The Best Information on Southern Thailand

Two Blue

Imagine if I told you a chicken is not a bird, a tiger is not a cat and a lemon is a vegetable not a fruit. These statements are all true, if you are speaking the Thai language and categorizing according to Thai rules.

What is a tomato? Is it a fruit or vegetable? Believe it or not the US Supreme Court has even ruled on that one. Fruits and vegetables fall under different laws for taxation. It seems that the US Supreme Court thinks that tomatoes are vegetables based on the way they are used. Botanists disagree because of the nature in which the tomato grows.

Not only is categorization not the same in every language but categorization can change over time as well. Hey, Pluto is not a planet anymore.

Quick, name the colors of the rainbow. Many of us learned the mnemonic Roy G. Biv for the seven colors red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. There is some debate over Roy’s last name though. Many argue that indigo is not a color that should be differentiated. They believe that there should be six colors that are differentiated in a spectrum. By the way, Newton was the one that outlined the standard western categorization of seven colors in a spectrum in 1671. As the story goes, he believed the seven colors matched the seven days of the week and seven musical notes.

Every person in Thailand memorizes seven colors for the rainbow including the two different blue colors “see fa” and “see nam nugn” in Kindergarten. The idea that there are two blues is fundamental in Thai language. There is not a single word or category to group the colors that the English speaker would call sky blue and navy. They are two distinct colors and categories in the Thai language. Thai speakers have difficulty understanding why English is so imprecise when dealing with these two distinctly different colors.

When we give up the notion of our own concrete categories we can learn to better deal with viewpoints of others. Media sensationalists too easily, liberally and often falsely apply the labels Muslim, fundamentalist and Islamist without true understanding, correct information or correlation. Very rarely is there a printed article that states a perpetrator as Christian, Buddhist, Jewish or Zionist. We don’t read about Timothy McVeigh the Agnostic terrorist. When there is a shooting in a US church or school the headlines don’t read “Christian suicide killer.” It is time for the media to stop the biased categorization of the words Muslim, fundamentalist and Islam with negative images.

For a better understanding of how the Muslim faith is similar to the Christian and Jewish faiths please read:

"A Friendly Note from your Muslim Neighbor"

South-Thai.com / Prince of Siam Stories / Weird and Wild Thailand

Violence in Southern Thailand / Hatyai and Songkla / Expatgirl's Blog

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