Dear Seh Fah: no Ph.D. from Srinakharinwirot University (Prasarnmitr) was ever awarded to the said lady. She actually did not attend that school, although Sia O did approach the school to try to get her admitted.
A few sops to the establishment and a cabinet that is not by being devoid of reds going to be too confrontational to the establishment. That gives an indication of the way Yingluck is going.
Overall a cabinet with a number of technically weak choices, but probably not anyone as controversial as say Kasit last time around.
As to the red shirt-PTP direction, well the red shirts are a diverse group and already a few elements have moved away from the PTP. Maybe a few more will but in the short term it is likely the alliance will stay as not only are some red shirt leaders obviously interested in their future political careers which wont forever be stilted in terms of cabinet positions but any big PTP-red split could open things to once again allow their opponents to manouver them out of power, and in reality although the opponents of red-PTP-Thaksin are currently divided and in disagreement finding common cause against a single thing again is never far off. The direction of the red-PTP alliance in broader terms is probably a more longer term question due to political realities that currently exist.
I find that the key to reading Thai script is not to view it as a line of characters, but as a series of circular syllables.
There is always an initial consonant symbol which marks the centre of the syllable.
There is usually one or more vowel symbols at particular points in an imaginary circle surrounding the initial consonant. Some before, some after, some above and some below.
There may be a tone marker above the right-hand edge of the circle.
If there are any final consonant symbols, they are placed to the right of the circle.
When reading, all one has to do is correctly identify the initial consonant symbols, and the rest just falls into place. One way of facilitating this in primary readers is to print the initial consonants, vowels, tone markers and final consonants in different colours.
Last Thursday I was eating at one of my favorite Asian places, and found out one of the new sushi chefs is Kachin/Chinese from Myitkyina. I was back there eating tonight, so I asked him how common cell phones were in Myitkyina. He asked if I meant Burmese or Chinese and I said either one. He said everybody, even the Burmese soldiers had Chinese cell phones.
The answer to this problem undoubtedly belongs with the young. With the advent of instantaneous communication worldwide, they will begin (have already started) to question the subservient treatment they presently endure. This will of course take time but it might come a lot quicker than people expect. That is why there are a lot of nervous people in this country at present.
Odd to see the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) weighing in on this topic but a most interesting comment on the King’s Speech, especially the part about his micro expression. Is it posible to view the speech via the net on youtube.com ?
Also I would remind readers that if time runs out and the new PM ignores the issue,boycott action, as Ji suggests, or a counter prosecution, as I suggested above against the beneficiaries if the law, will be needed.
For the sake of those exiled or imprisoned, I ask for action from the learned readership.
However I must respectfully and honestly tell you that I cannot be sure about your theory and your analysis. The reason is because the K’s speech has always been confused, muddled, contradictory, repetitive, and incomprehensible it is impossible that one can really interpret his speech in a way that would be free from any reasonable objection.
Thus, instead of trying to scrutinise his largely muddled speech, I try to look for the ‘gist’ of his speech, which can be interpreted through the overall speech, as well as his actions (whether BEFORE and AFTER he made that speech) to know whether he is really serious about what he said, or he is just paying lip-service to make himself look good, to make the ignorant Thais who cannot see the whole structure of the elites’ network see him as an unhappy and unwilling Monarch, who is incapable to do anything to stop the wrongs that the elites around him commit in his names.
In this situation, his speech (while muddled and contradictory), would make any reasonable person thinks that he is against lese majeste, and that every time anyone files a charge against anyone for lese majeste, he would feel uncomfortable about it. However, if one looks deeper and observes his actions BEFORE and AFTER this speech, they are likely to think that he just said it to make himself look clean and good. Because it was he himself who gave his royal assent to this law-not just once but twice (first time during Sarit’s era, where Sarit’s government eliminated the phrase “criticism of the Monarch, his wife, and his Regent is permitted if the purpose of the criticism is to uphold democracy and the people’s Constitution” from the permissible exception in this section 112). And the second time was the time after the massacre of 6 October 1976 (in which if you have studied about it you will know that his family supported, or at least acquiesced to, this massacre), in which he signed to accept this increasion of penalty for lese majeste to fifteen years. In other words, he said he can be criticised but he himself gave a royal assent to this law which forbids anyone to criticise him by himself? If this is not contradictory I don’t know what is.
And don’t get me started with his conduct AFTER he made this speech, especially the part when he said “if what they criticise is true, that’s fine”. Da Torpedo’s criticism that he ‘destroys democracy by endorsing the coup’ is 100% truth. And he said it himself that this is allowed. So why Da is still in jail then? Why did not he do something about it?
…oh , I forgot! He can’t do anything, because he is currently ill (yeah right)…(sorry I am being sarcastic here :p)
A lot of Thaksins wealth, influence and contacts came through his marriage into his wife’s highly connected dynasty.
His wealth and influence grew enormously by contracts he secured through his X wife’s family.
Through her he was able to secure contracts to supply pagers and computer equipment to the police force. It was these kinds of networks Thaksin needed to secure in order to move politically forward.
Prior to this he was in business with PADs founder Sondhi who accused him of screwing him over. They ultimately became enemies yet both come from similar family backgrounds with similar family business practices.
Thaksin’s X wife is a very smart, highly connected, influential women. It was through her cunning that her husband was able to steer himself to power. They both as a team knew how to work the system especially the manipulation of the vote.
Someone needs to write a tell all book on the real exploits of this corrupted political family. Watching them come to power again makes the country look incompetent. But hey as a farang I shouldn’t comment as I could never understand the workings of ‘Thainess ‘
Its a feudal state hiding behind the facade of democracy. How can new governments claim to unite the nation through reconciliation whilst select families control not only the political sphere but the social and economic one as well.
The majority of people know no different as they have been educated to accept the authority of those that have hijacked the country. These pseudo lords have built their networks over decades with the support of the military and police they rule with impunity.
Thousands if not millions of cliques work behind the facade of democracy at all levels of Thailand’s class driven society.
Education reform is the key but who is willing to challenge the way the majority of Thai children are brainwashed through rote learning methods of following , obeying and believing all their teachers tell them.
There is no creative or constructive critical thinking taught in government schools only rote methods of selective knowledge that has benefited the country’s pseudo lords and their families for decades.
These illegitimate oligarchs and their supporters are the core reason for the country’s inability to reconcile and progress but you wont hear any Thai politicians talk about this issue as the truth like reality in Thailand is not only deceptive but has dangerous consequences.
Actually, the PISA report doesn’t seem to recommend spacing at all. Note that the very best scores of all those listed here are assigned to Shanghai, Japan, and Singapore. Chinese and Japanese scripts do not use spacing either.
CT : If you read between the lines and read the wordings of the speech carefully, you’ll find that the King did not say he can be criticized at all.
It’s too impractical to quote his exact wording, let alone to quote him in English given his random language structure, but here’s an attempt:
“to criticize… or in other words to violate the King… that is allowed… but if one violates ‘wrongly’, he will be bombed by the people. I mean, it’s their problem to know how to criticize. If the criticism is ‘right’, fine. If the criticism is ‘wrong’, not good.”
The king equates ‘criticism’ with ‘violation’ of the king and justifies that ‘people’ can bomb whomever criticizes him ‘wrongly’. He never mentioned the revoke of article 112. In fact, he supported it by saying ‘people’ can bomb one who criticizes ‘wrongly’. By using the word ‘bomb’, he probably support the abuse and violence of it as well.
“but then the constitution says the king cannot be criticized, cannot be violated, that puts the king in a difficult position…… but foreigners often violates the king, and laugh that the Thai king is bad, inviolable. And if inviolable then he is bad. ….
…. Farangs say in Thailand, if the king is insulted, [the insulter] must be jailed. In fact, [they] should be jailed, but because Farangs say that, so [they] don’t have to be jailed. Nobody dares put people who insults the king in jail because they (foreigners) will accuse the King of being a not good person, or oversensitive person who sends people who slight him to jail. …”
The King clearly stated that the people who criticize him should be put in jail*, but that can’t be done because of the “foreigners”. It is highly probable that he used the word “foreigners” to also marginalize Thais who think that way.
In fact, if you really read it, you’ll find that in every sentence that the King says people should not be jailed, it is only because he has to appease, to fool the “foreigners”.
*If you look at his microexpression and the raising of his voice when he said that sentence and compare it to his blank expressions in the rest of the random rant, you’ll see that that is his real opinion
Sorry moderators, please use this one instead of the former.
I can’t lay claim to being any type of “academic” at all, but I am capable of reading Thai well enough to be functionally literate.
My semi-literate comments, then:
1. Because of the Thai spelling rules, spacing is not much of a problem. One quickly becomes accustomed to spotting where syllables begin & end. The difficulty for me is having enough vocabulary to recognize discreet words, which obviously wouldn’t be an issue for native speakers. In my opinion, spacing, while it might be convenient for teaching Thai to foreigners, is not a big deal.
2. Having vowels placed before the consonants (not in the same order they are pronounced) is a very minor issue, and one that I found I quickly became accustomed to. I think that any attempt to change that would be more confusing and disruptive than otherwise. It may offend western sensibilities about writing systems, but I don’t see anything inherently better or worse in either system of vowel placement.
3. In general, I find that the spelling of words in Thai is (at least from the standpoint of reading — writing is a bit more problematic) more rational and consistent than English. Doubtless this comes from the long history of English incorporating words from other languages, but English spelling rules are haphazard by comparison to Thai.
4. The two — connected — areas that I believe could be addressed with positive effect are rationalization of the 44 consonants, as well as a re-working of the system of tone marks. While I realize that adult Thais normally know the spelling and pronunciation of words, I find that they are often confused about the rules that establish the relationship between spelling and pronunciation, and with good reason. They are systematic, but they are non-intuitive, difficult to teach or learn, and unduly cumbersome.
The duplication of sound among consonants, and the overlapping ways of producing the same tones using different combinations of consonants and tone marks, makes it very difficult to learn to spell Thai words accurately, in my experience.
I believe that Thai students and foreigners alike would benefit if the duplication of consonants with identical sounds (but usually different tones) could be rationalized.
If such rationalization were to take place, it should go hand in hand with a dramatic change in the system of tones indications. The most obvious way to do this (in my view) would be to make all syllables mid-tone unless a tone mark were used, and tone marks would consistently denote the same tone (for example, mai-aik would denote a low tone, mai-thoe a falling tone, mai-tree a high tone, and jatawaa a rising tone). This would probably also do away with the haw-heeb+LC combination at the beginning of words/syllables as well.
One obvious problem here would be words that currently have the same pronunciation (including tone) but different spellings.
However, the great stumbling block to the two changes — consonant rationalization and simpler tone mark rules — (aside from inertia, resistance to change, economic costs, etc) would be the fact that it would, as noted above, render older texts unreadable to anyone other than language scholars within a generation.
I apologize for the simplicity of my comment. I’m sure that Thai language scholars will find them sophomoric (if not kindergartenish) but I felt compelled to voice my opinion anyway.
It seems clear that this is not a burning issue in Thailand, and not likely to be addressed in the foreseeable future, if ever.
Reuters reports that the Thailand government has deposited 54 million USD or 38 million Euros into an account controlled by the German court in order to secure release of the CP’s 737 airplane. This is far in excess of the actual value of the airplane and if the German court decides to do so, the entire amount might be paid out to the German construction company. This payment was made under the Abhisit/Kasit government just before the new government came into power and explicitly and implicitly contradicts almost every statement made to date in this matter by both Abhisit and Kasit:
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Letter to Thailand
Dear Seh Fah: no Ph.D. from Srinakharinwirot University (Prasarnmitr) was ever awarded to the said lady. She actually did not attend that school, although Sia O did approach the school to try to get her admitted.
Yingluck’s cabinet
A few sops to the establishment and a cabinet that is not by being devoid of reds going to be too confrontational to the establishment. That gives an indication of the way Yingluck is going.
Overall a cabinet with a number of technically weak choices, but probably not anyone as controversial as say Kasit last time around.
As to the red shirt-PTP direction, well the red shirts are a diverse group and already a few elements have moved away from the PTP. Maybe a few more will but in the short term it is likely the alliance will stay as not only are some red shirt leaders obviously interested in their future political careers which wont forever be stilted in terms of cabinet positions but any big PTP-red split could open things to once again allow their opponents to manouver them out of power, and in reality although the opponents of red-PTP-Thaksin are currently divided and in disagreement finding common cause against a single thing again is never far off. The direction of the red-PTP alliance in broader terms is probably a more longer term question due to political realities that currently exist.
Find the gap
I find that the key to reading Thai script is not to view it as a line of characters, but as a series of circular syllables.
There is always an initial consonant symbol which marks the centre of the syllable.
There is usually one or more vowel symbols at particular points in an imaginary circle surrounding the initial consonant. Some before, some after, some above and some below.
There may be a tone marker above the right-hand edge of the circle.
If there are any final consonant symbols, they are placed to the right of the circle.
When reading, all one has to do is correctly identify the initial consonant symbols, and the rest just falls into place. One way of facilitating this in primary readers is to print the initial consonants, vowels, tone markers and final consonants in different colours.
Find the gap
Likewise Australian English should take in some elements of the languages of the Aborigines.
Letter to Thailand
This family would make a great TV reality show. Could call it “Sanford and Sons.”
Yingluck’s cabinet
Very typical of the ‘Thai way’, you have to have at least three deputies for every single position. The more the merrier.
Mobile telephony in Burma
Last Thursday I was eating at one of my favorite Asian places, and found out one of the new sushi chefs is Kachin/Chinese from Myitkyina. I was back there eating tonight, so I asked him how common cell phones were in Myitkyina. He asked if I meant Burmese or Chinese and I said either one. He said everybody, even the Burmese soldiers had Chinese cell phones.
Family business, Thai style
The answer to this problem undoubtedly belongs with the young. With the advent of instantaneous communication worldwide, they will begin (have already started) to question the subservient treatment they presently endure. This will of course take time but it might come a lot quicker than people expect. That is why there are a lot of nervous people in this country at present.
Ji Ungpakorn on lese majeste
Odd to see the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) weighing in on this topic but a most interesting comment on the King’s Speech, especially the part about his micro expression. Is it posible to view the speech via the net on youtube.com ?
Also I would remind readers that if time runs out and the new PM ignores the issue,boycott action, as Ji suggests, or a counter prosecution, as I suggested above against the beneficiaries if the law, will be needed.
For the sake of those exiled or imprisoned, I ask for action from the learned readership.
Ji Ungpakorn on lese majeste
@PRC, thank you for your opinion.
However I must respectfully and honestly tell you that I cannot be sure about your theory and your analysis. The reason is because the K’s speech has always been confused, muddled, contradictory, repetitive, and incomprehensible it is impossible that one can really interpret his speech in a way that would be free from any reasonable objection.
Thus, instead of trying to scrutinise his largely muddled speech, I try to look for the ‘gist’ of his speech, which can be interpreted through the overall speech, as well as his actions (whether BEFORE and AFTER he made that speech) to know whether he is really serious about what he said, or he is just paying lip-service to make himself look good, to make the ignorant Thais who cannot see the whole structure of the elites’ network see him as an unhappy and unwilling Monarch, who is incapable to do anything to stop the wrongs that the elites around him commit in his names.
In this situation, his speech (while muddled and contradictory), would make any reasonable person thinks that he is against lese majeste, and that every time anyone files a charge against anyone for lese majeste, he would feel uncomfortable about it. However, if one looks deeper and observes his actions BEFORE and AFTER this speech, they are likely to think that he just said it to make himself look clean and good. Because it was he himself who gave his royal assent to this law-not just once but twice (first time during Sarit’s era, where Sarit’s government eliminated the phrase “criticism of the Monarch, his wife, and his Regent is permitted if the purpose of the criticism is to uphold democracy and the people’s Constitution” from the permissible exception in this section 112). And the second time was the time after the massacre of 6 October 1976 (in which if you have studied about it you will know that his family supported, or at least acquiesced to, this massacre), in which he signed to accept this increasion of penalty for lese majeste to fifteen years. In other words, he said he can be criticised but he himself gave a royal assent to this law which forbids anyone to criticise him by himself? If this is not contradictory I don’t know what is.
And don’t get me started with his conduct AFTER he made this speech, especially the part when he said “if what they criticise is true, that’s fine”. Da Torpedo’s criticism that he ‘destroys democracy by endorsing the coup’ is 100% truth. And he said it himself that this is allowed. So why Da is still in jail then? Why did not he do something about it?
…oh , I forgot! He can’t do anything, because he is currently ill (yeah right)…(sorry I am being sarcastic here :p)
Find the gap
Am I not correct in believing that the books that can be bought to teach Thai
children to read do have spacing between words?
The Shinawatra family tree
A lot of Thaksins wealth, influence and contacts came through his marriage into his wife’s highly connected dynasty.
His wealth and influence grew enormously by contracts he secured through his X wife’s family.
Through her he was able to secure contracts to supply pagers and computer equipment to the police force. It was these kinds of networks Thaksin needed to secure in order to move politically forward.
Prior to this he was in business with PADs founder Sondhi who accused him of screwing him over. They ultimately became enemies yet both come from similar family backgrounds with similar family business practices.
Thaksin’s X wife is a very smart, highly connected, influential women. It was through her cunning that her husband was able to steer himself to power. They both as a team knew how to work the system especially the manipulation of the vote.
Someone needs to write a tell all book on the real exploits of this corrupted political family. Watching them come to power again makes the country look incompetent. But hey as a farang I shouldn’t comment as I could never understand the workings of ‘Thainess ‘
Family business, Thai style
Its a feudal state hiding behind the facade of democracy. How can new governments claim to unite the nation through reconciliation whilst select families control not only the political sphere but the social and economic one as well.
The majority of people know no different as they have been educated to accept the authority of those that have hijacked the country. These pseudo lords have built their networks over decades with the support of the military and police they rule with impunity.
Thousands if not millions of cliques work behind the facade of democracy at all levels of Thailand’s class driven society.
Education reform is the key but who is willing to challenge the way the majority of Thai children are brainwashed through rote learning methods of following , obeying and believing all their teachers tell them.
There is no creative or constructive critical thinking taught in government schools only rote methods of selective knowledge that has benefited the country’s pseudo lords and their families for decades.
These illegitimate oligarchs and their supporters are the core reason for the country’s inability to reconcile and progress but you wont hear any Thai politicians talk about this issue as the truth like reality in Thailand is not only deceptive but has dangerous consequences.
The Shinawatra family tree
Re: Sirisan #8
Thanks for the clarification. I guess I must have misinterpreted her writings.
Paul
Find the gap
Actually, the PISA report doesn’t seem to recommend spacing at all. Note that the very best scores of all those listed here are assigned to Shanghai, Japan, and Singapore. Chinese and Japanese scripts do not use spacing either.
Ji Ungpakorn on lese majeste
CT : If you read between the lines and read the wordings of the speech carefully, you’ll find that the King did not say he can be criticized at all.
It’s too impractical to quote his exact wording, let alone to quote him in English given his random language structure, but here’s an attempt:
“to criticize… or in other words to violate the King… that is allowed… but if one violates ‘wrongly’, he will be bombed by the people. I mean, it’s their problem to know how to criticize. If the criticism is ‘right’, fine. If the criticism is ‘wrong’, not good.”
The king equates ‘criticism’ with ‘violation’ of the king and justifies that ‘people’ can bomb whomever criticizes him ‘wrongly’. He never mentioned the revoke of article 112. In fact, he supported it by saying ‘people’ can bomb one who criticizes ‘wrongly’. By using the word ‘bomb’, he probably support the abuse and violence of it as well.
“but then the constitution says the king cannot be criticized, cannot be violated, that puts the king in a difficult position…… but foreigners often violates the king, and laugh that the Thai king is bad, inviolable. And if inviolable then he is bad. ….
…. Farangs say in Thailand, if the king is insulted, [the insulter] must be jailed. In fact, [they] should be jailed, but because Farangs say that, so [they] don’t have to be jailed. Nobody dares put people who insults the king in jail because they (foreigners) will accuse the King of being a not good person, or oversensitive person who sends people who slight him to jail. …”
The King clearly stated that the people who criticize him should be put in jail*, but that can’t be done because of the “foreigners”. It is highly probable that he used the word “foreigners” to also marginalize Thais who think that way.
In fact, if you really read it, you’ll find that in every sentence that the King says people should not be jailed, it is only because he has to appease, to fool the “foreigners”.
*If you look at his microexpression and the raising of his voice when he said that sentence and compare it to his blank expressions in the rest of the random rant, you’ll see that that is his real opinion
Sorry moderators, please use this one instead of the former.
Plane audacity in Thai dispute
38 million euros……..
Find the gap
I can’t lay claim to being any type of “academic” at all, but I am capable of reading Thai well enough to be functionally literate.
My semi-literate comments, then:
1. Because of the Thai spelling rules, spacing is not much of a problem. One quickly becomes accustomed to spotting where syllables begin & end. The difficulty for me is having enough vocabulary to recognize discreet words, which obviously wouldn’t be an issue for native speakers. In my opinion, spacing, while it might be convenient for teaching Thai to foreigners, is not a big deal.
2. Having vowels placed before the consonants (not in the same order they are pronounced) is a very minor issue, and one that I found I quickly became accustomed to. I think that any attempt to change that would be more confusing and disruptive than otherwise. It may offend western sensibilities about writing systems, but I don’t see anything inherently better or worse in either system of vowel placement.
3. In general, I find that the spelling of words in Thai is (at least from the standpoint of reading — writing is a bit more problematic) more rational and consistent than English. Doubtless this comes from the long history of English incorporating words from other languages, but English spelling rules are haphazard by comparison to Thai.
4. The two — connected — areas that I believe could be addressed with positive effect are rationalization of the 44 consonants, as well as a re-working of the system of tone marks. While I realize that adult Thais normally know the spelling and pronunciation of words, I find that they are often confused about the rules that establish the relationship between spelling and pronunciation, and with good reason. They are systematic, but they are non-intuitive, difficult to teach or learn, and unduly cumbersome.
The duplication of sound among consonants, and the overlapping ways of producing the same tones using different combinations of consonants and tone marks, makes it very difficult to learn to spell Thai words accurately, in my experience.
I believe that Thai students and foreigners alike would benefit if the duplication of consonants with identical sounds (but usually different tones) could be rationalized.
If such rationalization were to take place, it should go hand in hand with a dramatic change in the system of tones indications. The most obvious way to do this (in my view) would be to make all syllables mid-tone unless a tone mark were used, and tone marks would consistently denote the same tone (for example, mai-aik would denote a low tone, mai-thoe a falling tone, mai-tree a high tone, and jatawaa a rising tone). This would probably also do away with the haw-heeb+LC combination at the beginning of words/syllables as well.
One obvious problem here would be words that currently have the same pronunciation (including tone) but different spellings.
However, the great stumbling block to the two changes — consonant rationalization and simpler tone mark rules — (aside from inertia, resistance to change, economic costs, etc) would be the fact that it would, as noted above, render older texts unreadable to anyone other than language scholars within a generation.
I apologize for the simplicity of my comment. I’m sure that Thai language scholars will find them sophomoric (if not kindergartenish) but I felt compelled to voice my opinion anyway.
It seems clear that this is not a burning issue in Thailand, and not likely to be addressed in the foreseeable future, if ever.
Plane audacity in Thai dispute
Thai government have coughed up. It’s in the Thai English language press too, but here it is without fantasy headlines:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/08/09/thailand-germany-plane-idUSL3E7J93WJ20110809
Plane audacity in Thai dispute
Reuters reports that the Thailand government has deposited 54 million USD or 38 million Euros into an account controlled by the German court in order to secure release of the CP’s 737 airplane. This is far in excess of the actual value of the airplane and if the German court decides to do so, the entire amount might be paid out to the German construction company. This payment was made under the Abhisit/Kasit government just before the new government came into power and explicitly and implicitly contradicts almost every statement made to date in this matter by both Abhisit and Kasit:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/08/09/us-thailand-germany-plane-idUSTRE7783WM20110809