01. trying to figure out e Thai alphabet in secondary school, from an Anthology of ASEAN Literatures book:
interest in Thai language came from living with Thai students for 11 years, staying & helping out in their homes, factories & shops in Bangkok, & travelling to e provinces together with their families. e abovementioned book was Traibhumikatha, a 'gift' that my dad happened to bring home one day - think nobody wanted it as they were not interested &/or couldn't make any sense out of e esoteric content on Buddhist cosmology & e 'three planes of existence'. I could only make sense of parts of e English translation that ran alongside e Thai text - there were plenty of Pali terms littering e lengthy descriptions of e nether world, physical world & ethereal world.
till now e only thing I can recall of what I'd read is some definition of a unit of time (forgot e term), which was used to describe how long a person must spend in e nether world for some sin (forgot what), expressed in terms of e length of time needed to erode some mountain (forgot e name) if it is dusted with a feather once every kazillion (forgot how many) years. quite far removed from e definitions of SI units in Physics, but far more interesting =P
Traibhumikatha is believed to be e oldest existing Thai literary work, having been written by some 13th century king. but what fascinated me more was e table of Thai consonants & vowels & their romanised equivalents in e book, though I only managed to commit a few to memory (kor kai, nor nu, mor maa) & spent a long time puzzling over how thor thong should be written with a single continuous stroke of e pen =P approx 6-7 years later I chanced upon SE1315 (Basic Thai I) while looking through cross-faculty module options, & decided on a whim to pursue this interest. had so much fun & continued on with SE1316 (Basic Thai 2), where I finally got to learn e alphabet & realised that thor thong should be written in e opposite direction =)
[ filed under: 7_things_i_jumped_into + thai1 ]
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