on names

It's the week before an extended weekend, compounded by being prep for midterms next week: throwaway lessons in general. Sunday night, sometime before the neighborhood birds started waking up, I woke up with the genius idea of a worksheet: take the material we've been working on--basic biographical stuff--in the happy kidlet formula on one side, and in an official format on the other. 15 minutes later, one side has the happy cartoon bubbles asking "What is your name" (first, last, nickname), "How old are you?" (date of birth) &c, and the second page is a US visa application, edited slightly.
It's been about the best week of Mattayom I've had. The students who care about it end up clustered around the desk in the front of the room, asking for transcriptions of names and trying to get the information filled out, and the ones who don't care just wander off. The fun part is that when I orbit the room after a few minutes and take back worksheets from kids who haven't made it as far as getting out a pen, about half the time, they end up being some of the most motivated and hardworking in the class.

What i've really learned is the impossibility of Westernizing Thai. The classic example is "Sua." Or maybe Seewa. Sooah. Any of 'em could work, depending upon the Thai and farang's accent. But then there's the inflection: say it one way and "sua" is tiger. Say it another and it's shirt. Another and it's a sitting cushion. Or there's the word for pork: Muo. Or is it Hmo? Hmuo? Mho? How do you write the way you have to drop your tongue and open your nasal cavities and then scoop the sound up in the space of one very short syllable?

And then came the parade of names. Wichararoot, Chankasatong, Supaporn (I realize I've been here too long when I almost miss laughing at that one), Oyawatchakorn. A press of kids screaming to be heard over the background roar, all hoping that by screaming louder they'll get through to me and be able to hear my response more easily.
It's fun.

But then again, take an easy name like "Wichararoot." Seeing it like that, I imagine someone saying "which are uh root." Perfectly reasonable. And completely wrong.
"Wi" is a "Weee" with your tongue crimped fully forward in your mouth. "Cha" is like a British "char" or "chah" or saying "chai" like the tea but with a downturn instead of uplift at the end. "Ra" is halfway between an "L" and "D" sound: say 'la' but think 'ra' or say 'da' while thinking 'la' and it'll come about right. And "Root" is hopeless. The T is a hard stop, so no 'tuh" or aspiration; in this sense, it could be T or D just as easily, which ends up going for just about every hard consonant sound in Thai. And there is absolutely nothing that prepares the American tongue for the OO sound. On the one hand, you hold your tongue about like someone who's just learned what exactly they ate and are experiencing its return. Open your nasal passages, too, and then do a bizarre little tonal curlicue--think the basic Baroque turn on a keyboard, but constrained to ordinary speech levels. And again do the thing where you say D while thinking L and shaping your mouth for R.
Then point to the name, forget about all of it, repeat whatever whatshisname said, and be glad Thai people have nicknames like Bank, Arm, Bam, or Pang.