Satellites and Sailors...NavIC...Nawik...नाविक...นาวิก...

Hey, folks! Ned Nerdington here with a techno-linguistic knowledge nugget that 99.99% of regular folks out there won't care about...

I've always been a bit of a low-key tech and language nerd, interested in language families, networking, new phones and wearables, and just how all those things we take for granted on a daily basis work for us. I was messing around on GSMarena today doing a comparison of the OnePlus 15 and Oppo Find X9 Pro. OnePlus (currently on a OnePlus 13...best phone I've ever had) is a subsidiary of Oppo and essentially the Western/US (India, too, I reckon) leg of Oppo, a Chinese company. Both offer fantastic handsets, but something that caught my attention was the positioning attributes of both of these phones. In addition to the typical GPS, GLONASS, and BDS, there were a few other constellations that I didn't recognize...

One of those was NavIC, which is India's constellation. It stands for Navigation with Indian Constellation, but the acronym is pronounced something like "nah-wick," which set off an alarm in my brainasium (definitely a Grandma's Boy reference). Lots of Thai words stem from, or are complete borrow words, from Indian languages. This is no surprise, since the Pali Canon, the compilation of early Buddhist texts, was compiled in Sri Lanka and preserved in the Pali language...which is still heard in chanting throughout Southeast Asia today. To get back on track, though, the word "Nah-wick" is the exact same word in both various Indian languages and in Thai...and it means maritime, or naval/sailor.

There are many other linguistic similarities and traditions in Thailand that stem from Indian origins. For my fellow expats (immigrants is more proper, but for many of us, our visas are the non-immigrant type...semantics), can you name a few? Ramayana...Ramakien? Numerous other examples exist and permeate daily life here.