Tai people and their languages: theories concerning the origin of the Tai language and the Tai homeland

Abstract

As we all know, language and humankind are inseparable. One cannot imagine a full-fleshed human being unfurnished with speech, devoid of a means of communication of thought. Simplistic theories about primitive people who were only able to gesticulate with an occasional grunt have been long abandoned since the dawn of linguistic science. Assuming that people have inhabited the Earth for more than one million years, one must recognize that language, one of man's greatest intellectual accomplishments, is ancient. Historical time and written records however, does not date back more than 7,000 years. Consequently, discussions of the origin and evolution of language, any language, have been taboo in the field of linguistics for a number of years. For example, in the French Societe de Linguistique, if some bold soul dares invoke this question, the best that he or she could hope to get is contemptuous raised eyebrows. One can sympathize with the French scholars, for their silence is caused by our inadequate knowledge on the subject of the evolution of language. No fossil cries were ever found at the Ban Chieng1 dig. Morris Swadesh' s (1971, p. 15 8) tongue in cheek remark emphasizes this fact, "because sounds do not turn to stone". The science of today enables us to date the earliest bones in Ban Chieng around 4430 B.C. (Charoenwongsa & Diskul, 1978, p. 45), but it cannot tell us which language those earliest jaws formulated even though some Thai scholars, in their nationalistic enthusiasm, readily saw the resemblance between the skeletons of Ban Chieng and the present-day Thai people. Having thus phrased the caveat, the writer asks for the reader's understanding that this is not an attempt to answer the unanswerable: the origin of the Tai language. However, the question about the homeland of the Tai people, albeit a human attempt to probe the unsubstantiated past, still permits a variety of research possibilities. Theories put forth by different researchers will be enumerated chronologically (the oldest theory first) in the following. Again I must caution that all of these are still theories, not proven facts.