Wanna Porn and Kiss a Tit?

(or how to get many Google matches...)

Warning: Here comes a very long post about one aspect of my life in Thailand. For those of you who don’t give a damn about phonetics and Thai names, don’t worry, there’s a part about Porn in there as well. So you shouldn’t be disappointed!

I spent two years of my life working in Bangkok. Two very interesting years where I experienced various states of happiness, immense culture shock and total disbelief. But this will be the topic of a future post. What I’d like to focus on today is what is in a Thai name.

Thais have the longest and most complicated names in the world. To give you an example, open a Bangkok telephone book and it won’t be uncommon to find exotic but unpronounceable names such as: Uraiwan Chiwitkilliprongpang or Wittawit Chulapornkhlongtram. Add to this difficulty, the fact that Thai, like many other Asian languages, is a tonal language. This means that a word can mean up to 5 different things depending on how you pronounce the vowels, either in a flat, rising, falling, high or low tone. For example a word could mean anything from woman to horse / shrimp to happy depending on those deadly tones. Therefore, when you say something like: “Mr. Chulapornkhlontram, could we start the meeting at 8?” perhaps what you will actually say to a trained Thai ear is “Mr. Shrimp-face-anal-fart” can we start the meeting at 8?”.

Thais are friendly people and will not get offended by that as they know most speakers of Indo-European languages do not make any difference between tones. They will just laugh at you very much using very nasty nasal sounds that will make you feel like a total idiot. That’s all.

If the Thais regularly make fun of us trying to pronounce their names, they are fortunately happily unaware of what their sons and daughters’ names mean to an English-speaking ear. My friends and I would spend time laughing at the people's names. (I know it's not nice to laugh at people but since most people laugh at my nationality around the world, I thought I was allowed to). Here is a list of real Thai names that sound cute to a Thai person but quite odd to anyone else:

Ngarmpit, Turdsak, Kisatit…

And then you also have the …Porn variations :

Wannaporn, Titiporn, Pinkyporn, Wannatit, Supaporn, Pornthip, Sasiporn, Tanaporn etc…

Thai names are long and impossible to pronounce but the Thais, of course, do not have any trouble pronouncing them. In spite of that, they would agree with us that they are very long. So since it is very warm in Thailand and as warmth makes people lazy, Thais are very lazy people (which suited me perfectly well btw, although they are not quite as lazy as I am). Therefore they will try to find nicknames to everybody in order to avoid the long official names.

Thai nicknames usually have a meaning. Parents will often opt for a nickname as soon as their baby is born depending on what the kid looks like at birth or an aspect of his/her little personality. Many parents favor English sounding names, as the latter are more international and do include a somehow trendy factor.
Let me give you a few names of the people I met in Thailand and let’s see if you can picture what these people looked like when they were born:

Apple, Rabbit, Junk, Chubby, Chunky, Baboon, Banana, Michael Jackson, Soda, Beer, Pee-Pee, Pooh, Eye, Mud, Peng-Win, Ice-Cream, High, Top, Menthol, Mint, Cinnamon, Bam-Bam, Boss, Meow, Ball, Nut, Nudie, Soot, Bee, Hello, CNBC, Bit-Nee (Thai for Britney), Horny (the one who has horns), … These are real names, I know it’s hard to believe but these are the names people use at home, at work, basically all the time except on official documents. Thais are usually unaware of what their best friend’s real name is, they would just know the official nickname, that’s all. And you may tell them what their name means, they will smile and just say: Well of course, that's what I looked like when I was born!

And then you also have the nicknames that mean something in Thai but that are just sounds to us.

A few of my colleagues were named: A, Oo, Aow, Eow, Ee, Ing, Yeow… The problem with these names are the tones again. Two of my colleagues were named Oo. One with a rising tone (pronounce as if you said “Eew” in a surprised manner), the other one was Oo with a high tone (pronounce as if you suddenly got scared and said “ew” in a sissy kinda way).
Oo with a high tone was the photocopy girl, her full-time job was to make copies, she mastered the copy machine like no one else and wouldn’t let anyone come near it. However, Oo with a rising tone was one of the receptionists, she had big front teeth and small eyes and you wonder why her parents didn’t call her “Rat” at birth.

First, whenever I would call rising-tone-Oo, well high-tone-Oo would appear and vice versa. Secondly, whenever you would utter to yourself something like “eeeew, what is that?”, then one of them would show up (depending on your excitement afflicting the tone).

I was really happy when they fired high-tone-Oo because she had started some business on the side, copying whole books on the company’s photocopy machine. She was soon replaced by low-tone-Bee. This made everything much simpler for me.