Origins of Thai language

[Brink15]

This may have been asked and answered before, and if so please forgive me. I did a search and couldn't find anything.

 

 

 

For the linguistic scholars on the board:

 

 

 

What are the origins of Thai language?

 

 

 

My understanding is that the "Tai" people were forced to move from the Yunnan area of China by Kublai Khan in the 13th century. The land they moved to already had some residents, primarily the Khmer, Shan, and Mon.

 

 

 

Trade with India, sharing the Sanskrit and Pali languages, also heavily influenced this region.

 

 

 

My assumption is that Thai is a mixture of an indigenous language of the Tai tribe from Yunnan, mixed with Sanskrit, Pali, Khmer, Mon, and maybe a few others.

 

 

 

Recently the language has adopted some English words, although with that unique Thai spin.

 

 

 

This is just my guess. Would love to hear from those with a stronger linguistic background.

 

 

[markle]

You pretty much covered the generally accepted thinking on the origins of 'Thai' language.

 

It's my understanding that the Sanskrit and Pali was introduced via the Khmer Empire rather than direct influence.

 

Also alot of French was injected early on.

 

 

 

I have heard of another argument that the 'Tai' were indigenous to the region and moved into Yunan rather than vice versa but I think it's a bit on the fringes of accepted theory.

[daeng bireley]

Thai also has a lot of borrowed words from Chinese (various dialects) Tamil and Malay.

 

Its easy to tell tell genuine Thai words:

 

They are single syllable, or compounded from single syllable words .

 

End with gor gai ¡ , ngor ngoo § , bor bai mai º , dor dek ´ , nor noo ¹ , mor maa à or sala aa ÃÃ’ .

 

The 20 sara ai ã mai muan words are genuine thai words . Thai words have none of the following letters in them

 

¦ ³ ­ ¯ ® ° ± ² ¸ È É Ì .

 

 

 

Sanskrit and Pali came from Buddhist scholars. I think Sanskrit came from Mahayana Buddhism and Pali from Hinayana. Thailand changed to Hinayana under Ramkamhaeng. Sanskrit and Pali are closely related languages.

[Brink15]

daeng bireley,

 

 

 

Thanks for that. Have you read or heard of any good books on the roots of either Thai language or the Tai language group?

 

 

 

Unfortunately I'm not able to read the Thai characters you included as for some reason I've never been able to get Thai characters to work.

 

 

 

I'm still debating getting a Thai/Roman character keyboard. Maybe have my wife's sister pick one up at Pantip and bring it with her.

 

 

[Guest]

Have you read or heard of any good books on the roots of either Thai language or the Tai language group?

 

 

 

 

I think David Watt's Brief history of Thailand covers the language origins on 4-5 pages.

 

 

 

Unfortunately I'm not able to read the Thai characters . . . I'm still debating getting a Thai/Roman character keyboard.

 

 

 

Keyboard is an input device. You do not need it to read the Thai chars on the screen. (You may need it to write documents in Thai chars.) What you need it Thai font. Assuming you're on IE5+, there's a Thai language pack. W2K may have Thai font pack as part of the OS. But you definitely do not need a keyboard.

[Brink15]

Max,

 

 

 

"I think David Watt's Brief history of Thailand covers the language origins on 4-5 pages"

 

 

 

I have the book but haven't had time to read it. Now I have a reason to break it open. Thanks.

 

 

 

 

 

"Keyboard is an input device."

 

 

 

Uhmm, yeah somewhere in my Net Admin classes in University they went over that. Actually I should have been more specific. Most of the Thai font programs I have seen have been poorly written shareware. Most end up being too much of a hassle to work with. The keyboard comment was related to the fact that if I install a Thai font program, I would like to easily be able type in Thai without having to constantly refer to a character map. Obviously one can print out character maps and use a standard keyboard to type the correct characters using the map as reference.

 

 

 

I am also aware of the Encoding option for Thai font under the view tab (I'm using IE 6), but it doesn't always get the characters correctly.

 

 

 

I'd like to find a decent 3rd party app.

 

 

 

 

[Brink15]

Max,

 

 

 

Thanks for your suggestion. In this case the encoding took and it properly displayed the characters. I still don't have too much faith in its general functionality. I've had too many web pages come up with less than half the characters encoded properly. TIM (This Is Microsoft)

[Guest]

About encoding:

 

 

 

Each character you see is represented as a number and typically stored in a file.

 

 

 

Unicode is a modern approach where every character in every langauge (at least in theory) is assigned a unique number.

 

 

 

Before Unicode there was ASCII with numbers 0-255. Obviously you can only represent 256 characters, nearly not enough for every character in every language. So they came up with "code pages," which loosely correspond to "encoding."

 

 

 

If number 141 is used, it will display as one thing in American ASCII, and something completely different in Thai encoding, and yet something different in Japanese code page.

 

 

 

These are international standards. It's up to every vendor to implement them.

 

 

 

You can have faith in general functionality of IE5 and later handling of standard encodings including Unicode. As far as I know, there are no issues with displaying all supported code pages at least since IE5. I believe there was a limited support in IE4 but it's been a while.

 

 

 

The point I'm trying to make (apart from trying to explain an incredibly complex and convoluted issue) is that TDINM (This Definitely Is Not Microsoft).

 

 

 

Regarding Thai fonts being poorly written shareware, there are a few fonts around (DB text or something like that comes to mind) that have served me well. I used it to display and print Thai text that I created with my keyboard remapped to create Thai characters. Slow and painful. Thai kbrd is definitely the way to go. Got Logitech Thai kbrd at Pathip for under $10.

 

 

 

The font supplied by MS when you install Thai Language Pack is a Unicode font. What it means is that both the English and Thai (and whatever other language the font supports) are represented. I believe the font name is Tahoma.

[Brink15]

Max,

 

 

 

"Got Logitech Thai kbrd at Pathip for under $10. "

 

 

 

Thanks very much I'll have my sister-in-law pick one up for me. I used to have one while working in Thailand.

 

 

 

Thanks also for the explanation of binary encoding in octets. Gee just like IP addresses, how unusual.

 

 

[Guest]

Thanks also for the explanation of binary encoding in octets. Gee just like IP addresses, how unusual.

 

 

 

Not sure if you're sarcastic... pls note that I used the word 'represented' rather than 'encoded'. Eg., there is only one numeric value to represent any given character in Unicode, but this numeric value can be binary encoded in many different ways. UTF8, UTF16, etc. are different encoding schemas to store numbers that represent characters in Unicode.