Avoiding spelling mistakes

Voltaire     

François-Marie Arouet (1694 –1778), who wrote using the pen name Voltaire, was a French historian and philosopher who fought for freedom of religion and speech. He wrote essays and over 20,000 letters. The Thammasat University Library owns several books by and about Voltaire. These include a translation into Thai of one of Voltaire’s most celebrated tales, Candide. Copies of this translation are available in the Charnvit Kasetsiri Room of the Pridi Banomyong Library, generously donated by Ajarn Charnvit Kasetsiri, and also in the general stacks of the Puey Ungphakorn Library, Rangsit Campus. Voltaire wrote many memorable things, although as with any writer, some of his statements are wrong, or no longer valid. With few words, he would suggest something that may cause us to think, even if we disagree with him, as in his remarks:

• Opinions have caused more ills than the plague or earthquakes on this little globe of ours.
• If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.
• We should be considerate to the living; to the dead we owe only the truth.
• Man is free at the instant he wants to be.
• One always speaks badly when one has nothing to say.
• Love truth, but pardon error.
• The secret of being a bore is to tell everything.
• It is better to risk sparing a guilty person than to condemn an innocent one.
• To hold a pen is to be at war.
• We all look for happiness, but without knowing where to find it: like drunkards who look for their house, knowing dimly that they have one.
• Let us read, and let us dance; these two amusements will never do any harm to the world.
• Nothing is so common as to imitate one’s enemies, and to use their weapons.

All the more reason to try to spell Voltaire’s name correctly. Yet in Thai English, it is sometimes seen spelled wrongly as Voltairs or voltaire. The second mistaken spelling is a familiar error when writers are not certain whether to capitalize a word or not. Anyone who has taken classes in English as a foreign language knows that proper names should be capitalized. One way not to forget capitalization or other aspects of spelling a proper name is to be sure to Google each name and then copy it onto the academic research paper or thesis that is being prepared. The first wrong spelling, Voltairs instead of Voltaire, is a little more difficult to fix. The problem is that some lower case typed letters in English look similar. If we are not careful, we might confuse the letter s with the letter e. Even though a spell check program, such as the one available on Microsoft Word documents, should underline Voltairs in red, we might still overlook this error. The only solution is to associate the name Voltaire with other words ending with the letters aire, for example:

• billionaire
• doctrinaire
• legionnaire
• millionaire
• multimillionaire
• questionnaire
• solitaire
• Zaire

To better group thee words together, we might invent sentences where the meaning is not important. Keeping all words which end with the letters aire in close contact is the main point:

• Was Voltaire a millionaire, multimillionaire, or billionaire?
• Did Voltaire fill out a questionnaire in Zaire?
• Voltaire was not a legionnaire but he sometimes played solitaire.

 

Thailand and Voltaire

Voltaire was famous for having ironic views on many subjects, from religions to countries outside of France. His Philosophical Dictionary, including mentions of Siam and Buddhism, is in the collection of the Thammasat Library. Writing as someone without religious beliefs, Voltaire examines the phenomenon of faith. He asks why the

same Siamese who will never let himself be cheated when there is question of counting him three rupees, firmly believe in the metamorphoses of Sammonocodom.

This question is clearly written by someone who does not have detailed knowledge of Asia. As all Thais know, the baht has been the currency of the Kingdom for many hundreds of years, since the Sukhothai era in all likelihood. The rupee is the name of the currency of India as well as Indonesia, Nepal, and Bhutan, among other countries which were formerly part of ancient India. The rupee was also once the currency in Tibet and Burma. Sammonocodom is a French spelling for the śramaṇa Gautama, another name for the Buddha. For Voltaire, all religions were fictions. Yet he shows respect for Siam, writing:

The religion of the Siamese proves to us that never did a lawmaker teach bad morals.

He praises Thai Buddhist monks for living according to rules as strict as those of Catholic clergy in the West. Further insight into this text is provided in an essay available online by Professor Donald S. Lopez, Jr., who teaches Buddhist and Tibetan Studies at the University of Michigan, USA. The TU Libraries own several books on Buddhism written and edited by Professor Lopez. In 2016 Professor Lopez also published Strange Tales of an Oriental Idol: an Anthology of Early European Portrayals of the Buddha.

In the same Philosophical Dictionary, Voltaire refers to the Burmese-Siamese War of 1563-1564, also known as the War over the White Elephants. As TU students in the Faculty of History will know, this was a conflict between Burma and the Ayutthaya Kingdom. To prepare for the war, King Maha Chakkraphat captured seven white elephants. Voltaire discusses the effect of religious education on a small child, who is told that Fo, a god, may appear as a white elephant. The child responds:

“The Kings of Siam and Pegu,” he says, “have made war for a white elephant; certainly if Fo had not been hidden in that elephant, these kings would not have been so senseless as to fight simply for the possession of an animal.”

Bago, formerly spelt Pegu, is the capital of the Bago Region of Myanmar. Voltaire also wrote about his idea of Siam in another important text. André Destouches in Siam is a dialogue between a French musician and a Siamese bureaucrat. They discuss an ideal society where the justice system is based on old traditions and religious beliefs. André Destouches (1672 – 1749) was a real French composer who travelled with the Jesuit Father Guy Tachard, on a mission to Siam for two years, arriving in 1687. Tachard’s group voyaged to Siam in response to missions which had visited France from King Narai, also known as Ramathibodi III and Ramathibodi Si Sanphet, leader of Ayutthaya in the late 1600s. In Voltaire’s imaginary text, Destouches speaks with Croutef, a high-ranking Siamese official. Croutef served as Minister of Foreign Affairs and Maritime Trade, also called Berkelang – Chao Phraya. In charge of the Royal warehouses, commercial monopolies controlled by the Court, and relations with foreigners, he was the King’s personal merchant. This text and others by Voltaire may be interesting to TU students of French, philosophy, politics, religion, economics, history, sociology, and related subjects. Whether or not we agree with him, Voltaire was a permanently interesting writer.

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)