angle, we may call it a society highly in step with the times, because the people do not suffer from the condition where one thing advances far ahead while another remains sluggish. They don’t experience inequality; their hearts are content. As for whether a language is in step or out of step with the times, the measure is whether or not the language is satisfactory to its users. In other Asian nations, they have acknowledged that their languages are out of step with the times, that they would like to use a native language as the medium of instruction in secondary schools, but are unable to do so. In India, they accelerated the development until they could use it for instruction in the Faculty of Arts in some universities, but in the sciences they cannot yet use Indian languages, and have to keep using English for the time being. In this aspect, Thai can be considered in step with the times, as we use it as the medium of instruction at all levels of education. Besides, the writing system and orthography are satisfactory enough to people in Thai society. Poetry is also not alien to us Thais. The occasional fiddling little modifications here and there such as country name change or spelling changes seem to be a frivolous toy of someone who doesn’t have better things to do, or who is ruled by emotions rather than by demands from society. Generally speaking, therefore, the Thai language may be said to be in step with the times.

But in the aspects outlined in Dr. Heidt’s paper, the Thai language may yet be characterized as out of step with the times, as its users still feel dissatisfied about things like expository writing on, say, psychology. Thai currently lacks a vocabulary for the subject, which needs words related to human feelings. If we were to use wholly new words, it would sound as if those feelings were unprecedented among Thai people. If we were to use already existing words, their meanings would be muddled by the non-academic meanings; some words would also be muddled by their Buddhist connotations. This demonstrates that Thai is out of step with the times. For this subject, as for the social sciences in general, the body of coined terminology in Thai remains insufficient. Linguistics itself has extremely few terms.

Another point that is still out step with the times may have little to do with the language, but much to do with the thinking of Thai people: namely, the art of art criticism. We haven’t found a way to come to an agreement on terms such as līlā, which some insist can only be used to refer to a poet’s choice from a range of traditional metrical forms, while others use it to refer to writing style. When we discuss novels, there are no shared meanings in our critical vocabulary. In this matter, rather than faulting the language, we may instead hold that our art criticism is still underdeveloped.

Another point that in my opinion can’t really be called out of step with the times, is what I would call being out of step with the terms. For example, we often hear people use this language, “Now I shall describe the status of the two banks of the river.” What’s out of step here is the word sathānaphāp “status,” which was coined with a certain meaning in mind, but some people who didn’t understand it wanted to use it anyway, leading to mass confusion. The word wārasān is another example. We traced it from the English journal, with wāra translating to day. Those unfamiliar with the word’s meaning then naturally take it to mean publications that are issued daily. All these I have personally witnessed; I did not invent them.

Another point to be noted is the dwindling status of Thai words. This phenomenon began long ago, with words like phaw being considered an impolite variant of ‘father’ for which one must instead use bidā in polite society. Nowadays, kep kradūk ‘keep the bones’ is turning into kep atthi ‘keep the remains’ even for a commoner, not royalty; phao sop ‘burning the body’ is being replaced by chapanakit ‘cremation.’ I dare not speculate about the reasons for such changes, but if we’re not careful, I fear that Thai words will fall into disrepute among Thais, with all the words accused of being vulgar.

But most concerning is the fact that the Thai language is about to lose one consonant sound, namely, the r sound. You may have noticed that few Thai people under the age of thirty use the r sound in normal speech; they only pronounce it when they’re especially careful. This has led to weird pronunciations such as haruea or harot [for the words ruea ‘boat’ and rot ‘car’] that are common among the consumers of mass media, which is a very influential sphere in changing or preserving linguistic forms. This loss of the r sound is regrettable because our literature, especially the poetry written in the last two hundred years, was created with the assumption that the r sound was part of the language. If we lose it, poetry or versifications that used be a consolation and an entertainment for Thais will cease to be so, and Thai people will have to remake poetry from scratch, which means the old stuff will have to be discarded. It is like jewelry that one no longer adores and can only keep in the closet with no way to use them. It is an issue worth brooding over, but I don’t see much resistance to the phenomenon. Attention and efforts are devoted only to rather insignificant issues, some of which I have discussed elsewhere.

Since this article is already getting too long even though a number of things can still be said about Thai and other Asian languages, I have to end here at this time.