Toponyms in the Western Region of Thailand

Authors

Sujaritlak Deepadung

Publication Date

2003-01-01

Abstract

Village names or toponyms in the Western region of Thailand, i.e. Kanchanaburi, Nakorn Pathom, Ratchaburi, Phetchaburi, Prachuap Khiri Khan, Samust songkhram, samut Sakorn and Suphan Buri, in this study are drawn from a complete list of names in Thamniap Thongthii 2535 BC (Provincial Records 1992). The aim of this study are: 1) to analyse the linguistic structure of Thai village names 2) to set up dimensions for the semantics features of the village names in the western region of Thailand and 3) to make a frequency count of the general names which are the first morpheme of a name. The result are as follows: 1) the linguistic structure of the village name is the same as that of the grammatical word structure in Thai 2) there are five major semantic dimensions of the village names, namely the geographical features which include water or sources of water, elevated land areas and other geographical areas, the non-geographical features which consist of plants, animals, uncultivated or the cultivated land and profession, constructed objects, numbers, persons, and other ethnic languages, the locative or directional features which are divided into prepositional locatives and nun locatives, the auspicious features and the descriptive features, and 3) the village names to the western region of Thailand rely significantly on physical geography of the area.

First Page

31

Last Page

65

Recommended Citation

Deepadung, Sujaritlak (2003) "Toponyms in the Western Region of Thailand," Manusya, Journal of Humanities: Vol. 6: No. 2, Article 2.
Available at: https://digital.car.chula.ac.th/manusya/vol6/iss2/2