Reflections on a Tonal Language

Finally Tuk Tik has a moment to help. I lofted the idea of just calling her Wendy but everyone ultimately just wants to hear the sound of their own name. I couldn’t pronounce it correctly. Yesterday, during rehearsal, I said it correctly after about four botched attempts. I knew I did it right because she whirled around with an attentive smile.

Now, she spreads her hand out on the table. She taps her pinkie and says, “Chai” the word for Yes. She taps her ring finger and says the same sound about a third lower. The middle finger starts higher goes up a bit and then falls off fast about a fifth. It sounds like when we say the word “Wow.” She tapped her pointer finger for the high tone. It starts high and goes up maybe a quarter tone at the very end. I beleive this is the sound that means “tea”. Finally the thumb for the raising tone. It sounds like what we inflect for a question like at the of a sentence. We repeated this part of the lesson a few times until I had the sound of it.

I finally realize a mistake I’ve been making for about two days. Someone would show me a new word like “kow” for rice (low tone – I think) and I would repeat it back as a rising tone signifying “rice – am I saying it correctly?”. Wrong. Sometimes the opposite problem. One of our hosts was named “eh” (rising tone). I wanted to get her attention so I said it with a falling tone which is the inflection we generally use to call someone’s name. It was like she just didn’t hear me. That sound was not her name.

In English we use pitch to add an emotional layer of information to what we say by bending the pitch of our phrases. It will take a lot of practice to disassociate that impulse from the pitches necessary to speak Thai. The Thai also use pitch for emotional content but it sounds more like just changing the key of the whole melody up or down. Higher means more excited, agitated or important. Sometimes this will happen in the span of just one idea. The melody will keep transposing up or down to match the emotional needs of the moment. Nonetheless, a high tone is always heard as the high tone, a falling tone as a falling tone. Etc…

Tuk Tik continues with the first part of her name: tuk. It’s a very short stacatto sound with an explosive “dt” at the beginning and just the faintest suggestion of “k” at the end. She runs the sound through each of the five pitches. The normal tone and the low tone are easy but the falling tone, rising tone, and high tone are really hard to hear as the sound is so short. Especially the high tone with that slight quarter lift at the end. Of course her name was two high tones in a row: “Tuk Tik” – just about impossible for me.

Maybe I’ll write a song built around these 5 pitches and the kind of sound that Thai evokes. In a cab, I was listening to a talk radio show. The outstanding characteristic to my ear was that there was absolutely no pauses. Just as one person would be taking a tiny short breath – the other person would interject a short “chai”(yes) or shorter “kop” (a general word indicating respect. ) The first person would be off into the next idea. Occasionaly you’d hear a “Chai, di di di” (yes, good good good)

On the last day of my stay I was playing some duets with Bob. We already share an explicitly conversational approach to playing together. During one extended passage I was doing these kind of interjections with my plunger mute in between his phrases. To him, it was as obvious as if I had just been talking. At one point after a really twisted phrase he had layed down I said “are you drunk?” with my horn (“mao my?”) We both started to laugh.