I am very thankful to Nina Van Gorkom and Venerable Dhammanando for
their kind assistance. Dhammanando particularly reflects in his post an
exquisitely heuristic range of research interests. Might the two of you
only indulge me further

1. Assuming samnak is indeed a loan word from Classical Khmer, how might
we ascertain the term's true sense? In other words, what might be the
Sk/P word from which samnak is derived? Goggle brings up Khmer samnag.
Parsing this word as sam + nag provides some pretty clear Sanskritic
intimation. However Monier-Williams has nil.

2. How about this? Could a reconstructed meaning be drawn from sam +
nak/nag? Thus nak becomes a Thai modification of the Classical Khmer
nag, as derived from the Sanskrit naga (no long vowels). Naga would
signify/imply and transfer the meaning(s) of 'mountain & tree' - hence
'fixity and firmness'. In a similar way (if I'm not mistaken), Pali na +
gacchati also means 'immovable' ('like a mountain').

3. To shepherd my question in another direction, may I assume the Thai
samnak to be a 'purely secular' term? That is, minus any qualifier -
e.g. song, patibat, yokha, et al - does samnak ('centre, union') aver to
anything more than a social organization, association, society, club,
institute, etc? Is samnak ever a stand-alone word?

Best regards,

sritantra

--- In Pali@yahoogroups.com, nina van gorkom <vangorko@...> wrote:
>
> Venerable Sritantra,
>
> op 01-04-2006 05:57 schreef sritantra op sritantra@...:
>
> > Now as for "song", according to at least one monastic Thai-speaker
it
> > is a colloquialization (or linguistic alteration) of Sk/P sangha. I
> > would appreciate any verification or refutation of this.
> >
> > In brief, does anybody have any clear idea as to the derivation
> > of "samnak"? Being of two syllables, my instincts tell me that it
> > must be Sanskrit/Pali in origin.
> -------
> N: yes, song is sangha, community.
> samnak I recall: a center. Samnak patibat, a meditation center.
> With respect,
> Nina.
>



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