APPENDIX

Pronunciation, Nomenclature, and Acronyms

Readers of this book will meet Bone and Sone, guides who participated in the expedition to the Nam Nyang. If those readers want these names to ring correctly in their mind’s ears, they will teach themselves to hear them as “Bawn” and “Sawn,” as the text encourages them to do. They might ask, however, why not write the names phonetically in the first place?

It’s a good question, and the simple answer is that I have tried to follow conventional practice for transliterating Lao into English, a process that has been shaped in interesting ways. Many Lao words were translated into French before they became known in English, and so traditional transliteration has a bias toward French. For this reason poung (mineral lick) is not written with a double o—poong—although that is how it sounds. The double o does not exist in French, and so poung, the closest French spelling, is how the word has come down.

Another complication is that Lao has more consonant sounds than English (or French) does. T, th, dt, and d, for instance, are used to denote various Lao consonants along the progression of sounds from “t” to “d.” Thus Thii, the name of another guide, is effectively pronounced “Tee” in English, but it is not spelled that way. One might think of it as another Gallicism, like the name Thierry, pronounced with a hard t in French.

Place names present a special challenge. Nam Nyang, for instance, is the spelling favored both by Bill Robichaud and by James R. Chamberlain, a linguist on whose advice I have relied. On the standard 1:100,000 maps approved by the Lao government, however, the name of the river is given as Nam Yang. Similar issues exist for village names. Chamberlain, emphasizing etymology, endorses Ban Na Meo; most maps, including the government’s, give Ban Nameo. My choice of one system over another is essentially subjective, but in this case I side with the more conventional usage: Nameo, Nameuy, Makfeuang, Thameuang, and so on.

The rendering of Vietnamese also required a number of choices. Like Lao, Vietnamese is a tonal language. It uses a modified Roman alphabet in which vowel tone is indicated by diacritical marks. Because most English readers would not understand these marks, and on the advice of others better informed than I, I have eliminated them. Thus Nghê An Province is given simply as Nghe An. Additionally, there are two d’s in Vietnamese: , pronounced “d” in English, and d, pronounced close to “z” in English. In the case of Vu Van Dung, lead author of the scientific paper establishing saola as a new species, it is the “z”-sounding d. Some writers in English will spell his name Dzung, but Dung is more common. The name Do Tuoc, belonging to one of the original discoverers of saola, uses the other d.

Readers will note that many Lao words (like many words in English) have consecutive vowels. Often these represent blended sounds, or diphthongs, eu being one of the most common, as in the case of Nam Theun, which sounds roughly like “nam tŭn.”

Some English speakers debate how to refer to the country of Lao PDR. Should they say Lao or Laos? The Lao people call their homeland either Meuang (or Muang) Lao or Prathet (or Pathet) Lao, both of which translate as “Lao country” or “Lao nation.” Laos is the name the French gave to the colony they ruled, beginning late in the nineteenth century. They derived the word by pluralizing the name of the colony’s dominant ethnic group. Some English speakers prefer to refer to the country as Lao, not Laos, because the shorter word avoids colonial overtones and conforms better with Meuang Lao, Lao PDR, and similar terms. I have elected to use Laos because of its greater familiarity for English readers. For an excellent discussion of the two terms and their relative merits, I recommend a short essay by Nick Enfield, a scholar at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, which originally appeared in the Vientiane Times in 1998 and which can be accessed at http://laobumpkin.blogspot.com/2008/07/of-laos-and-laotians.html.

Finally, following is a glossary of abbreviations used in the text:

ADB: Asian Development Bank, known to its critics as Asian Dams and Bridges

FIPI: Forest Inventory and Planning Institute, Hanoi

IMA: Independent Monitoring Agency (evaluates the WMPA; can order the NTPC to withhold funding)

IUCN: International Union for the Conservation of Nature

NGO: Nongovernmental organization

NNT: Nakai–Nam Theun National Protected Area

NT2: Nam Theun 2 Hydroelectric Project

NTPC: Nam Theun 2 Power Company (operators of NT2)

PDR: People’s Democratic Republic

POE: International Environmental and Social Panel of Experts (advisers to the NTPC)

TCM: Traditional Chinese medicine

UXO: Unexploded ordnance: bombs, “bombies,” and land mines remaining from the American, or Second Indochina, war as well as other conflicts

WB: World Bank

WCS: Wildlife Conservation Society

WMPA: Watershed Management and Protection Authority

WWF: World Wide Fund for Nature (“World Wildlife Fund” in the United States)