จีซัม โครว

มลรัฐเวอร์มอนต์ (Vermont) เป็นมลรัฐในสหรัฐอเมริกาตั้งอยู่ทางตะวันออกของประเทศ อยู่ในเขตนิวอิงแลนด์ ในอดีตรัฐเวอร์มอนต์เป็นที่อยู่อาศัยของอินเดียนแดงเผ่าอิโรควอยส์ เผ่าอัลกอนเควียน และเผ่าอเบนากิ โดยทางฝรั่งเศส*ได้ยึดครองมาในช่วงตั้งรกรากในสหรัฐอเมริกา และได้เสีย*ให้กับอังกฤษในช่วงสงครามในเวลาต่อมา

รัฐเวอร์มอนต์มีชื่อเสียงในด้านของวิวทิวทัศน์ที่สวยงาม และเป็นแหล่งท่องเที่ยวที่สำคัญแห่งหนึ่งรวมถึง*** สกีรีสอร์ตที่สำคัญหลายแห่ง**** เวอร์มอนต์ยังคงมีชื่อเสียงในด้านผลิตภัณฑ์จากวัวและเมเปิลไซรัป เมืองหลวงของรัฐคือ มอนต์เพเลียร์ และเมืองที่ใหญ่ที่สุดในรัฐคือ เบอร์ลิงตัน

ในปี 2550 เวอร์มอนต์มีประชากร 621,254 คน^[1]

Things I learned from the Thai wikipedia page on Vermont:

• Native Americans are called Red "Indian"s, อินเดียนแดง.
  
• I can read short Thai wikipedia pages without much difficulty! Holy shit!
  

Seriously, there were only a (large) handful of words I didn't get:

อดีต -former, previous
ยึดครอง -occupy, take possession of forcefully.
รกราก -residence
ดั้งรกราก -settle down, take up residence
ได้เสีย -gain and lose (interesting combination of two common words)
(วืว)ทิวทัศน์ -scenery
แหล่งท่องเที่ยว -Tourist location
รวมถึง -include
ผลิตภัณฑ์ -product/merchandise

Here is a stab at translating the entry. This is no doubt riddled with errors.

Vermont is a state in the United States, in the northeast part of the country. It's in the region of New England. In the past Vermont was home to the Native American tribes Iroquois, Algonquin, and Abenaki. France* occupied it during the establishment of the United States and lost it** to the English during the war afterwards.

Vermont is famous for its beautiful scenery and one important tourist location*** is the many ski resorts.**** Vermont remains famous for its dairy products* and "maple syrup". The capital of the state is Montpelier and the largest city is Burlington.

In the year 2007 Vermont had a population of 621,254.

*I'm not quite sure how to parse โดยทาง. I know the words, but the structure confuses me. I'm going to assume it basically means "by"- I think it says "By France it was occupied" but there's no passive marker.

**While ได้เสีย has the interesting "lose and gain" translation, on second look I'm assuming that ได้ is marking aspect, to match the previous clause's ได้ยึดครอง.

*** First time around I neglected to realize that แห่ง was a classifier (for locations).

**** This sentence took me a while to crack. (If I even have.)

* Literally "products from cows." A similar word is ผลิตภัณฑ์นม, "products from milk". I have no clue what difference in meaning they have.

Friday Vocab #1 (n=25)

Well I plan on using this blog to facilitate my language study, so I should probably do that thing that I planned on doing.

I'm going to start a weekly vocab regimen.

I am going to enter them in to a Study Stack, which I will try to review daily over the course of the week. I'm going to start with 25 words, and adjust it upwards based on how well I do.

I will be doing Vietnamese words as well, of course, but I haven't quite figured out how to type in Vietnamese. It's surprisingly quite a pain in the ass.

Here are this weeks words!

ขยาย enlarge, magnify
ลงมือ start
ปกป้อง protect, keep safe
สมควร appropriate
ชัก to pull
ขุด to dig
ปลูก to plant
สดชื่น fresh/joyful
พิลึก strange
ซึม gloomy, unhappy
พันธ์ obligation
ล้าหลัง old fashioned
พวกพอ้ง friends
ครอง to rule
โหดร้าย heartless/ruthless
ดูดาย indifferent
ด่วน urgent, pressing
ร่าเริง happy, cheerfull
กลาย change/become
ตกใจ frightened
นำมือ skill
เกื้อกูล help, assist
ทึกทัก presume, assume
พรวดพราด quickly, abruptly
ลำบาก difficult, tough

Study Stack for Week 1

Biete Seele Such Gott!

The Friendly Atheist has got his book translated in to German.

The English title is "I Sold My Soul on Ebay". The German is "Biete Seele Such Gott!"
From the comments:

It is an odd title indeed. It’s two imperatives: “Offer (your) soul; Seek God!”

“What an atheist experienced in Christian Communities.”

Is that really what you want to have as the initial impression for people who pick up this book in the store?

The conversation is rather interesting. I don't know a lick of German, unfortunately.

Thai vs Vietnamese: Round One

I have taken the first tentative steps in to Vietnamese.

Hoo boy.

The tones are interesting. There are six (in the Hanoi dialect), compared to Thai's five. Three of them seem to roughly match Thai's mid, rising, and falling tones. The other three, however, include glottal stops! Very interesting.
The tones are quite easy to write. Thai has a very elegant and insane method to mark tones, involving three classes of consonants, live and dead syllables, long and short vowels, and tone markers. Vietnamese does it much more simply: Each tone has a diacritic, and it is placed over (or in one case, under) the vowel of the syllable.

I'm not sure how to approach the writing system. Tiếng Việt is written in a modified Latin alphabet (like English), and it's very difficult to scan without subconsciously pronouncing it as I do English. I haven't had this problem since Latin class in high school. I do have a vague understanding of the differing orthography of some European languages- but this comes from familiarity with loan words. Vietnamese's phonology is unlike any European language's (or, apparently, Thai's.) So it being written in a Latin script is almost the opposite of helpful.

I need to somehow suppress my instincts until I am comfortable with the spoken language. I should probably seek out an audio-only course of some sort. Teach Yourself Vietnamese has a nice exposition of tones and phonetics, but it's a lot to take in.

Last time I started studying a new language (Arabic), I quickly realized how much Thai I actually already knew, and decided to put my effort in to that language. I hope I don't do that this time, but starting from scratch is honestly a bit daunting.

tiếng Việt

I have decided to start learning Vietnamese.

This is mainly for pragmatic reasons. My study of Thai was precipitated by a visit to Thailand. I continued studying basically for the hell of it- I enjoyed it. But Vermont is a long ways from Thailand, and I don't currently have the means to return there. Basically, my Thai is useless for the time being. After a long period of consideration, I've decided to take a stab at Vietnamese. I like Vermont, and Vietnamese is spoken in my area by a considerable minority. It's simply more practical in the short term than Thai. If I have to "force" myself to study a 2nd language, it is the obvious choice. There will be more opportunity in learning it and more opportunity for using it. Also, it's geographically close to Thai, and shares many traits, like being tonal and analytic/isolating. I should have some familiarity with most of the grammatical concepts, although they are used differently.

I'm going to try and approach Vietnamese differently from Thai. Perhaps I can learn from my mistakes? I'm going to try and emphasize the spoken language. With Thai, my reading far outstrips my listening. I don't want to repeat this imbalance. I also will look in to formal instruction, and adopt a more structured (and more social) study regimen.

I plan to continue my Thai study as a serious hobby (this blog will still be titled ฝรั่งงง) but I'm going to attempt, for the time being, to put the majority of my effort into tiếng Việt.

Well, hello there.

After some dabbling, I've decided to "launch" this silly blog. I'm going to shoot for the modest goal of three posts per week. Topics will include: me babbling about Thai; me babbling about Vietnamese; and maybe me babbling about other language-related stuff. I have no authority or qualifications, and will not be attempting to "teach" anything. The focus will be on the process and progress of my personal language study, and anything interesting that comes out of it.

Coming up, I plan on doing some contrasting and comparing between the Thai and Vietnamese languages, as I take my first steps into the later.

In search of 一番

I am rather ashamed to admit I bought a shirt at a thrift store which had a "Chinese character" blazed across the front. I first felt guilty for not knowing the meaning of the character, but then I became worried it was just fake. How does one go about looking up Chinese characters? Or could it be Kanji? I have very little knowledge of either Chinese or Japanese. I only know the basics of the structure in Chinese- each character is (usually? always?) one morpheme and one syllable. I also know that characters are broken down in to "radicals" for collation purposes.

Searching with the radical 由 plus 5-7 strokes, I found 番. The definition given is "take turns, repeat." A Kanji search gives ばん as the Hiragana form. It means "many". But wait- this character, 番, isn't correct- my shirt has a horizontal line above it.

Breakthrough! The character for "one" is a horizontal line (in both Chinese and Japanese, apparently.) If stacked vertically, 一番 is my character. In Japanese, it means "first, top, best", written in Hiragana as いちばん and pronounced "ichiban". The same two characters don't seem to form a word or phrase in Chinese. (Perhaps it just means "one turn"- but that's a wild guess.)

So in conclusion, my shirt apparently says "Number One" in Japanese on it. Also: logographic writing systems are scary, but apparently not impossible to figure out.

For the record, "first" in Thai is ที่หนื่ง or แรก.