The Inscriptions on the murals of Wat Nong Bua

• Applicant: Dr. Marek Buchmann
• Subject Area: Applied Linguistics, Computational Linguistics
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 509155667

The region of present-day northern Thailand has had an eventful and interesting history. To understand the history and culture of today's Thailand and the neighbouring regions of northern Thailand, an accurate knowledge of the history of northern Thailand is essential. The exploration and study of language and writing of this region is an area of research which may provide the basis for many other areas of history and social sciences. Northern Thailand has a very comprehensive, very well preserved and documented written culture. Stone inscriptions and inscriptions on temple murals, in addition to manuscripts on palm leaf and on local paper (Samut Khoy) are the most important surviving written sources. Looking at the starting point in terms of region, history and written sources, the corpus linguistic research as part of linguistics is a very good and proven method, to research and analyse the language of this region accurately.The Wat Nong Bua temple, the "Lotus Pond Monastery", dealt with in this project is located about 40 kilometres north of City of Nan. It was built in 1862 by the Tai Lue, who played a prominent role in the history of the Nan Valley region from the 19th century onwards. The temple is famous for its murals, which are similar in style to those of Wat Phumin, located in downtown Nan. The village around Nong Bua is still predominantly inhabited by the Tai Lue. The temple itself, with its distinctive murals and inscriptions, is a prime example of this culture.The lack of translation of these nearly 200 inscriptions of this temple into standard Thai and English, the non-existent linguistic analysis and visual documentation in the form of a scientific publication are reasons why the necessity is so great. The publications resulting from the project published in English lay important foundations for further research in an international research context. Research on medieval languages ​​and scripts of Southeast Asia is far from over, with the possible exception of ancient Khmer.The main goals are therefore to publish the inscriptions of the murals of Wat Nong Bua for the first time as a pictorial documented collection of the paintings together with the scientific translation of all inscriptions and thus to provide an essential basis for further research in various sciences.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants