thinking about vegaspete again. re the context of thai. thinking how the word for pet 'สัตว์เลี้ยง' (sat lyang) has the root syllable 'สัตว์' (sat) which means animal. and how 'สัตว์' is also one of the worst things you can call a person.
not any real concrete thoughts yet that can be turned into words but they sure are being THUNK
Info for writer in Thai series fandom: More language thingy
Swear words and metaphor
*Some words may have more meaning than what I mention.
ไอ้ Ai and อี ee = words to be added in front of other words (a name or swear word), showing contempt or closeness (in a rude way).
Ai is masculine and ee is feminine, but nobody actually cares at this point.
เหี้ย hia or เชี่ย shia = Varanus salvator
These two words are the same. Hia is an original, and shia is a word that is born from distorting the voice in order to reduce vulgarity. It's kind of like referring to an f-word with any other word starting with f. We also used many other words that mean "Varanus salvator" as a sensor version of the "hia" swear word. little crocodile or chicken eater, for example.
They can also be used to empathize by adding to the end one or two times, for example, "super cool" would be "cool hia hia".
Tbh, whenever I read in English and see the word "hia," I always think of this word before a word that means "older brother." And to make it worse, the placement of both of them in the sentence can be exactly the same. Sometimes it took me an embarrassingly long time to realize the writer intended it to be an older brother.
เปรต pret=The hungry ghost, frequently described as a very tall monster with a needle-sized mouth. = tall(negative meaning) or a bad person
อ้อย oi=suger cane=อ่อย oi=attempt to entice something or someone to be caught (typically used by a woman seducing a man).
For example, a cane truck has overturned here.=Someone here is trying really hard to seduce someone.
งิ้ว ngiw=bombax anceps (thorn-covered tree)
In the story, when sinners go to hell, the adulterer must climb this tree naked.
Mark from Love Mechanics asks on Facebook how hurtful it would be to climb a ngiw tree after having sex with Vee, implying that he is at least interested in someone who is not single.
Gold fish=short memory
Tiger=flirtatious person who is good at getting who they want (typically a guy)
A tiger with faded stripes=old tiger=someone who used to be flirtatious but is no longer.
Dog can be alot of things depent on the context but usually a bad things.
"Dog with a rotten head" means someone nobody wants to get close to or interact with.
If someone looks just like a dog, that means their current state is bad. Too drunk = like a dog. Crying too much = like a dog.
Giving someone dog food means making someone, usually your friends, a dog. Used when you complain about your love life to someone, ask them for advice and they tell you to leave your current partner since the partner is being awful to you, you say so! Then you turn around and reconcile with your partner. So now your friend is a bad guy whom your partner won't want you to associate with anymore because they incite you to be at odd witn your partner.
Temple's dog = low status, usually used for a low-status man who likes a high-status woman who would be called ดอกฟ้า(dokfha) which translates directly to "sky flower." Use something like, "You are a temple's dog yet want to pluck a sky flower, you should know your place!"
A dog that serves someone means someone who only cares about serving their boss (who is a bad person) and nothing else, like morals or other people. A lackey
Bird(quite a new slang) = Can't get what you want, typically means someone you want as a lover.
Phonix = immortal bird = repeatedly failing to get what you want *We do use phonix as a poetic expression too, not just for this meaning.
Buffalo = idiot/fool.
You can say A is putting horns on B when A is cheating on B; this means A makes B an idiot for believing in A.
When you fail your exam, you might say that these days you eat grass instead of rice (like a buffalo).
There is a saying that goes like this: "One who remembers when they get hurt (and leaves or does something to not get hurt again) is a human; one who is willing to endure it is a buffalo." If you put up with something you shouldn't, you are a buffalo.
Pig
fat
weak/easy to win against
Fox
Cunning
Sedusing
catfish,termite=ugly
rhinoceros=Someone who tries to steal someone else's lover or just acts inappropriately in general according to the traditional feminine standard. Originally, it was only used to call women, but it is no longer the case.
barking deer=gay man
gibbon=woman
It was originally used by trans women to refer to cis women. can be seen as rude, but like many other words, many people don't actually take offense if it is used playfully. These two words, "barking deer" and "gibbon," are usually used together.
The reason why a character does not always know information stated in the subtitle
Gender of someone
The Thai language, for the most part, is gender-neutral. The she or he in the English subtitle usually has to be chosen by the translator.
Who/what the speaker is talking to/about
Many times, sentence structures in spoken language won't require a subject or object. I guess when that gets translated, it looks weird, so the translator has to pick something to add in. In a lot of situations where I am not sure how to address my interlocutor, I can simply avoid doing it, but when I'm writing in English like this, I have to pick something, right?
When
There are no tenses in Thai the way there are in English. We have words for determining whether something happened in the past, present, or future, but you can say something without using any of those and it will be just fine.
Rice
When someone asks if someone has eaten rice(ข้าว-khao) yet, the word rice usually means meal/food and not strictly rice. The word rice can mean food in general a lot of the time.
Polite words
There are a lot of words that mean the exact same thing but have a different degree of politeness. You may already have noticed it with the way there are so many words that mean you or I. You may also notice it when you watch alot of any Thai series. Like, how when a character says "eat" in the subtitle, there are some varied sounds, such as daek(แดก-rude), kin(กิน-common), than(ทาน-a bit more polite-shorten from rapprathan), rapprathan(รับประทาน-polite).
Meaning of polysyllabic words
Some polysyllabic words, when each syllable is separated, still have a meaning, but their meaning may not be consistent with the meaning of that polysyllabic word. So even when you recognize the meaning of each syllable, the meaning of the polysyllabic word you deduce from it may not be correct. I mean, if we look deeper, we should be able to make it make sense, but yeah.
For example, the word "witch" in Thai is mae mod(แม่มด). Mae means mother or something you can used to indicate that a word it is in refers to a woman and Mod means ant when it's a separate word, but when combined, they mean witch. Or for the word whose meaning is more similar to the words used to create it, the word khun nhu(คุณหนู), which means "young master/mistress." used for address the child of the boss, when sperate khun is a prefix to show politeness or respect, and nhu means mice or a word used for calling children. You can see that while some of the single-syllabic words are arguably related to the meaning of the polysyllabic word, some aint so much.
I hope this explanation doesn't make you more confused.😅 But if it is, do tell me. I will try to do better.
Thai alphabet
Our letters are named after words they used to spell. Like, both letters ญ and ย sound the same(yor), but the word woman (หญิง-ying) uses letter ญ and the word giant (ยักษ์-yak) uses letter ย, so letter ญ is named yor ying and letter ย is named yor yak.
I see there's In Stars and Time crossover thing going on so I want to join
...Also it's Let Papyrus Say Fuck day and I see this post from @entryn17 and I think... hmm, well why not just, do both of that actually
Read more for... it's not really Isat's spoiler or anything it's just general worldbuilding thing but I'm doing this anyway in case people want to like, experience it blind or something (please do that actually, play it, or even look at playthrough, just not summary or something like that it's much better that way, I say this like how you eat a specific type of food)
(Chara no)
...I speedrun drawing this, kinda... I don't think I'm that good at drawing Siffrin... he's just standing there... oh well, I can improve later
(technically this isn't him teaching swear to a child but it's him teaching swear... and maybe learning some more in the process, even if those're like... crab, and gems)
(...I probably could just use my own language but like I don't feel like making ocs...)
(I also could use like the one thing I want to do where Frisk is Thai but it would be very long and I don't feel like making all that in comics)
(and if it's a fic it would just be a very long infodumping on what I think the word come from and when it might be appropriate... and I have no idea the appropriateness of the English ones for Papyrus to teach it back so I don't think I could do that)
...
Anyway the infodumping anyway, I'm going to use the pinyin/chinese tone indicator for this because I don't know any other one (other than that just say it like English word I guess)
Did you know that one of the Thai swears is just แม่ง (màng) that means your mom. (said really fast it merge the word... also rudely, you pronoun rudely, we have rude pronouns... or really informal, depend on your relationship)
It's used in the middle of a sentence like 'fucking' and things.
there's also a dad version, พ่อง (pòng) the longer version that's used as a curse to kill the opponent's parents... (maybe don't do that) the middle version where you cut the death part and it's a come back like how english use your mom... แม่มึง/พ่อมึง (màe mūng/pòre mūng, maybe add a at the end)
There's also the one for insulting specifically (including the table that you stub your toes on) that means a type of monitor lizard. เหี้ย (hèar) ...it has another name that sounds a lot better that just, means money/silver-gold creature, which is. weird, so do we like it or not??? (money and silver is the same word)
mmmmmm another one that is used in the situation you would say 'oh shit' ชิบหาย (chib hái) direct translation is uhhh... chip-lost????? (I have no idea where it come from, also we don't have past tense verb it's all the same) maybe it's like 'lost your marble' or something I don't even know
there's also one that is pronounced like animal/สัตว์ (sǔt) (pronounced like cut/shut) in Thai but I'm pretty sure it's not the same word, noone knows exactly how to spell it. it's... some kind of insult, not as severe as the lizard monitor though
and uhh, the lower one which is the watered down monitor lizard, เชี่ย where you just change from hèar to chèar
[DISCLAIMER: this post contains strong language and cannot be recommended for anyone]
On the journey to a new language it helps to have themes one works with. Because I’m a biologist, one theme when trying to expand my vocabulary is of course nature and especially animal names. Oh my, what fun things I learned on the side.
Interestingly, the word animal (สัตว์, saht /sat̚˨˩/) itself is an insult. As such, when directed at a person, it translates to something like asshole, shithead or bastard, but especially when combined with a super rude pronoun อี / ไอ้ (ee / âi = you for woman and for man respectively, please never use these), it really conveys contempt.
Porsche calls Kinn สัตว์ already in the first episode, (not with badterrible pronouns at least, but the pronouns he uses are lacking common decency, even if they are not in-your-face offensive)
(I have to say that the more I learn Thai, the more I am rolling my eyes at these two being total jerks to each other in the beginning. I mean… I was told about this, but still… Seriously guys, where are your manners? Your mums would be so ashamed of you!)
Anyhow, back to animals.
Animal names are fun to learn because living things are a good conversational topic (that also happens to interest me a great deal), but also because many Thai people are named after animals.
Thai nicknames (ชื่อเล่น chuu len, literally name play) are unofficial, but they are the names people use the most and it is normal that for example at school or workplace this is the only name people know of a person. Usually the nickname is given by parents and it can be short for the official first name (Kinn, Khun), but way more often it is a descriptive word or food or animal or (especially for girls) a plant, flower or fruit, but it can be anything. And I mean anything. It is very popular to give a child an English nickname that just sounds nice. So we get Barcode, Bible, Job and so on…
Self evident amongst animal names are the fluffycute or big and strong, like: cat แมว (maew - yes it's meow-sound), deer กวาง (kwaang), bird นก (nók), baby chicken เจี๊ยบ (jíap), tiger เสือ (sĕua) etc
[sidenote: เสือ is also a common name for the whole genus Panthera - “big cats”, so name for most of them in Thai starts with เสือ - for example leopard is เสือดาว (sĕua dow - star tiger), animals in Thai in general have a lot of names like this: bird this, bird that, fish this, fish that, which is familiar to English speakers, but somewhat special to my Finnish ear.]
More interesting animals people are named after:
pig หมู (mŏo) — pigs are considered very nice and valuable animals in Thailand, so this is not at all a bad name, but a cute one given to a much loved boy. To be fair, หมู can be used to call someone chubby, or gently scolding them for eating too much, but it isn’t offensive, really, unless combined with expletives.
Mouse/rat หนู (nŏo), frog กบ (gòp), tadpole อ๊อด (ót), shrimp กุ้ง (gûng), ant มด (mót)... all of these being obviously suitable names for a tiny, adorable child.
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I decided to save you (for now) from my terribly rambly, long ethnozoological ponderings I've had while digging into the creepy crawly nomenclature. It is pretty fascinating, though. No wonder - Thailand is a tropical country and consequently the invertebrate diversity there is breathtaking. I’m so jealous.
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In my opinion a very misunderstood animal is Asian water monitor Varanus salvator. Its name is เหี้ย (hîia /hia̯˥˩/), which is also one of the most vulgar, profane, insulting thing you can say to anybody in Thai. DO NOT USE.
How did this poor animal end up being a terrible insult? Asian water monitor, like most members of Varanidae, is a generalist predator that eats whatever it can catch or find, including carcasses. But instead of being praised as a valuable, free cleaning aid, it is seen as a dirty animal because of this (fine, they also can predate on farm animals – a monitor in a chicken coop equals bloodbath). Them living in the murky, muddy places isn’t helping their public image. Historically, they are considered bad luck and that killing them definitely causes bad things to happen. Even saying the name is considered unlucky, so many people call them ตัวเงินตัวทอง - “silver and gold” instead.
Sure, water monitors are big, surprisingly fast and they can give nasty, easily infected bites, and claw and hit hard with their tails, but they are also important, interesting and kinda derpy animals. Asian water monitors are kept as pets even, although they require a lot of room as they can grow up to 3 metres long (in average 1,5 m). They can be tamed and they learn all kinds of things. I think they are cute and I would love to meet a pet monitor someday and give it belly scratches (wild animals I prefer to observe from a respectful distance away, but it would be supercool to see one).
Regardless, เหี้ย is a Profanity. Linguistically, it can be used pretty flexibly much like ‘fuсk’ as a noun, adjective, adverb, comma, full stop, exclamation mark… But do not use it - it really is much worse word than even 'сunt', especially combined with อี / ไอ้ ( ee/âi).
And that is exactly how Kinn uses it here, calling Vegas a water monitor.
He continues here. Now adverbial use, so not directed at person. Less offensive, still pretty mean tone.
(I cannot believe this man had the audacity to tell Porsche off for his language...)