Thailand, the land of smiles, is no different.

Those smiles are for foreigners, not their own estranged brothers. Comedians will come on TV in Thailand and recite a little speech in Lao, not normal speech, but something specifically designed to be intelligible to Thais but also laughable because of their inability to speak ‘correct’ Thai. And that’s the whole joke, making their fellow Laos a laughing stock, even though the two dialects are very close, Lao being relatively ‘central’ to the entire family of languages, essentially ‘more pure’ in the sense that London English is more pure than Californian, though less popular internationally. A large percentage of modern Thais from the northeast, also, speak a Lao dialect as their local language, as do northerners and southerners their own dialects. Far more ‘bumpkin’ would be the northern dialect, though it’s never laughed at, being a good obedient son, more picturesque, and closer to the hearts of the average Thai. Laos and the northeast still carry the taint of communism, very un-Thai. Lao people, in turn, revile and insult the ‘black Tais’ resident in much of the country, the original and most traditional Tais. As Jackie Chan once said, “In China, everything face.” Someone else said, “You’re in Chinatown, Jake.”

Burying the past with language

removes it from the usual patterns of evolution, as would deliberate gene splicing. The Dravidian languages of southern India deliberately remove Sanskrit influence while ignoring similar influences from English, which would certainly be easier to locate and remove because of their obvious foreignness. Local politics and petty jealousies weigh heavily. ‘Aryanization’ carries with it the connotation of ‘civilization’, at least in Thai, notwithstanding the fact that the same people now called ‘Dravidians’ have ancestors who created one of the world’s greatest early civilizations in the Indus River valley. They undoubtedly left much DNA in the current bloodlines of both northern and southern India. Unfortunately for them, this is the darker-skinned lower-caste bloodline that was ripe for Islam to enhance their status. It’s no accident that that same Indus River is now in Muslim Pakistan, though linguistic traces with their forbears are long gone. The lingua franca of Pakistan, Urdu, in fact is mutually intelligible with Hindi, the closest thing India has to a national language, and the local language of no one in Pakistan. Once again, efforts are continuous to separate the two for political reasons. The same has not yet happened, but could, with India’s other major language, Bengali, also known as Bangla, the national language of Bangladesh.

People put other people down in order to puff themselves up,

and so does language. The great English vowel shift in the 15^th century made sure that leaning ‘proper’ English would be a trial by fire and that only the fittest would survive. With French no longer the language of government and pretentiousness, the upper classes had no quick easy way to prove they were better than the smiths, bakers, millers, carpenters, and Joneses. So they formed their own dialect of English. Only they knew the code. Long I’s became long E’s, long E’s became long A’s, and short and long vowels separated entirely, rendering the concept largely meaningless, though still taught, at least as of my tenure. In reality, a system of dual pronunciation for each vowel was adopted, similar to the Khmer system of ‘registers’. It was complicated, but easier than learning Latin, now that French was out of favor, never to be united with England regardless of who’s the reigning monarch. Latin came in vogue at the same time, but more as a language of writing, than of speech. Spoken Latin had long since become Italian and other bastard mutations, much of the changes from classical Latin occurring even before the Empire fell.

Language is a weapon to be used sparingly;

stockpiled for future use in case of surprise attack, superpowers struggle to achieve parity. Language riots break out in the most unlikely places, houses of Congress and houses of servants, bedrooms and boardrooms. Shibboleths maintain purity of the race, drawing lines in the sand where no borders yet exist. Harder than metal, cutting deeper than love, words are the ultimate weapon for the complete samurai, and the balance of power for the frail of body. Nouns are the hardware of battle, pawns under the control of knights and bishops. Verbs are the software, parries and thrusts and vast sweeping movements over rolling hills designed to trap the enemy in a scissors movement without exit. Sharpen your tongue and glean ammunition from slips of the enemy’s tongue, forced confessions, and bared chests. Then when the time is right, strike with the fury of a summer storm, fire and lightning with not a drop of rain in sight to cool the fevered brow. But remember to play fair, no reason to strike below the belt. Nothing hurts more than the truth when unloaded in a properly timed depth charge.

Music is the universal language,

capable of enjoyment regardless of whether one knows the language in question or not. Language is secondary to music, as it is to film. Writers don’t write music, and they don’t write screenplays. People ask me what I talk about with my wife as if the eastern reality must be incomprehensible to a westerner. You don’t have to read much Chomsky to realize that life is very similar regardless of the language(s) involved; and I’m a Sapirian. I do think that language influences one’s reality in the same way that a computer program or operating system or even your search engine influences your computing output. Certainly they’re both right. The fact that the geographically contiguous and culturally similar ‘Pueblo’ Indians speak not only different languages, but languages from four different language families only two of which are remotely related says something. The fact that their reality is (or at least WAS) far different from all other language phyla says something else. To describe as ‘human’ a creature without language is almost unthinkable.

I always thought rock & roll was an English language phenomenon,

as if all the joy and love, all the fear and angst, all the excitement and transcendence, all the sturm und drang, were somehow hard-wired into the language, directly related to the German structure/Romanticized content of the language. Let’s face it, for whatever the reason, the Continent doesn’t produce much great rock-and-roll. Sure there’s Bjork and Nina Hagen, and the occasional stray genius like Manu Chao, but mostly we’re talking the mediocrity of Abba or Ace of Base and for you really hard-rockers, we’ve got Scorpions. For those of you who refuse to get professional help, we’ve got Swedish Death Metal. This hardly compares with the hundreds of bands blasting out basements and lofts in the US, UK, Ireland, Canada, and Australia. Why the Continent never developed a pop-cultural rock & roll edge to rival the English-speaking world could be speculated upon endlessly, but that’s not the point. The point is that great R & R is possible in other languages, and not just half-breed and ‘fusion’ groups, as Carabao in Thailand and Mana’ in Mexico amply prove. The reasons behind the anomaly probably lie more in the given socio-politico-economic realities than in the aptitude of the language. Europe is a museum, just too expensive and rigidified to experiment. They almost missed the Industrial revolution before; now they’re missing the Entertainment one also. Computers and Internet are but the tip of the iceberg. When it’s all over, you won’t know what’s real and what’s entertainment.

Language can be fattening if you use too much shortening.

When w’d’ya’ want?’ becomes what you want and ‘how d’ya’ do?’ becomes how you do, then you know you’re becoming fluent in English and therefore incomprehensible to much of the world. But be careful. I might have to ask, “wha’d’you say” when you ask, “wha’ ‘tcha’ name?” but soon you’ll get it right to the nth degree and “wha ‘tsyer name?” will roll off your tongue like melted butter and you’ll never have to ask me “wha’ cha’ say?” again. It’s not a good idea to learn shortcuts in language. It’s better if they learn themselves. Otherwise it sounds unnatural and pretentious. There’s no substitute for speaking correctly, grammar-perfect and sound specific. Speed creates the shortcuts of necessity, the unaccented valleys of pitch becoming indistinct filler. For speakers of tonal languages, like here in Interzone, English by convention almost becomes a tonal language itself, changes in emotional pitch imitated as if a part of the internal structure itself. For the uninitiated, tonal languages employ changes in pitch to distinguish different words from each other, not to show emotion. We use volume for that. Got it? A rising tone does not necessarily denote a question. Though the native language will employ various tones, the borrowed tongue will invariably sound monotonal, hence the frequent borrowing of emotional pitch to compensate for the otherwise lack of sonic inflection. All this is understandable and easily predictable. Stranger is the predilection of some speakers of tonal languages to borrow what few grammatical inflections remain in the English language to use in their own, which has none otherwise. Thus the word ‘American’ is used as often as the word ‘America’, likewise ‘Spanish’ for ‘Spain’, though ‘Espanol’ is unknown. My box can’t process Arabic.

Written language pulls together what spoken language splits apart.

For probably the first time in history languages are no longer dividing and multiplying and declaring independence at the same time that more and more nations are. Go figure. Dialects are disappearing under the onslaught of mass media and standardized education, in favor of a national standard language. A language is a dialect with a book and a sword. National languages are themselves in danger of disappearing in favor of international standards, once the national languages become deviant or pidginized to the point of incomprehensibility. Already French and Chinese movies offer subtitles in their own language. IN THEIR OWN LANGUAGE! This is understandable with mutually unintelligible Chinese dialects that share the same written language, but French has no convenient excuse. It’s just hard to understand in the vernacular, like subtitles for senile mumblers in documentaries.

I consider Slavs to be the broad mass of Indo-European stock,

the population pool from which the others spun off and never came back. They are to the European race what chimpanzees are to the great apes, the most direct descendant of that common ancestor who was father to them all. The other large pool was the Aryan/Iranians, who occupied Central Asia before the Turks. To me, the descendants of the Aryans who invaded India in 1500 BC look more European than the Aryans who stayed behind and became Iranians, in the process of mixing with Arabs and Turks. But for the darker skin, the average northern Indian could be mistaken for someone hailing from Hackensack or Peoria. Interestingly, descendants of Portuguese who settled Malacca in the modern state of Malaysia, now mostly fishermen, look darker than the predominant Malays. They can trace their descent and know a smattering of the language, but more closely resemble Indians or Australian aborigines than modern-day Portuguese. Their first language now is English.

The French get so righteous about the spread of English

at the expense of French (maybe French is just more expensive), but they do the same with Dutch/Flemish and others. All of Belgium, and especially Brussels, used to be a political and linguistic entity with Holland to the north and its Germanic language. That all changed with Napoleon and the Flemish had to wait long and fight hard just to regain parity. Of course, long before that, all Franks were part of that same entity before they became ‘Romanized’ and proceeded to butcher Latin. Apparently not all of Charlemagne’s progeny were in agreement on that issue, as the domain became divided, and the French/Latin-speakers became a centralized nation long before the rump Holy Roman Empire of independent principalities became Germany. Whether the centralization of ancient Rome was somehow transmitted through the vestiges of its language while the Germans were stuck in the proud but ultimately feudal heritage of its own tribal past would be an interesting thesis. Whether the individualism and de-centralization of ancient nomadic Germany was the basis of capitalism and industry is another. Throughout the entire Germanic Europe to this day the dialects spoken are mutually intelligible from one village to the next, though the national standard dialects have become mutually unintelligible.