A Thai-Chinese Vocabulary Correspondence Study

It is generally acknowledged that Thai history before the 13^th century inscription of King Ram Kamhaeng has remained obscure,and the national origins of the Thai people continue to be hidden.But it is also interesting that a considerable number of Thai words that appears to be related in some way to Chinese,while the Thais have assumed these words to be of native origin.The literature on Thai-Chinese vocabulary study is not rich.During the past century a number of scholars had contributed to our knowledge in this field. However,most studies had focused on loanwords either brought in by Chinese immigrants or their pronunciation in relation to southern Chinese dialects.Both the Thai and Chinese languages belong to the same Sino-Tibetan family.One of the common features is that their original words are mostly of monosyllable.Previous researches also point out that there were lengthy historical contacts between the Han Chinese and the Thai-speaking peoples in vast common areas then belonged to none.Based on the above theories we managed to search out target words in Thai and Chinese which are of correspondence both in meaning and sound,by resorting to a series of lexicon tool books.In this study,recent loanwords that were introduced into the Thai language from Chinese immigrants in Thailand during the 19^th and 20^th centuries are not discussed.It also excludes from consideration words which have been identified as originating from Chinese in the official Thai dictionary issued by the Thai Royal Institute(Ratchabandittayasathan, 1982).After careful screening we finally have selected a body of 463 vocabulary items showing parallels between Chinese and Thai.With the application of MS Excel software,these vocabulary items have been tabulated into a proper format to facilitate comparison and reference. Chinese characters are arranged in phonetic alphabet order according to each character's pronunciation in mandarin.Pronunciations are also given in 4 major southern Chinese dialects namely Cantonese,Hakka,Chaozhou and Minnan. For Thai words,each item is given in Thai script and the international phonetic alphabet symbols to identify its modern pronunciation.The vocabulary items are selectively discussed in the thesis content to analyze and compare their different usage.In the later chapter the dissertation suggests that the Thai-Chinese vocabulary parallels be applied to the teaching of Chinese as a foreign language, particularly for Thai learners of Chinese.Citing some authoritative theories of language learning,the study believes that these lexical characteristics will help strengthen and widen the learner's command of Chinese in terms of not only the listed characters but also their derivatives and beyond.