A recent posting got me wondering about Malay loanwords in Thai. Are there any?

First I searched Mary Haas' Thai Etymological Dictionary via SEAlang.net. It records loanwords by origin as follows:

Burmese - 2
Chinese - 60
English - 289
European (sic) - 22
French - 3
Hindi - 2
Japanese - 4
Khmer - 2
Portuguese - 5
Tamil - 1
Vietnamese - 5

But for Malay, nothing.

Further investigation threw up a paper (T. Suthiwan, Malay Loanwords in Thai, 1992) which identifies a few words which have been used in literary context, but only one - mangummangaraa (I couldn't track down the Thai spelling in the dictionary) - which has apparently entered general usage. Are there others?

It's not unusual for one country to eschew the vocabulary of a neighbour. For example, in English there are only seven fairly common words adopted from Welsh (flannel, flummery, penguin, cwm, eisteddfod, coracle, corgi). The usual explanation for this is that adoption is a function of (i) length of exposure, and (ii) social status of the other language. I believe that there is also another factor, the absence of a suitable word in one's language. This explains why, for example, Thai has adopted the Malay word kris - กริช.

This raises a few questions in my mind:

(1) Historically, say in Sukhothai or Ayutthaya, were the Siamese people exposed to Malay? There were certainly trading links, and parts of the Malay-speaking world were vassal states of Siam (though the latter point is somewhat contentious).

(2) Was Malay regarded as of lower status than Mon and Khmer (both of which have provided a fair number of words)? If so why?

Any thoughts?

ปะการัง is from Malay

Finally managed to track down "mangummangaraa". It's มะงุมมะงาหรา - máˑ​ŋumˑ​máˑ​ŋaaˑ​rǎa meaning ไปอย่างไม่รู้ทิศทาง - to wander aimlessly.

Another one : โกดัง

Another one : โกดัง

>Further investigation threw up a paper (T. Suthiwan, Malay Loanwords in Thai, 1992)

Any ideas as to how I could get my hands on this paper?

Another one : โกดัง

Not sure about that. Isn't it more likely to have come from the Portuguese gudão (also meaning "godown")? (The English word is also derived from gudão.)

>Further investigation threw up a paper (T. Suthiwan, Malay Loanwords in Thai, 1992)

Any ideas as to how I could get my hands on this paper?

http://sealang.net/sala/archives/djvu1/suthiwan1992malay.djvu/index.djvu

(You'll need a DjVu plug-in for your browser to view. List of plug-ins available at http://djvu.org/resources/)/

>Further investigation threw up a paper (T. Suthiwan, Malay Loanwords in Thai, 1992)

Any ideas as to how I could get my hands on this paper?

http://sealang.net/sala/archives/djvu1/suthiwan1992malay.djvu/index.djvu

(You'll need a DjVu plug-in for your browser to view. List of plug-ins available at http://djvu.org/resources/)/

ขอบคุณ

You taught me 2 things - Djvu and the existence of this fascinating paper by T Suthivan.

Terima Kaseh

and if you don't want to install Djvu

http://sealang.net/sala/archives/pdf8/suthiwan1992malay.pdf

Looking around I found this paper on the same subject:

http://www.academia.edu/4647821/Language_Contact_Malay_Influence_on_Thai

Now I'm not a linguist or etymologist, so I can't really comment on it, but it's an interesting read nonetheless.

I had high hopes for bahasa - ภาษา, but I see it's a Pali/Sanskrit word (should have known from the spelling)

Looking around I found this paper on the same subject:

http://www.academia.edu/4647821/Language_Contact_Malay_Influence_on_Thai

Now I'm not a linguist or etymologist, so I can't really comment on it, but it's an interesting read nonetheless.

Indeed, it is an interesting read. So far I've got as far as p.39. Some of what Daniel Krauße has hoovered up is pretty ancient - the ant word มด and the sesame word งา seem to go back to Proto-Tai-Kadai. On the other hand, they may well be related to Malay semut and lenga; the /l/ shows up in the sesame word in at least one Tai-Kadai language.