Navavan Bandhumedha
The Royal Society of Thailand
This paper provides a brief account of Professor Dr. Khun Banchob Bandhumedha’s life and works with an emphasis on her contributions to the study of the Thai language.
Professor Banchob had a keen interest in etymology and especially word derivations. The person who had significant influence on her academic pursuit was Phraya Anuman Rajadhon, who she got to know as a fourth-year student and was in constant contact throughout her life.
Some parts of her life were recounted in her columns in Satrisarn, a now-defunct women’s weekly magazine, covering her travels to various places to learn the languages of her interest and her contact with people living there, as well as their languages and cultures. Many of her articles dealt with the Thai language, some of them providing insight into Thai orthography. A case in point was an analysis of the vowel, sa-rà ʡai mái-múan [ใ].
In addition to her articles, Professor Banchob wrote three textbooks. The first one gave an insightful view on the nature of the Thai language. On the formation of Thai words, in particular, apart from compounds, reduplications, couplets and four-syllable expressions, she brought attention to a class of words with what she called upasak-thiam, or “pseudo-prefixes.” The second textbook described the characteristics of Pali and Sanskrit in comparison with those of Thai, including sound and meaning changes in borrowings from those two languages. An interesting observation in this textbook was that Thai speakers changed the /t/, /p/, and /v/ sounds in some Pali and Sanskrit loanwords into /d/, /b/, and /ph/, respectively. Such changes were attributable to the fact that many Thai borrowings from Pali and Sanskrit were through the Khmer language. The third textbook examined the characteristics of some other languages than Pali and Sanskrit that influenced the Thai language – in particular, Khmer, Chinese and English. In the case of Khmer, she pointed out that some Thai words that were often mistakenly thought to be borrowings from Khmer were, in fact, found to be the other way around.
One of Professor Banchob’s works that has indirectly contributed to the study of Thai is the Tai Phake-Thai-English Dictionary. One topic at issue on Thai word spelling is the digraph ʡɔɔ-ʡàaŋ-yɔɔ-yák [อย] representing one single consonant sound /y/ [ย]. It is hypothesized that in former times, there existed an initial consonant unit /ʡy/, but the glottal stop /ʡ/ before the palatal semivowel /y/ was subsequently dropped. The two words /yuu1/and /ʡuu1/, both meaning “to stay” in Tai Phake, confirm this hypothesis. Furthermore, the dictionary also contributes to the study of Thai words and derivations. Some Tai Phake words offer clues to our understanding of Thai polysyllabic word components. Certain words support these two hypotheses: first, some Thai words are derived from other words with similar sounds and meanings; secondly, some words with pseudo-prefixes are ultimately derived from compounds.
(Presented in the 2020 Chulalongkorn Asian Heritage Forum : Thai-Tai Language and Culture, 20 July 2020, The St.Regis Hotel, Bangkok, organized by Institute of Thai Studies, Chulalongkorn University, Department of Thai, Department of Linguistics, Southeast Asian Linguistics Research Unit, Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University)