Language Origins & the Indo-European Root
ทำไมคำไทยบางคำคล้ายอังกฤษ ความลับของต้นกำเนิดภาษาโลก
Summary
Fai and fire sound alike and are not related — a good illustration that resemblance is not descent.
Meanwhile mātā, pitā, nāma, nava and dasa genuinely connect to mother, father, name, new and ten, through a root several thousand years old.
The route runs from Thai into Pali and Sanskrit, and up into the Indo-European family.
Key points
Accidental resemblance happens constantly
Comparative linguistics therefore requires regular sound correspondences, not merely similar sounds.
The oldest words are kinship terms and numbers
They change most slowly, which makes them the best evidence of relatedness.
Thai is not in the Indo-European family
Those words are borrowings through Pali and Sanskrit, not an inherited line of descent.
Language records the route a civilisation took
The words that reached Thai show which way the ideas and the religion travelled.