The Criticisms of His Majesty King Chulalongkorn: The Changes of Words and Idioms

Abstract

The research study aims to examine the changes of the words and idioms used in the criticisms of His Majesty King Chulalongkorn, and to compare words and idioms used for the criticism between the previous and the present days. The criticisms of His Majesty King Chulalongkorn toward the memorabilia of Her Royal Highness Princess Naridara Dhevi (Princess of Wat Pho), was studied employing Chamni-Roksan’s (2015) concept of the change of language. The statistic used to analyze the data was a percentage.

The results showed that, in His Majesty King Chulalongkorn’s criticisms, there were eighty words and idioms which were used differently in the present days. The most changing element was the changes of sound which was at 46.25 percent, following by     the changes of vocabulary at 26.25 percent, the changes of word’s meaning at 15.00 percent and the changes of grammatical point at 12.50 percent. The factors effecting on  the changes of words and idioms included: 1) the differences of the language usage of  the people from the lower class in the society that they had the different education level, therefore; they tended to use the particular language forms and styles; 2) the pronunciation styles which were changed accordingly to the convenient issues of the people living in different eras; 3) the advancement of technologies which lead to the new-invented words, and also the use of borrowing words from foreign countries. The words were employed to call everything that were invented from the advanced technologies and 4) the use of sufficient language style, that is, generally the use of two identical words having the same meaning is not allowed in any languages. When there is the word borrowing, and the meaning of that borrowed word is similar to the one existing in the native language, either the meaning of the native word or the borrowed one is needed to be changed,  so the two words could be existed in the language.