Positive Attitudes Reflected in the Thai Language

I enjoy chatting with my Thai friends. I enjoy chatting with my English friends. I like to chat with most people that I encounter. I find most exchanges of ideas stimulating. And I like to learn about the people around me, their beliefs, and their culture. Of course, in reality most conversations in which I’m involved are fairly trivial and superficial, but even so I find that the word usage employed by others does reveal a huge amount about their mindset. This generalisation applies equally to conversations with native English speakers as it does to conversations with Thai speakers. But because the Thai language is fundamentally foreign to me and also because I only enjoy fairly limited proficiency in Thai, the cultural disclosures revealed by Thai phraseology and word usage often strike me with the immediacy and ferocity of an electric shock. I would like to share some of these perceived disclosures here with you today on Doodee’s Thailand.

The first example that I’d like to discuss today that I find very telling of the Thai mindset is the way that Thai people choose to express the concept of badness.

There are a number of words and expressions in the Thai language that mean “bad”. Many of them mean bad in a specific kind of way, or have a meaning closer to very bad, awful, dreadful or horrendous in English. But the word usage for bad that I most commonly encounter in Thai is “mai dee” (literally “no/not good”) or “mai dee loiy” (literally “no good at all”).

I find it interesting, and revealing of the Thai mindset, that bad is most often referred to as “not good”, or put another way, bad-ness often seems to be referred to in negative measures of good-ness. I realise of course that we English speakers will often say “no good” or “not very good” when we mean “bad”. But we don’t use those expressions all of the time. We often use the word bad. Thai people rarely seem to use any of their words for bad in the same context.

Does this reveal that Thais in general make judgements about how good something is, whereas Westerners often make a judgement about whether that same something is good or bad? I suspect that maybe it does.

Another example of the way that I perceive that Thais express their positive view of the world and their fun-loving national character is in their liberal use of the word “sanook”. Sanook literally means “fun”, but in Thailand “fun” is not merely a useful noun or adjective. It’s an entire concept.

For example, if ever I ask a Thai person a simple question (i.e. What’s it like, living in Bangkok? Or, How is it, working in the pickle factory?), I will often receive the answers “sanook dee” (good fun), or “mai sanook” (no fun) in response, and then further explanation will follow.
If I were to ask an English person the same questions I suspect that I would hear such words as “convenient”, “crowded”, “hot”, “cold”, “busy”, “good prospects”, etcetera, long before I heard any reference to whether either situation is good fun or not.

Does the above indicate that the search for fun and the assessment of how much fun that there is in a particular activity or situation is important to Thai people? And does it also indicate that perhaps fun as a concept is rather more important to Thai people than it is to Westerners? I suspect that the answer to both of these questions is “Yes”.

The Final Example of this positive and cheery word usage that I am going to offer for you today is the way in which Thai people use the word “len” (literally “to play”) as an accessory to a sentence.

For example, to sit and chat together is often expressed in Thai as “nang khuiy len”. “Nang” is the Thai word for “sit”. “Khuiy” is the Thai word for “chat”. And “len” is added to indicate that the activity is play i.e. it is being indulged in for pleasure or fun.

In much the same way, although “Gin” (the “g” is pronounced as a hard “g”) is a commonly used Thai word for eat, Thai people will often use the expression “Gin len” (eat for fun) when referring to eating.

And likewise the Thai word for walk is “dern”, but again Thai people will often respond to the question “Where are you going?” with, “bai dern len” (literally “go walk play”, but more accurately “going for a recreational/fun walk”).

There are very many examples of this use of “len” to transform a mundane activity into a fun pastime. Does this frequent use of “len” to qualify a phrase in this way indicate that Thais find enjoyment and fun in activities that us Westerners find to be routine? I suspect that it does.

It’s not my belief that Thais are constantly positive, constantly light-hearted, fun-loving, carefree people for twenty four hours of the day, seven days per week. But I do believe that the way that the Thai language is constructed and used does reflect the Thai propensity towards finding the fun and the pleasure in things, and equally reflects the Thai aversion to constantly searching for and seeking out the negative qualities in things.

I like the positive attitudes that I perceive in the construction and usage of the Thai language. I like the very positive attitudes that I see in the everyday behaviour of most Thai people that I encounter. These easy-going, positive attitudes help to generate the delightfully intoxicating, all-welcoming, all-embracing, all-accepting environment that makes it such a joy to live amongst Thai people.

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COMING NEXT on Doodee’s Thailand: A couple of special benches.

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