08 · The Dust Beneath the Royal Feet

In 1997 the Royal Institute academician Kanchana Naksakul wrote in the Royal Institute Newsletter that carrying Thai's ​ฉัน and ​คุณ — "I" and "you" — into English takes almost no thought: I and you, and that is the end of it. Going the other way, the translator has to establish first who is speaking, how old they are, their gender, who they are speaking to, how close the two are, whether the setting is formal, whether the speaker is being humble or is angry, and what social class they come from.

That list is what English never has to answer. Thai has to, and answers it from the first word. The most formal part of the system has a name of its own — ​ราชาศัพท์, the royal register, the vocabulary reserved for the king, the nobility and the monks — but the same machinery runs down as far as a sentence a father says to his child. The rank of the two people talking is not floating somewhere in the context. It is embedded in the verb and in the pronoun.

The verb meaning "eat" has four forms, and taking the wrong one is not a lapse of style. ​เสวย is used of the king and of high royalty. The verb ​ฉัน is used of Buddhist monks — a different axis from rank, since it marks a religious role and not a class. ​รับประทาน is the ordinary polite register. ​กิน is the bare word. Use the wrong rung and it lands as disrespect, or as formality absurd enough to be funny.

​รับประทาน is itself the fossil of a sentence. The Office of the Royal Society explained on its radio programme "​รู้ ​รัก ​ภาษาไทย" on 30 October 2009 that as royal-register vocabulary it is two words — ​รับ, "to receive," and ​ประทาน, "to give" — used when a prince or princess of ​พระองค์เจ้า or ​หม่อมเจ้า rank gives something to a commoner. Run together as a single word, with no pause, the two syllables have eroded into a polite verb meaning simply "eat." The Office goes as far as instructing speakers to pause between the syllables when they mean the older sense.

English has one word, ate, and no rungs to choose between. A translator carrying ​เสวย across has to put in words that were not there — "the King ate" — so what Thai has already said inside the verb, English says again outside it. The information does not vanish in the crossing. It changes category: from something grammar obliges to something context can supply, and what is not obliged can always be cut.

The second person has four forms that cannot be exchanged, ordered by the rank of the person addressed. ​ใต้เท้า, "beneath your feet," for a respected superior. ​ใต้ฝ่าพระบาท, "beneath the royal sole," for a ​หม่อมเจ้า. ​ใต้ฝ่าละอองพระบาท adds the dust rising off that sole, and is used from ​พระองค์เจ้า rank upward. ​ใต้ฝ่าละอองธุลีพระบาท adds a mote within that dust, and is reserved for the king. The speaker is not choosing how polite to be. He is announcing the rank of the person he addresses loudly enough for the room to hear it. You cannot do that.

The first person climbs in the opposite direction. ​ข้าพระพุทธเจ้า means "servant of the Lord Buddha," a religious self-abasement carried over into address of the king. ​เกล้ากระหม่อม and ​หม่อมฉัน put up the crown of the speaker's own head in place of the speaker, and are used by lower nobility addressing higher. Kanchana's account is that Thai treats the head as the highest part of the body, so the speaker offers his head rather than the whole of himself. And ​ผม, the word used every day, means literally "hair" — the same logic, fallen to the ordinary register.

Kanchana gives one case where it breaks. In foreign films dubbed into Thai you sometimes hear a father call himself ​ผม and address his own child, under ten years old, as ​คุณ. Every word is correct by the dictionary, and it grates badly, because no Thai father speaks to his child that way. The error is not lexical but relational — that pair of pronouns carries a formal distance built into it, which a father and child do not have.

The sentence-final particles ​ครับ, spoken by men, and ​ค่ะ, spoken by women, close nearly every polite Thai utterance, and mark two things at once: the speaker's own gender and the formality of the sentence. English has no word class that does this work. Eric McCready set out a semantics for it in "A Semantics for Honorifics with Reference to Thai" (PACLIC 28, 2014) — pronouns, verb forms and particles jointly fix a politeness level, and that level must then be compatible with a formality level the discourse context has already set.

In 2020 the President of the Office of the Royal Society, ศ.​เกียรติคุณ ​นพ.​สุร​พล ​อิสร​ไกร​ศีล, said of a word his own institution had coined: "​ตอนนี้​มี​ใคร​ใช้​คำ​ว่า​คณิตกรณ์ ​ก็​เรียก​ว่า​คอมพิวเตอร์​กัน​หมด" — does anyone use the word khanitkorn now? Everyone just says computer. A language that can oblige rank inside its verbs could not oblige its own vocabulary.

The instrument that should have been able to oblige it exists, and has a birthday. The body that became ​ราชบัณฑิตยสภา was founded in 1933; formal terminology-coining began in 1942, per its Secretary-General, ​กนก​วลี ​ชู​ชัย​ยะ, in 2019. The method is stated in three tiers, per ​สุร​พล's interview of 6 July 2020 — find a native Thai word first; failing that, build one from Pali-Sanskrit roots; transliterate only as a last resort. And it has worked. ​โทรทัศน์, "television," is ​โทร ("far") plus ​ทัศน์ ("to see").

The words that lost have names and dates too. The Society's science and computing committees coined ​คณิตกรณ์ from Pali-Sanskrit roots, roughly "calculating instrument," alongside the transliteration ​คอมพิวเตอร์. ​สุร​พล gave the outcome himself in 2020: "​ปรากฏ​ว่า​มี​เพียง​คำทับศัพท์​คอมพิวเตอร์​เพียง​คำ​เดียว​ที่​รอด" — in the event, only the transliterated word "computer" survived. ​จดหมายอิเล็กทรอนิกส์, "electronic letter," coined for email, holds on in official paperwork and some teachers' documents; Thai mouths say ​อีเมล — this from รศ.​อร​พัช ​บวร​รักษา (Assoc. Prof. Orapat Bavornraksa) in the same set of interviews.

The older mechanism belonged to one man rather than a committee. Rama VI (Vajiravudh, reigned 1910–1925, died 26 November 1925) translated three plays of Shakespeare's into Thai — ​เวนิส​วานิช, The Merchant of Venice, in 1916; ​ตามใจ​ท่าน, As You Like It, in 1921; ​โร​เม​โอ​และ​จู​เลียต, Romeo and Juliet, in 1922. He set out his own method in the preface to the last of them, signed "​ราม​วชิราวุธ ​ปร" and dated 1 June 1922: "​ใน​การประพนธ์​คำกลอน​ภาษาไทย​ใน​เรื่องลคร​นี้ ฃ้าพ​เจ้า​ตั้งใจ​ให้​ใกล้​สำนวน​และ​โวหาร​เดิม​ของ​เชกส๎เปียร์ ​มากกว่า​คำนึงถึง​ความไพเราะ​ทาง​กาพย์​ภาษาไทย" — in composing the Thai verse for this play, I intended to keep close to Shakespeare's own idiom and style, rather than prioritise the mellifluousness of Thai poetic convention. That is a source-fidelity policy, declared 73 years before Lawrence Venuti coined the term foreignization in 1995.

His coining was not confined to the plays. The Surnames Act of พ.ศ. 2456, 1913, required every Siamese subject to take a hereditary family name for the first time, and many of the compound Pali-Sanskrit surnames that followed he devised or bestowed himself. Another was ​ลูกเสือ, "tiger cub," the name he gave the Boy Scouts of Siam in 1911, built on ​เสือป่า, the Wild Tiger Corps he founded the same year. This is a different mechanism from the terminology office, which was not born until 1933, after both reigns.

The word "first" here has already been contested. ​อาชญาสิทธิ์ ​ศรีสุวรรณ wrote in The101.world on 31 January 2023 that Rama VI's preface claimed priority only for translating the play as line-by-line stage dialogue, not for bringing the story into Thai at all. ​ขุน​สุนทร​ภาษิต (Thanom Keyanon), a schoolteacher, published "​โร​โม​ยู​เลียด​คำ​ฉันท์" between August and October 1921, a full year ahead of the King's version. Whether the King knew of it is undocumented; the article's author states that he could not determine it.

On the Pali and Sanskrit share of the modern Thai lexicon, this book prints no number. The research for this chapter found no verifiable measurement. The figures in circulation — "30–40%," or "more than half" — could not be traced back to anyone who did the counting or to a method. No number does not mean there is nothing there to measure. It means nobody has measured it. What has actually been counted is narrower: Søren Egerod counted 181 Teochew loanwords in Siamese, in 1959.

The highest word in this chapter is itself borrowed. Rikker Dockum read roughly a hundred Sukhothai inscriptions, 13th to 15th century, and found Sanskrit arriving in at least two waves. The first came through Khmer, carrying Khmer's own sound changes in with it — which is why Thai has บ and ด at all; the second was taken directly. The result is doublets still in use, ​บิดา beside ​ปิตุ, and the word ​บาท, from pāda, "foot." The ​บาท in ​ใต้ฝ่าละอองธุลีพระบาท is therefore a loan that arrived by way of Khmer, and no committee ever voted it in.

That is the whole difference between the two halves of this chapter. Rank could take up residence inside the verb because nobody had to approve it. ​คณิตกรณ์ had a resolution behind it, a stated method behind it, a state office behind it, and it lost. Grammar obliges. Policy can only ask.

The strongest argument against this verdict is that transliteration is a form of absorption too, and Thai has been absorbing from Khmer, Pali, Sanskrit, Chinese and Portuguese for centuries. Nor do dead coinages always die of English: พฤ​ทธิ​ธรรม lost to ​วัฒนธรรม, for "culture," before the digital era and before the terminology office existed. So the claim made here is narrow. The Office stated its own order of preference plainly — Thai first, Pali-Sanskrit second, transliteration last — and its own President said in 2020 that last place was the place that survived.

What could not cross: The rank of speaker and hearer, which Thai binds into its verbs and its pronouns so tightly that it cannot go unsaid, cannot cross into English, because English has nowhere in its grammar to put it. The translator has to add words instead, and words that can be added can always be cut.

Overturned if: Someone produces a lexical count — the counter named, the year given, the method stated — that actually measures the Pali-Sanskrit share of the modern Thai lexicon; or usage data showing that ​คณิตกรณ์ or ​จดหมายอิเล็กทรอนิกส์ is still current in ordinary speech and not only in official paperwork.

Sources: ​กาญจนา ​นาค​สกุล (Kanchana Naksakul), "​คำสรรพนาม​ใน​ภาษาไทย​สะท้อน​วัฒนธรรม​ไทย", ​จดหมายข่าว​ราชบัณฑิตยสถาน vol. 7 no. 73 (June 1997) — http://legacy.orst.go.th/?knowledges=%E0%B8%84%E0%B8%B3%E0%B8%AA%E0%B8%A3%E0%B8%A3%E0%B8%9E%E0%B8%99%E0%B8%B2%E0%B8%A1%E0%B9%83%E0%B8%99%E0%B8%A0%E0%B8%B2%E0%B8%A9%E0%B8%B2%E0%B9%84%E0%B8%97%E0%B8%A2%E0%B8%AA%E0%B8%B0%E0%B8%97%E0%B9%89e · ​สำนักงาน​ราชบัณฑิตยสภา, "​รับประทาน", radio programme "​รู้ ​รัก ​ภาษาไทย", broadcast 30 October 2009 — http://legacy.orst.go.th/?knowledges=%E0%B8%A3%E0%B8%B1%E0%B8%9A%E0%B8%9B%E0%B8%A3%E0%B8%B0%E0%B8%97%E0%B8%B2%E0%B8%99-%E0%B9%93%E0%B9%90-%E0%B8%95%E0%B8%B8%E0%B8%A5%E0%B8%B2%E0%B8%84%E0%B8%A1-%E0%B9%92%E0%B9%95%E0%B9%95%E0%B9%92 · Eric McCready, "A Semantics for Honorifics with Reference to Thai", PACLIC 28 (2014) — https://aclanthology.org/Y14-1058.pdf · "'​ราชบัณฑิต' ​ยุคใหม่ ​กับ '​ศัพท์บัญญัติ' ​ดิสรัป​ชัน", Bangkok Biznews, 6 July 2020 (interviews with ​สุร​พล ​อิสร​ไกร​ศีล and ​อร​พัช ​บวร​รักษา) — https://www.bangkokbiznews.com/social/888035 · "'​ระบบ​ศัพท์บัญญัติ' ​สำนักงาน​ราชบัณฑิตยสภา ​ปรับปรุง​ล่าสุด ​พร้อม​ใช้งาน​แล้ว​วันนี้", NECTEC, 30 April 2019 (quoting ​กนก​วลี ​ชู​ชัย​ยะ) — https://www.nectec.or.th/news/news-pr-news/royin-coined.html · ​ศัพท์บัญญัติ ๔๐ ​สาขาวิชา, Office of the Royal Society — https://coined-word.orst.go.th/ · Kanlaya Coulsting, "Shakespeare in Thai", Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, 1 November 2017 — https://www.shakespeare.org.uk/explore-shakespeare/blogs/shakespeare-thai/ · "To be or not to be in Thailand", Bangkok Post Special Report (2016) — https://www.bangkokpost.com/thailand/special-reports/1241218/to-be-or-not-to-be-in-thailand · ​อาชญาสิทธิ์ ​ศรีสุวรรณ, "​มี​ผู้แปล Romeo and Juliet ​มา​เป็น​ภาษาไทย​ก่อน​ในหลวง​รัชกาล​ที่ 6", The101.world, 31 January 2023 — https://www.the101.world/romeo-and-juliet-thai/ · "Vajiravudh", Wikipedia — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vajiravudh · "Thai name", Wikipedia — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thai_name · "​กำเนิด '​เสือป่า' ​ก่อน​มี '​ลูกเสือ'! ร.๖ ​ทรง​ตอบโต้​คำวิจารณ์...", MGR Online — https://mgronline.com/onlinesection/detail/9630000067423 · Søren Egerod, "Swatow loan-words in Siamese", Acta Orientalia 23 (1959), 137–156 — https://journals.uio.no/actaorientalia/article/view/5303 · Rikker Dockum, "Sanskrit loanword adaptation in Old Thai: epigraphic evidence from the Sukhothai corpus", 16th World Sanskrit Conference — https://www.academia.edu/28516211/Sanskrit_loanword_adaptation_in_Old_Thai_epigraphic_evidence_from_the_Sukhothai_corpus · "List of loanwords in Thai", Wikipedia — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_loanwords_in_Thai