After googling, looking in the dictionary, asking Mrs Xang and searching the Forum, I've not been able to find a Thai term or the Thai pronunciation of "Jataka", as in the Jataka stories about previous lives of the Buddha. Translated web pages I've looked at simply use the word "Jataka" in Roman script.

Can anyone help? What do Thai people call the Jataka tales?

ชา-ดก - chaa-dòk

Here is a bit about it in Google Books...

Desi's got it right. And นิทานชาดก is the common term for "Jataka tales".

Google the term for lots of examples on the web. For instance, http://นิทาน...whitemedia.org/.

ชา-ดก - chaa-dòk

Thank you. I thought that would be the logical Thai pronunciation of Jataka, but when I put it to Mrs X she seemed puzzled (but now says she just forgot).

I have read that the Uncle Remus stories, such as Brer Fox and the Tar Baby, originated in Jatake tales that spread to Africa somehow by Buddhist missionaries before being carried to America by slaves. Interesting, if true.

That would be very interesting indeed. Tale 55 in this PDF, "Prince Five-Weapons and Sticky-Hair" is supposedly related to the Tar Baby story.

There are also world flood myths in some ridiculous number of cultures, including Southeast Asia (see the Khun Borom myth, and this collection). We have a lot more in common than we think sometimes.

The Aesop tales (นิทานอีสป) have come into Thai culture more recently, but they're similar enough to local traditional tales, and they've been around long enough that several Thai I've talked to were surprised to learn that Aesop was Greek, not Thai! But I'm sure the stories are older than Aesop.