Online Lecture: Language Change as an Evidence for Dating Old Thai Texts

26. November 2021, von AAI Webmaster

Foto: unsplash

We kindly invite you to this online lecture organised by the Hamburg Society for Thai Studies and the Department for Languages and Cultures of Southeast Asia on Friday, November 26, 2021, 14 CET.

Old Thai texts are traditionally dated by non-linguistic criteria such as material, content, letters and orthography. This lecture shows that semantic and grammatical changes of words can be used as an alternative criteria to date old Thai texts because these kinds of linguistic changes occur in a gradual and directional manner. They result in different semantic and grammatical properties in stages of change. Thus, a text can be chronologically dated by examining semantic and grammatical properties of words and placing them in order of pathways of semantic and grammatical changes. This is exemplified by using historical changes of the words /thîi/ and negators /bɔ̀/ /mí/ /pàj/ and /mâj/ as case studies to date samples of old Thai texts ranged from the Sukhothai era to the early Rattanakosin era. Additional discussion on linguistic dating of Traibhūmi (the National Library of Paris Version) and Royal Chronicle of Ayutthaya (Luang Prasert Aksornnit’s version) is included in this lecture to support that texts can be dated linguistically.

This online lecture will be held by Santhawat Thanyawong who has received his B.A. and M.A. degrees from the Department of Thai, Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University. He has currently been granted a PhD scholarship from the Ministry of Higher Education, Science, Research and Innovation, Thailand and is now a PhD candidate in the Department of Linguistics at the same institution. His present work is on Dating Old Thai Texts Using Functions of Polyfunctional Words.

The lecture will be held in English and can be attended via Zoom. For the link and more information, kindly refer to our Flyer (PDF).

We would like to thank the Hamburg Society for Thai Studies for the cooperation.

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