Historical Dictionary of Thai

[Doug Cooper]

> 1)  Does this usage (phlii chiip) predate the modern phenomenon of
> Islamic bomber marytrs?
Yes.  For Thai, it appears in the texts of both the Royal Institute
dictionary and the Kanchanapisek encyclopedia in the context
/phlii chiip pheua chaat/ 'sacrifice yourself for the nation.'  I've
heard the phrase in an older (Phibulsongkram era?) military
anthem, and am told it's not uncommon in such songs.  The phrase
isn't found in either MacFarland or Pallegoix (60 and 150 years old).

  /phlii/ 's most common collocate by far is /chiip/ :  124 of 231 pairs
in the 1994-96 Thai News Agency corpus (49 megs); the same
pattern is seen in my 50-meg set of all on-line editions of Khao Sot,
Thai Rath, and Matichon for January, February, and March, 2000.
In both corpora, /rabert phlii chiip/ accounts for about 10% of
appearances (actually, the formulation is always /kaan rabert .../
in the TNA text).

  Historically, /phlii/ appears in lines 8 and 9, face 3, of Inscription 1
in positive and negative forms of the phrase  ไหว้ ดี พลี ถูก
/waay dii phlii thuuk/ , roughly translated as 'make obeisance
properly.'  I could not find it elsewhere in my Sukhothai or Northern
Thai inscriptional corpora.

  The source is presumably CDIAL:9171 bali 'tribute, offering',
(with some local 'balii' forms), + CDIAL:5239 jiiva 'living', presumably
into Thai via Khmer.  Headley97 cites the blii orthography as an alternate
(modern) Khmer form, along with a similar 'sacrifice for the nation'
formulation.  JC Wright (editor of CDIAL) comments that "bali" in
Rig Veda has the sense of 'national tribute.'  I couldn't find the complete
phrase in any of the usual dictionary sources (Pali Text Society,
Monier-Williams, etc.), but didn't check any of the Indic corpora.

   Given the origins, I'm curious if this particular 'suicide bomber'
phrasing started in the Indian press circa July 5, 1987, date of
the first such Tamil Tiger attack.

> 2)  Is anybody working on an historical dictionary of Thai, tracing
> uses back to origins for some or all of the word stock?  Anything
> already published or partially published?
Yes and no.

   Best,
   Doug Cooper
   _____________________________________
   Center for Research in Computational Linguistics
   http://crcl.th.net