The Appearance and Semantic Extension of the Word /sǔay/ from the Past to the Present

Abstract

This article aims to study the appearance of the word /suay/ and its semantic extension from the Sukhothai period to the present. The data is from Thai prose from the Sukhothai period to the Rattanakosin period (from the reign of King Rama I to the reign of King Rama VIII) and contemporary data (from the reign of King Rama IX to King Rama X) from Twitter in order to study the word /suay/ in the natural communication context. The first result showed that the word /suay/ is likely to have been used since the Ayutthaya period because it was first found in Ayutthaya Thai poems. Later, the word was also found in Thai proses in Rattanakosin period in terms of ‘beauty’ or ‘satisfaction’. Presumably, the word /suay/ is not a Thai word but is borrowed from /sruay/ in Khmer and is differentiated in both the forms of the word and its meaning. The semantic extension has occurred from the process of meaning transferred by a mechanism of metaphor.