Thai honorifics

Honorifics are a class of words or grammatical morphemes that encode a wide variety of social relationships between interlocutors or between interlocutors and referents. Honorific phenomena in Thai include honorific registers, honorific pronominals, and honorific particles.

Thai honorifics, although not as extensive as Japanese honorifics, date back to the Sukhothai Kingdom, a period which lasted from 1238 to 1420 CE During the Sukhothai period, honorifics appeared in the form of kinship terms. The Sukhothai period also saw the introduction of many Khmer and Pali loanwords to Thai. Later, in the Ayutthaya Kingdom (1351 to 1767 CE), a new form of honorific speech evolved. While kinship terms continued to be used, a royal vocabulary known as "raja-sap" (Thai: ราชาศัพท์; rtgs: Rachasap) emerged. The Raja-sap, an honorific register, was created as a way for commoners and aristocrats alike to talk to and about the king of Thailand. Soon after its creation, the use of royal vocabulary was extended to address all members of the royal family as well as aristocrats. At the same time, a clerical vocabulary used to talk to or about monks arose, very similar to the raja-sap. With the development of royal and clerical vocabularies, means for honorific speech increased significantly. The Bangkok period, from 1782 to the present, saw even greater expansion of the raja-sap as it became the formal, or polite, way to address all peoples or topics. Specifically, lexical items from honorific registers replaced native Thai pronouns, resulting in an entirely new set of pronominal forms. Kinship terms continued to be used as honorifics, and a new type of honorific emerged as well, polite particles.

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