Thai Research On Sanskrit’s Loanwords In "Vikram And The Vamdire Or Tales Of Hindu Devilry"

Thai language is the official language of Thailand; it belongs to the Sino-Tibetan languages, Tai-Kadai family. Thailand is in the south central part of Indo-China peninsula, from the perspective of geographical location Thailand shares border with Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia and Malaysia, boarder is the medium of frequent interaction like people to people to contact, trade and commercial exchanges, transmission of religious thoughts etc, even immigrants entered Thailand to settle down permanently, Along with the interaction between people languages are also transmitted from one place to another, in this aspect Thailand is no different from other places; Thai language is also influenced by the convergence of other languages. From the perspective of amalgamation of languages, there are many Loanwords in Thai language; it is one of the basic characteristics of Thai language.Thailand has a long historical background; from historical point of view Thailand from a very early period has frequent interactions with other countries, especially with India. India is the birth place of Buddhism and cradle of other religious believes. In the 3rd century BC King Asoka send Buddhist monk Sonathera and Uttarathera to Suwannaphum (also known as Thailand and Malaysian peninsula) to propagate Buddhism. From this time onward Thai language borrowed huge amount of Sanskrit and Pali words, these words occupies more than 60% of Thai language. Thailand is influenced by India to a great extent, not only in cultural and religious aspects but more importantly in the form of language and literature. Along with the migration of Indian people to Thailand many classical Indian literary works like poems, novels, essays etc also transmitted to Thailand."Vikram and the Vampire or Tales of Hindu Devilry" is a famous classical "Vetala story " this classical Indian novel has more than 2500 years of history, in ancient times this novel was orally transmitted by the poets of Sivatas of India, afterward a famous Indian poet Sommathat wrote down the novel using Devanagari script. We cannot properly determine the time period when the vampire Vetala was transmitted to Thailand, most probably between the period of 1767 AD to 1779 AD; it was the time of Bangkok Dynasty or Ratanakosin Era of Thailand. Many Thai scholars put their focus on this novel and they translated this novel into Thai language from the original Sanskrit script, moreover some translations are also made from the English version of this novel. The complete translated version of Vetala came into being between 1930 AD to 2002 AD; it was translated by Dr. Saksit directly from Devanagari script to Thai language. This novel has a huge number of Sanskrit words, to comprehensively understand the Sanskrit words I have used Thai version of "Vikram and the Vampire or Tales of Hindu Devilry" translated by Dr. Saksit in this thesis.In this thesis (dissertation) I made a detail classification of 200 Sanskrit words including both vernacular and written language, furthermore I compared the alphabets of Sanskrit and Thai language and then thoroughly discussed the rules of usage and made an in depth analysis of the frequency of utilization of the Sanskrit words.