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Mags Meanderings:
From Som Tam
To Mushy Peas
a living language
Some time ago I talked about how hard it must be for
Thai people to learn English. In fact with all it’s tenses,
double meanings, and wildly inconsistent application
of plurals, I wonder how we ever managed to learn it
ourselves. Then remembered that back in the day my
generation (and many before us) learned English in
pretty much the same way as Thai people still do. By
rote.
We sat in primary school at our little double wooden
desks with those flip up bench seats attached to them.
Two pupils per desk. An inkwell either side of the twin
desk, and little grooves along the top to rest pencils and
pens in. The desk lids sloped down towards us and were
covered with the scratched initials of long gone pupils.
Wood beading across the bottom edge of the sloping lids
often failing to keep our bits of paper in place.
But enough reminiscing. The point is that we learned
much of our own language by sitting there and writing out
and reciting the words, together with their appropriate
plurals. Followed by the past and future tense of each
word, together with appropriate plurals.
Having completed that groundwork we went on to
construct sentences which contained the correct tenses
- and plurals.
It was no doubt all very tedious. But if it was, that tedium
was long forgotten as we progressed into High School
with a basic command of English, only to spend the next
five years tackling the finer points of punctuation - and
yet m