Dictionary Or Glossary Of Thai Proper Nouns

[Xangsamhua]

Can anyone tell me where to find a dictionary or glossary, in print or online, of Thai proper nouns, especially those based on Sanskrit/Pali? Names of towns, etc are a special interest; also names of people.

Thank you

Xangsamhua

[Rikker]

Do you mean a dictionary, as in, something that gives you the meaning of each one? That is a tall order.

Or do you mean something that gives the Thai and its English spelling?

[Xangsamhua]

Do you mean a dictionary, as in, something that gives you the meaning of each one? That is a tall order.

Or do you mean something that gives the Thai and its English spelling?

Thank you for your query. I'm looking for something that gives the derivation and meaning of the proper noun, e.g. Krung Thep - city of angels (krung from ? language; thep from ? etc.); Yasothorn (from Yasodhara (Sanskrit)? - bearer of glory - wife of the Buddha; Patchara (feminine name, from Sanskrit - diamond - modern Thai is "petch" เพชร... You get the idea.

Not just names of Indic origin, but things like Hua Lampong (where did that name come from?).

As you say, it might be a tall order to find as a glossary or dictionary, but there might be something in another form (books of names for Thai babies; travel guides in Thai...)

I hunt around sometimes on the net. For example, looking for the connection between the word Patra พัทรา which is often a proper noun, and the idea of a beautiful or classy woman. In Sanskrit, that seems to be a secondary meaning, the first being "chalice" or "vessel" - a chalice having a feminine shape. It would be less time-consuming if there were a reference I could go to.

Cheers

Xangsamhua

[Rikker]

There is nothing that really comes close to what you're looking for. There are a number of books which discuss the origins of some place names, but nothing at all approaching comprehensive -- very scattershot.

I have a book I like very much called นามนี้มีที่มา, by อรณี แน่นหนา, published in 2002 by สำนักพิมพ์ประพันธ์สาส์น (ISBN 974-230-848-9). It tells the background behind many place names in Bangkok, but it's more about their history than their etymology. So while it doesn't discuss what, say, Vibhavadi Rangsit means, it discusses who she was and when the road was named after her, etc.

Regarding the specific case of หัวลำโพง (since you asked):

I seem to recall หัวลำโพง is discussed in the book ภาษาคาใจ (the first volume, there's also a sequel ภาษาคาใจ 2), which consists of a series of short articles about different words and phrases. The area was originally a cow pasture, known as ทุ่งวัวลำพอง (boisterous cow field), because the cows ran around and enjoyed themselves. วัดหัวลำโพง also used to be known as วัดวัวลำพอง, and the pronunciation got corrupted to หัวลำโพง. I also read somewhere online that disagreed, saying this is unlikely, and the phrases are known to have existed at the same time, but there's no proof the one came from the other. The theory they proposed instead was that a tree called ลำโพง grew there in abundance, but I don't know if that's a historically defensible hypothesis, either.

There are many Thai baby name books out there, and while I've never really looked at one in detail, I wouldn't be surprised if they give a rough translation in lay-Thai. Never seen anything Thai-English, though, or that explicitly links names back to their Sanskrit/Pali roots.

Many names are common words, though, like สนธิ, อภิสิทธิ์, อภิรมย์, and you can look them up in a dictionary. The Royal Institute Dictionary in particular tends to have better coverage of words of Pali-Sanskrit content. Even if you can't find the name, often you can find the different constituent roots.

Sorry I can't be of more help. I'd love to learn of a book like what you're looking for, but I'm afraid it may not exist.

[Xangsamhua]

There is nothing that really comes close to what you're looking for. There are a number of books which discuss the origins of some place names, but nothing at all approaching comprehensive -- very scattershot.

I have a book I like very much called นามนี้มีที่มา, by อรณี แน่นหนา, published in 2002 by สำนักพิมพ์ประพันธ์สาส์น (ISBN 974-230-848-9). It tells the background behind many place names in Bangkok, but it's more about their history than their etymology. So while it doesn't discuss what, say, Vibhavadi Rangsit means, it discusses who she was and when the road was named after her, etc.

Regarding the specific case of หัวลำโพง (since you asked):

I seem to recall หัวลำโพง is discussed in the book ภาษาคาใจ (the first volume, there's also a sequel ภาษาคาใจ 2), which consists of a series of short articles about different words and phrases. The area was originally a cow pasture, known as ทุ่งวัวลำพอง (boisterous cow field), because the cows ran around and enjoyed themselves. วัดหัวลำโพง also used to be known as วัดวัวลำพอง, and the pronunciation got corrupted to หัวลำโพง. I also read somewhere online that disagreed, saying this is unlikely, and the phrases are known to have existed at the same time, but there's no proof the one came from the other. The theory they proposed instead was that a tree called ลำโพง grew there in abundance, but I don't know if that's a historically defensible hypothesis, either.

There are many Thai baby name books out there, and while I've never really looked at one in detail, I wouldn't be surprised if they give a rough translation in lay-Thai. Never seen anything Thai-English, though, or that explicitly links names back to their Sanskrit/Pali roots.

Many names are common words, though, like สนธิ, อภิสิทธิ์, อภิรมย์, and you can look them up in a dictionary. The Royal Institute Dictionary in particular tends to have better coverage of words of Pali-Sanskrit content. Even if you can't find the name, often you can find the different constituent roots.

Sorry I can't be of more help. I'd love to learn of a book like what you're looking for, but I'm afraid it may not exist.

Many thanks Rikker. You've been most helpful. Fascinating hypothesis about หัวลำโพง. Now I'll have to find the connection between this and an amplifier.

Maybe I'll just have to get together with a Thai colleague and write something myself. A good semi-retirement project, perhaps.

[Rikker]

Let me know if you need feedback on drafts!

[Xangsamhua]

Let me know if you need feedback on drafts!

Will do, for sure. 2009's a bit booked up (still working full time and finishing some studies). 2010 may be a goer.

[oevna]

It seems like this would be a huge project. Perhaps it would be more appropriate as a public effort, similar to Wikipedia, which could be contributed to by anyone. Of course, it would be difficult to verify the accuracy of the entries, but you could impose similar requirements for references.

Whenever I need to search for something like this, I usually start with Wikipedia. It helps to be able to reverse-transliterate the Thai word back into its Pali or Sanskrit origins (using Roman script). So to take your example, เพชร (Thai) comes from พัชร which comes from Vajra (V -> B is fairly commin in Sanskrit and Pali, and Thai พ corresponds to Sanskrit/Pali "B"). The article on Vajra gives some background on the word. In practice, this often takes some trial and error. I chose your example because it illustrates both a vowel shift and a consonant shift, and there is a good article on Vajra.

When this fails, I broaden the scope by searching Google for the word in both its Thai spelling and the Roman transliteration of its Sanskrit or Pali origin. Of course, this doesn't always work for words of Khmer or other origin, but it's a start.

[Xangsamhua]

It seems like this would be a huge project. Perhaps it would be more appropriate as a public effort, similar to Wikipedia, which could be contributed to by anyone. Of course, it would be difficult to verify the accuracy of the entries, but you could impose similar requirements for references.

Whenever I need to search for something like this, I usually start with Wikipedia. It helps to be able to reverse-transliterate the Thai word back into its Pali or Sanskrit origins (using Roman script). So to take your example, เพชร (Thai) comes from พัชร which comes from Vajra (V -> B is fairly commin in Sanskrit and Pali, and Thai พ corresponds to Sanskrit/Pali "B"). The article on Vajra gives some background on the word. In practice, this often takes some trial and error. I chose your example because it illustrates both a vowel shift and a consonant shift, and there is a good article on Vajra.

When this fails, I broaden the scope by searching Google for the word in both its Thai spelling and the Roman transliteration of its Sanskrit or Pali origin. Of course, this doesn't always work for words of Khmer or other origin, but it's a start.

Brilliant! Thanks Oevna. I hadn't thought of anything quite so scholarly; perhaps just one stage of the two-stage answer you gave to the เพชร -พัชร question. I have seen the article on Vajra and never thought of the connection with the "diamond" of พัชร. Of course I wasn't reading the article from an etymological perspective.

The Wikipedia suggestion sounds very sound, especially as it could involve many people and develop over time. I don't think I'd know how to set it up. Is it something you could do?

I'd like to try your method, using Wikipedia. It looks like I'd need to know the current meaning of the Thai word and the Sanskrit for the same word, which I suppose I can get from an English-Sanskrit or, perhaps, Thai-Sanskrit online dictionary. In some cases, with proper nouns, there is no difficulty, e.g. Tipangkorn = Dipankara; Nakhorn Sithammarat = Nagara Sri Dharmaraja. It's just a case of pronunciation shift, really. But พัทรา/สู่พัทรา?? I'll give your method a try looking for connections with femininity (rather than dishes).

[oevna]

We would probably have to set up our own web site, as the Wikipedia web site is specifically for encyclopedia entries and has fairly rigid standards for article writing style. There would be some overlap in content, but that is inevitable. We would also need to come up with a policy on adding entries. If we open it up completely to the public, then we would need some sort of review process to check the references provided. That would require some volunteer staff.

Here is some more information that I find useful for determining the original spelling of Thai words of Sanskrit and Pali origin:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thai_alphabet#Sanskrit_and_Pali
  

[Rikker]

This would be a large undertaking, indeed. But I wasn't about to discourage someone interesting in doing it.

If you're particularly interested in Pali/Sanskrit, you'll want to read up on things like สนธิ (sandhi) and สมาส (samāsa) rules in a textbook like หลักภาษาไทย by กำชัย ทองหล่อ. Not sure what to recommend in English. This will give you a foundation to make better sense of all the variations and correspondences between the Indic forms and the Thai forms.

The Royal Institute Dictionary (RID) is also an invaluable source for this. Its P/S coverage is quite good. You can apply a simple substitution to find the equivalent IAST (romanized Sanskrit) spelling. The Thai alphabet article on Wikipedia contains these correspondences. Just look for the table with IAST.

For example, at the end of the RID entry for เพชร, it reads (ส. วชฺร; ป. วชิร), giving you both the Sanskrit (ส.) and Pali (ป.) words.

You can then determine IAST romanizations (for searching in other sources like Sanskrit-English dictionaries) by doing a simple substitution:

วชฺร = va + j + ra = vajra

วชิร = va + ji + ra = vajira

Similarly, the entry for อักษร includes this etymological note: (ส.; ป. อกฺขร).

When it says ส.; without a spelling, that means the Indic form is basically the same as the Thai spelling, so we take อักษร and apply the substition:

อกฺษร = akṣara

อกฺขร = akkhara

And so forth. The พินธุ dot under some Thai letters means it behaves like a cluster with the next consonant, so there is no vowel /a/ inserted. That's why วชฺร is vajra, not vajara. (But the ṣ is different -- it's just a special character for that particular letter.)

The meanings of Thai words really open up when you start to learn this stuff. Things become much more transparent. About 25% of Thai is Indic, judging by the contents of RID.

[Richard W]

You can apply a simple substitution to find the equivalent IAST (romanized Sanskrit) spelling. The Thai alphabet article on Wikipedia contains these correspondences. Just look for the table with IAST.

A couple of statements in the Wiki article surprised me. It claims that when Sanskrit is written in Thai, that there is no distinction between the short and long diphthongs (e v. ai and o v. au) and that visarga is completely lost. However, the RID does make a distinction in some words, e.g. Skt. เสาริ > Th. เสารี and Skt. ไวทฺย > Th. แพทย์. I'm surprised at the claim that visarga has no written representative - how are such words written, then? (I can't lay my hands on any Sanskrit texts written in the Thai alphabet.) I would expect ะ to be used for visarga.

Another that has been bothering me about Sanskrit in Thai is avagraha (the mark of elision of a word initial vowel). How is it written in Thai?

[Rikker]

I think the Thai-language related articles need a lot of improvement, but there are a watchdog or two who don't like to see it changed. I made a recent plea that went unresponded to asking for help to improve them (Thai language-related articles are pathetic compared to other languages represented in Wikipedia).

About visarga, ะ is used to represent it. The article isn't worded very well. Since final h is not phonemic of Thai (I don't know that it ever was, but you likely know better than me), in a sense you "can't" record the visarga in Thai script, meaning that no Thai will pronounce final h. But writing ะ in P/S-derived words is of course still recording it. When transliterated using the Coedes system (or the similar Griswold/Prasert system), both of which are similar to IAST, ะ is invariably transliterated as <aḥ>.

I just glanced through and didn't see the statement about short and long diphthongs. Where exactly is that?

As for avagraha, I don't know enough about Sanskrit to know what words would be written with it. Can you give examples?

[Richard W]

I just glanced through and didn't see the statement about short and long diphthongs. Where exactly is that?

There is the statement, 'Thai Sanskrit has only 12 vowels', followed by a list. The long diphthongs (i.e. /ai/ and /au/) do not appear in it.

As for avagraha, I don't know enough about Sanskrit to know what words would be written with it. Can you give examples?

Well, according to one account of the rules of sandhi, it isn't written in any words. That is why I made the comment about Sanskrit texts in the Thai script. It typically occurs when word-initial /a/ is dropped rather than merged with the final vowel of the preceding word. However, by another account, and the rule in Panini is cited for this, compound words such as Skt. _goagra_ 'headed by cows' may optionally be _go'gra_. I'm not sure I understand the claimed _gavAgra_ variant - perhaps it's a derivational variant rather than a sandhi variant.