Historical Dictionary of Thai

[Yuphaphann Hoonchamlong]

This word has been in use in the news for a while since the occurrences
of "suicide bombing" years ago.
In the Royal Institute Dictionary B.E.2525 online version
(http://rirs3.royin.go.th/ridictionary/lookup.html), "phlii chiip" is
not listed as a word- only "phlii"  -sacrifice is. But in the newer
online dictionary such as Lexitron
(http://lexitron.nectec.or.th), "phlii chiip" is an entry - meaning
sacrifice one's life.
I don't have access to the new Royal institute dictionary at the
moment, but I will look up and let you know if it's there.

BTW, FYI, Dept. of Ling. at Chula has an online concordance service for
looking up words and their context from various types of corpora (news,
articles, stories), both contemporary and from "old " document such as
doc. from Sukhothai. King Rama V etc.
http://www.arts.chula.ac.th/~ling/ThaiConc/index.html

"rabert phlii chiip" turns up quite a number of times in the
contemporary news.

I think that there are a number of theses and small scale studies at
Chula comparing the usage of a certain groups of words across periods
of time, based on the corpus (and concordance tools) available at
Chula.  But not anywhere near the "OED" type of historical dictionary
you asked about.

----- Original Message -----
From: John Grima <john.grima at ihc.com>
Date: Thursday, September 9, 2004 9:53 pm
Subject: Historical Dictionary of Thai

>
> An inquiry about a word seen in an article in the Thai Press (forgive
> the primitive phonetics):
>
> rabert phlii chiip  "suicide bomber"
>
> Two questions:
> 1)  Does this usage (phlii chiip) predate the modern phenomenon of
> Islamic bomber marytrs?  Say in reference to the actions of Vietnamese
> monks prior during the Vietnam war?  (self immolation)  Or in some
> patriotic sense in reference to Thai historical characters?
> (death in
> battle, etc).
>
> 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?
>
> Thanks,
> John G.
>