Chindamani, the oldest surviving text about the Thai language, contains a direct but equivocal description of Thai orthography and prosody. Combining careful textual study with findings and analytical tools from Comparative Tai, I argue that 17th century Thai had already established a five-tone system that only differs from present-day Thai in
This article reports on the pilot project for the Thai National Historical Corpus, a diachronic corpus that represents the different stages of the Thai language. Three important decisions were made as a result of the project. First, the texts will be selected according to the criteria designed for the British
Mainland Southeast Asia (MSEA), roughly comprising Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Myanmar, northeast India, southern China, and peninsular Malaysia, has long been recognized as a linguistic area. In terms of linguistic diversity, it is an area with high phylogenetic diversity but very low structural diversity (Enfield 2011). With respect to phonology,
The Kra–Dai linguistic family includes Thai and Lao as well as a great number of languages spoken by ethnic minorities in Southeast Asia. In Thailand, a dozen of other Kra–Dai languages are spoken in addition to Thai, the national language. The genetic structure of the Kra–Dai-speaking populations in Thailand has
The current ethno-linguistic landscape of mainland Southeast Asia is a result of the spread of Tai speakers from southern China. This study examines Chinese loanwords in Proto-Southwestern Tai, the hypothetical ancestor of all modern Southwestern Tai varieties and proposes a dating of the spread of Southwestern Tai languages. By comparing
Kra-Dai (also called Tai-Kadai and Kam-Tai) is a family of approximately 100 languages spoken in Southeast Asia, extending from the island of Hainan, China, in the east to the Indian province of Assam in the west and south to the Malay Peninsula. The term Kra-Dai was suggested in Weera Ostapirat’s
This paper discusses periphrastic causative constructions in Patani Malay, which is a Malay dialect spoken in Thailand’s Deep South. The result shows that Patani Malay has three types of periphrastic causative constructions, namely waʔ ‘do’ construction, wi ‘give’ construction and waʔwi construction. Compared to Indonesian, Malaysian Colloquial Malay and Eastern
Based on comparative data from 64 modern Tai varieties, we propose that Proto-Tai had three distinct negators, namely *ɓawB, *mi and *pajB. These morphemes were distinguished from each other in terms of aspect. Moreover, we show that the Old Thai language represented by the literary classic Lilit Phra Lo, and
This article evaluates the use of tonal development as criteria for Southwestern Tai subgrouping. A literature review shows that Brown (1965) and Chamberlain (1975), the two most influential proposals, both use tonal splits and mergers as main criteria. However, this approach is not consistent with the shared-innovation method used in
Changes in word shapes in Mainland Southeast Asia are usually attributed to contact-induced typological convergence. However, little attention has been paid to the role of structural constraints in defining paths of change. In this paper, we describe two distributional gaps in paths of word shape shifts: (1) there are no
