The flames of anti-government protests have been further fanned with a ruling by the International Court of Alphabetical Justice (often called the World Letters Court) that the Thai letters ‘kho khuat’ and ‘kho khon’ are unnecessary, redundant, superfluous and supernumerary.  While not going so far as to order the Thai authorities to abolish the letters, the verdict has enraged linguistic nationalists who blame the government for the situation.

For those readers who are not familiar with the Thai alphabet, a word of explanation may be necessary. 

Thai students are taught that their alphabet contains 44 letters (though they will tell you that Thai has 44 alphabets, such is their confusion in the matter).  This figure is regarded by some as a matter of national pride, demonstrating Thai’s superiority over the paltry 26 letters of English.  In fact, the ‘superiority’ is even greater than this because this 44 includes only consonant letters, and does not count vowel letters, tone marks and a few other squiggles you will find on typewriter keys. 

You should also know that Thai consonant letters are pronounced with the vowel ‘o’ added together with a word that begins with that letter, rather like the primary classroom’s ‘a ant, b bird’, or ‘a apple, b banana’, except that in Thai, the names are fixed.

Now among these 44 letters are two, ‘kho khuat’ (bottle) and ‘kho khon’ (person), that exist in the alphabet and nowhere else.  There are already 3 other ‘kho’ letters in Thai after all, and ‘khuat’ is in fact spelled not with ‘kho khuat’ but with ‘kho khai’ (egg) and ‘khon’ is spelled with ‘kho khwai’ (water buffalo).  So bottles in Thai are really eggs and, at least linguistically, persons are buffaloes.  Please do try to keep up.

The continuing existence of these letters would be like teaching a 27-letter English alphabet that still included the ‘thorn’ (þ) from Old English (still used in Icelandic) where it represented the sounds now spelled ‘th’.  The only remaining trace of the ‘thorn’ is the ‘Y’ in the faux antique ‘Ye Olde Englishe Tea Shoppe’ signs, which have confused ‘þ’ with ‘y’ and given rise the mistaken belief that ‘the’ was once pronounced in the same way as ‘ye’.  No, it was always ‘the’.

Here endeth the orthographic lesson.

Frustrated by the waste of pedagogical time and effort in having these unused letters littering the Thai alphabet, a number of organizations petitioned the World Court for a ruling.  These included the Sosietee for Simplifide Sayameez Speling, the Dylsexic Associatoin of Thaliand and the truly radical Thailand Educational Revolution Alliance. 

Their efforts have now borne fruit and fuelled even more outrage among the anti-amnesty, anti-corruption, anti-Thaksin, anti-losing-even-one-square-inch-of-Thai-territory-at-Preah-Vihear whistle-blowers.  Or even more of what one perceptive observer called ‘an elevated sense of self-righteousness, shallow slogans, and nauseating narcissism.’

‘Every true Thai has all the letters of our alphabet inscribed in his heart,’ declared one flag-waving protestor.  ‘Farangs don’t understand that our alphabet was graciously invented for the nation by King Ramkhamhaeng the Great.  The loss of even a single letter is a loss of sovereignty and an insult to the monarchy.’

This ignores the fact that even if the Ramkhamhaeng Stone is not a 19^th century nationalist fabrication, the most that King Ramkhamhaeng ever managed was a codification of an already existing alphabet derived from an Old Khmer script which in turn came from Indian scripts.  Furthermore, the omission of the ‘kho khuat’ and ‘kho khon’ letters is supposed to have been the result of a lack of space on the first Thai typewriter, designed by an American but enthusiastically endorsed by King Rama IV.  But inconvenient facts should never get in the way of truly patriotic sentiment.  

Wary of public opinion, the government has moved carefully.  While not rejecting outright the Court’s findings, it has tried to persuade the Thai public that it is a ‘win-win’ situation.  It would make no move on the two letters, it said, without first studying the details of the verdict.  For its part, the military announced that it would resolutely maintain the peace by waging war on anyone who tried removing the ‘kho khuat’ and ‘kho khon’ letters from any military keyboard.

The Democrats have meanwhile promised to bring a no-confidence motion against the government for its criminal negligence in losing 2 letters from the Thai alphabet.  They have taken charge of street demonstrations, called for national strikes that no one will observe and appealed to all good people to use the two threatened letters whenever the need arises.

Which is never.

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).