Ram Mae Bot Yai : Naming Postures and Cultural and Social Reflections

Abstract

This research aimed to study the naming strategies of Ram Mae Bot Yai’s postures, and to investigate cultural and social reflections by analyzing from the names of posture which collected the data from the book written by the prince of the fourth king of Chakri dynasty including 68 names of 66 postures. The research found that there were two naming strategies; naming based on human manners and naming based on metaphor of non-human manners which the metaphor of animal was the highest. Furthermore, mostly it showed that structure of posture name was a sentence structure and most of the names had four syllables. Finally, the names of posture presented Thai lifestyles, values and beliefs of Thai people in the past in many aspects.