Reluctant linguistics

I confidently opened the new English-Thai dictionary: Now I'll be able to figure out how to say things like "Open your notebook," "Copy this down," and "BE QUIET!" without picking it up from a student.

Dirty, dirty publishing scum: it's all in Thai! Here's, "Amble" followed by a paragraph of sperm at a beachside dance party.

What gets me is the amount of mirth there is at the sight of Teacher Harry Potter walking around with flashcards that have characters of the Thai alphabet in primary colors.

Even supposing I get as far as memorizing the 60-some characters, what the heck am I supposed to do with the sonic production?

So I ask my Thai teacher for help with some of the pronunciations, and she looks, squints, goes, "hmm," and it takes me saying, "On the back it says..." to jog her memory, and it's okay that I'm completely wrong because really, she doesn't even remember most of them most of the time.

And really, even some of the common ones are just stupid tricky: K and D--kor kwaii and doh dek--are the same shape, something like a bullseye in an archway, but the bullseye connects via an opposite direction. Or there's Sho Shu (tree) and ngo ngane (novice monk), and we'll ignore the fact that there is no agreed-upon westernization of the thai alphabet, so anything anyone's ever said is a matter of their hearing a local dialect, and oh yeah, someone from Nakhon (Nakorn, Nakhorn, Nakkon...) speaks an entirely different dialect than they do 80 K South in Hat Yai (Hadjai, Hatyaii, Hat Yay, Haj Yai....)

Here's the stupid thing in its entirety. Really. Sometime during the dark ages--and didn't they spread all across the globe?--some king used a Khmer alphabet to elide sanskrit and pali, and voila, here's Thai.

Really?