Mr. Fart

Thai, also known as Siamese, is a tonal language, which means that the meaning of a word can change based on the tone used to pronounce it. There are five tones in Thai: mid, low, falling, high, and rising. For example: “naa” (หน่า) pronounced in a low tone means “face”, in a falling tone it means “pineapple”, but in a high tone it’s “paddy field”. Or “mai” (ไม้), which means “wood” or “tree” if pronounced in a mid tone, but “new” if you say it using a high tone. Imagine the mess if you ask someone in a market how much his pineapples cost, but in fact you’re asking him for how much he would sell you his paddy field or, even worse, his face for!

Thai is written in its own script, which is an abugida script where consonant-vowel sequences are written as a unit. The Thai script is derived from the Old Khmer script and consists of 44 consonants, and about 28 vowel forms.

Unfortunately for people like me, who were born in a Spanish-speaking country, among the many consonants in Thai, none accurately represents the sound “r”. This means that the Thais aren’t able to pronounce “Pedro”. Instead, they say “Pedo” or, more formally “Khun Pedo”, which, if you speak Spanish translates as “Mr. Fart”. After hearing this repeated several times, often quite ceremoniously, I tried to explain to people here what they were actually saying, which of course created shockwaves in this very polite country, where the last thing you want to do is to offend the person you are speaking to.

After understanding what they were saying, the Thais I met chose to simply disappear rather than continue talking to me. This created a real problem for me, since I have come to this country to interact and learn from the Thais, not to have them run away!

The solution was finally provided by an intelligent and well-meaning shop employee, who asked me: “In your country you have no nicknames?”. “Not really”, I replied. “Here in Thailand everyone is born with an official name, but no one uses it. We all use nicknames. We don’t use the same nickname for everyone, for example my mother has one nickname for me, but my friends call me something else. And if you don’t like a nickname, you just change it – we do this all the time. Why don’t you invent a nickname for yourself?”

I thought about this for a while and chose “Peta”. This is the name that my friends addressed me with as I was growing up in Argentina. It is the Spanish-ised version of the word “Peter” pronounced in German (my parents are from Austria and we spoke German at home when I was a child).

So now, for as long as I will live in this beautiful country, I will be known as “Khun Peta”, which suits me well and doesn’t make the Thais run away as soon as they understand what “Pedo” means.

One thing that hasn’t been sorted out is in which tone “Peta” should be pronounced. Perhaps, over time, it will mean different things depending which of the five tones are used. But I’ll let the Thais figure that out, I am very happy with the solution as it stands (and will probably never be able to figure out the tonal differences anyway).