Toponyms in the Western Region of Thailand

Abstract

Village names or toponyms in the Western region of Thailand, i.e. Kanchanaburi, Nakorn Pathom, Ratchaburi, Phetchaburi, Prachuap Khiri Khan, Samut 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 aims of this study are: 1) to analyse the linguistic structure of Thai village names 2) to set up dimensions for the semantic 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 names 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 nongeographical features which consist of plants, animals, uncultivated or the cultivated land and profession, constructed objects, numbers, persons, and other ethic languages, the locative or directional features which are divided into prepositional locatives and noun 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.