Rat Na Kai and Why Thailand has an H in it

I still plan to post several more times on Petchabun, but it's easier to just give you a couple of quick pictures of going to lunch today. We are still working on my workplan. Basically I was to be focused on management, but before coming to Chiang Mai I did some checking on the possibility of importing mangoes from Thailand. I think there are lots of obstacles, but maybe it's doable. This would be really helpful to some of the farmers we work with who have wonderful mangoes. And maybe we'll discover there are other products that would be easier to export from Thailand, like wild honey. Of course, you know what happens when you come up with an idea. You get assigned to follow up on it. So that's a new one of my assignments.

Also, at Petchabun I talked to one of the farmers about birds and I mentioned the possibility of training some farmers to be bird guides. Pet liked the idea, so now I get to check out all the birdwatching websites in Thailand as part of my work.

Anyway, Ping and I went to a small shop nearby for lunch. Above you can see it from the outside. It's just a set of posts with a corrugated metal roof. With lots of green stuff acting as most of the walls.



Here's looking into what was the black hole in the middle of the top picture.





And here's Ping (Last year I started spelling this "Bing," but he spells it - in English letters - with a P. That's ok for people who have studied some Thai and know the difference between an aspirated P (Ph) and an unaspirated P (P). So, you pronounce that first letter like you were going to say the English P, but don't let air come out of your mouth. (Hold your hand in front of you mouth when you say the English P and you feel a puff of air (that's the aspirated part). Now say the P without the air. That's how to pronounce his name - Ping. It's not the same as a B, but B is the closest English sound) adding some spice to his lunch. This is essentially wide noodles, some brocoli like vegetable, some chicken (kai - that's an unaspirated k, same routine, K without the puff of air, close to an English G, but not quite), and a liquid that's the consistency of gravy. I used to have this a lot when I was a Peace Corps volunteer, my third year working in Thonburi.

Since I got into all that aspirated stuff, I might as well take if full circle and explain, that's why Thailand has an 'H' in it. This is an aspirated T, pretty much the same as an English T. But they also have an unaspirated T - say T but with no puff of air - and so the phonetic Thai alphabet I originally learned reserves the letter T for the unaspirated T sound and TH for the aspirated T sound. So that's why Thailand has an H in it, but is NOT pronounced Thighland.

One more note: I spell my boss' name Pet, because it also has an unaspirated P. So it sounds more like Bet, but to get it right you have to form your mouth and tongue like you are going to say a P, but don't let that puff of air out.

I went looking for a picture of the mouth and tongue, but found these pictures of the B (left) and P (right) sounds. You can go to Slice of Thai to see the original pictures and explanations along with hearing the sounds.

















These pictures don't help me understand this at all, but they are pretty.

Here's part of Slice of Thai's explanation of the charts:

Sounds that are lower in pitch are near the bottom of the chart, and sounds that are higher in pitch are near the top of the chart.

Notice the blue fuzz at the bottom: that is the very low-pitched, wind-like blowing sound you can also hear along with the whistling.
The color of the spectrogram at a given point indicates how much sound with that pitch you were making at that time. The color scale works like this:



So the red parts of the spectrogram represent the most noticeable pitches.