Etymology of “Thailand”
Etymology of “Thailand”
According to George Cœdès, the word Thai (ไทย) means ‘free man’ in the Thai language, “differentiating the Thai from the natives encompassed in Thai society as serfs”.[18]:197 A famous Thai scholar argued that Thai (ไท) simply means ‘people’ or ‘human being’, sinc
e his investigation shows that in some rural areas the word “Thai” was used instead of the usual Thai word khon (คน) for people.[19] According to Michel Ferlus, the ethnonyms Thai-Tai (or Thay-Tay) would have evolved from the etymon *k(ə)ri: ‘human being’ through the following chain: *kəri: > *kəli: > *kədi:/*kədaj > *di:/*daj > *dajA (Proto-Southwestern Tai) > tʰajA2 (in Siamese and Lao) or > tajA2 (in the other Southwestern and Central Tai languages classified by Li Fangkuei).[20] Michel Ferlus’s work is based on some simple rules of phonetic change observable in the Sinosphere and studied for the most part by William H. Baxter (1992).[21]
While Thai people will often refer to their country using the polite form prathet Thai (Thai: ประเทศไทย), they most commonly use the more colloquial term mueang Thai (Thai: เมืองไทย) or simply Thai; the word mueang, archaically referring to a city-state, is commonly used to refer to a city or town as the centre of a region. Ratcha Anachak Thai (Thai: ราชอาณาจักรไทย) means ‘kingdom of Thailand’ or ‘kingdom of Thai’. Etymologically, its components are: ratcha (Sanskrit: राजन्, rājan, ‘king, royal, realm’); -ana- (Pali
āṇā ‘authority, command, power’, itself from the Sanskrit आज्ञा, ājñā, of the same meaning) -chak (from Sanskrit चक्र cakra- ‘wheel’, a symbol of power and rule). The Thai National Anthem (Thai: เพลงชาติ), written by Luang Saranupraphan during the patriotic 1930s, refers to the Thai nation as prathet Thai (Thai: ประเทศไทย). The first line of the national anthem is: prathet thai ruam lueat nuea chat chuea thai (Thai: ประเทศไทยรวมเลือดเนื้อชาติเชื้อไทย), ‘Thailand is the unity of Thai flesh and blood’.
