There are these tricky problems with translating Thai to English. Take, for example, the common or garden words phi (falling tone, not the ghostly rising tone) or nong. Because, some say, Thais regard age as more important than sex, these words tell you whether you are dealing with an older or younger sibling. But not if it is a sister or brother. Which is what the English reader expects to be told.

But far trickier are some words which, according to the dictionary, should be easy to translate because they are equivalents. ‘Meeting’, every English-Thai dictionary will tell you, is ‘prachum’ in Thai. And the reverse dictionary will tell you that ‘prachum’ means ‘meeting’.

Until you take your farang expectations about what a ‘meeting’ is supposed to look like into a Thai ‘prachum’. The disconcerting experience that results is often blamed on a failure to follow what is going on in a foreign language. But after a while, you begin to suspect that you do know what people are saying. You’re just completely bewildered .as to why they are saying it. A Thai prachum seems in part to be an exercise in giving people the pleasure of hearing themselves say irrelevant things – hearing themselves, because precious few of the other attendees are paying the slightest attention.

I recently was also made aware that another pair of seeming equivalents, ‘policy’ and ‘nayobai’, are not quite the same thing. Policies to the farang are a set of agreed principles or procedures that inform decisions about future actions in some sphere or other. Very often, they will be written down somewhere to establish a common understanding of exactly what the policy is.

This does not imply universal compliance. People may not agree with a policy or may even choose to act against stated policy. But they will know what the policy is that they disagree with or contravene.

A Thai nayobai is a far more fluid creation. One respected academic has even claimed that what people think is the Thai ‘policy’ towards Burma and the refugees that have come across the border is nothing more than what a high-ranking official may decide to say at a certain place on a certain day. Another official might say something quite different. The same official might say something different tomorrow. Or in the next camp along. And it will all look like the articulation, albeit in a piecemeal, haphazard and self-contradictory way, of a policy. And for Thailand, it is a nayobai.

Now there is a theory that subtle differences in language like this reflect differences in the way native speakers look at the world. Language does not just express thought; the structure of language actually imposes a corresponding structure on the way you think and see the world. One form of the theory says, for example, that because Thais have 2 words, si fa and si nam ngen, for the range in the colour spectrum that is covered by the one English word ‘blue’, this makes Thai speakers more sensitive to discriminations between shades of blue than English speakers.

The practical evidence for this is disputed, however. And even more dubious are claims like the one that sees a language like English, with a large and complex range of tenses, compares it with a language like Thai, where in the normal course of things there is nothing to mark tense, and comes to conclusion that this is why Thais never turn up on time and have, in general, a rather deficient sense of punctuality. Their language just does not give them a proper sense of time.

More persuasive are arguments that look at metaphors. It seems pretty universal that a higher spatial position is positive and a lower one is negative. This is why you cheer someone up (not down) when they are feeling down (not up). Similarly, it seems that languages agree that getting closer is good and moving farther away is bad. So things either come good or go bad, rather than coming bad and going good.

But when metaphors are not universal among languages, or not even shared by speakers of the same language, it begins to look like the language may instil a certain world view. Many languages use the metaphor of a family when talking about the country. And parents have a natural role of responsible leadership to which some obedience is due. But why is England the mother of parliaments but Germany a fatherland? And why does every Prime Ministerial speech in Thailand specifically address elder and younger siblings?

Rather than brothers and sisters, as it were.

About author: Bangkokians with long memories may remember his irreverent column in The Nation in the 1980's. During his period of enforced silence since then, he was variously reported as participating in a 999-day meditation retreat in a hill-top monastery in Mae Hong Son (he gave up after 998 days), as the Special Rapporteur for Satire of the UN High Commission for Human Rights, and as understudy for the male lead in the long-running ‘Pussies -not the Musical' at the Neasden International Palladium (formerly Park Lane Empire).