Parikara seems to be the source of บริกร(“one who serves, service provider; waiter, waitress; etc”), rather than the present term, บริการ(bɔɔ-rí-gaan, “service; to serve”).
Etymologically, the term บริการ(bɔɔ-rí-gaan) must be of Pali/Sanskrit origin (from pari "around; about" + kāra "action; task; work; etc", probably meaning "work[ing] around [someone]" = serving, attending, or something like that).
A Tamil dictionary says parikāra means 'servant' (at least in Tamil).
I found a 18th century text, the play ยุขัน, saying:
On that occasion, Her Majesty the Queen, the Most Considerate One, then gave and granted a hundred thousand parikāra girls [/female parikāra] to the two ladies, her beloved daughters.
The term บริการ(bɔɔ-rí-gaan) in 4 means "servant", no doubt.
Could it be that the term บริการ(bɔɔ-rí-gaan) originally meant "servant" and the meaning later changed to "service; to serve (to provide service, to attend, to help, etc)"? Or could it be that the term, in old usage, meant "servant; service; to serve", and its meaning later changed to "service; to serve" only?
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@Iudexvivorum Thank you for the research! I agree with your points above.
For one, both Sanskritपरिकार(parikāra) and Paliparikāra do appear to exist sporadically, but their uses seem to have been quite rare. Most often, parikāra in various languages seemed to have been an alternative form of parikara (“one who helps, assists or serves”), and there are still modern descendants from both forms in this sense. Examples include Tamilபரிகாரன்(parikāraṉ, “servant”), Bengaliপরিকর(porikor, “assistant; companion”), Thaiบริกร(bɔɔ-rí-gɔɔn), and the 18th-century attestation of บริการ(bɔɔ-rí-gaan) meaning “servant”. Aside from this meaning, there are some modern languages making use of parikāra in other meanings, most notably Nepaliपरिकार(parikār), which means “a type of food” (खानेकुराको किसिम) – it's unclear how this relates to the Sanskrit and Pali words above.
Thus summarising the above, the word Thaiบริการ(bɔɔ-rí-gaan) as meaning “service” appears to have been fairly recent. In previous records, it meant “to assist; to support; to serve; servant”, although it was perhaps much less common in frequency in the language, compared to its frequency in modern Thai.
Interestingly, I found an article, titled Remembering Prince Wan and said to have been published in the Bangkok Post on the 25th August, 2001. It contained the following reference to the word:
Yet certain words, like certain familiar objects, have not always been around. There were times when one had to make do without them, such as the very obliging word borikan (Thai for “service”), or the now bellowed-all-over-the-place seriphap (“freedom”), or the ever up-to-date pathiwat (“revolution”) or pathiroop (“reform”) ...
... and further down in the article:
The word borikan (“service”), which Prince Wan had seen on a sign put up in a small village on the way to Bang Saen not long after he had coined it, came as one of his first very pleasant surprises in the field of coinages.
This intriguing anecdote (of unknown degree of veracity) prompted me to research this further. Prince Wan was an avid proponent for the use of Thai words, and had been attributed as the person who had coined many new concepts in Thai, such as association, bank, company, family, service, supply, demand, freedom, pollution, revolution, reform, war and zone. He has penned การบัญญัติศัพท์ภาษาไทย (which may be relevant; see pp. 103), although I could not seem to find the article online.
Perhaps this is the missing link – one that would allow the explanation of the seemingly sudden popularisation (and repurposing) of this word? It would account for the absence of a Khmer comparandum, and could have been inspired by the intuitive interpretability of this word as บริ(bɔɔ-rí-, “around”) + การ(gaan, “working”). Wyang (talk) 05:15, 3 September 2017 (UTC)Reply
