Find Your Lanna Birth Day Name: Wan Tai and Wan Meng

Your Lanna birth day name is the name of the day you were born in the old Lanna way of counting. Lanna people can name the same day in two ways. The first is the wan meng (วันฯเมังฯ, Kham Mueang reading wan meng), the day of the week. The second is the wan tai (วันฯไท, Kham Mueang reading wan tai), a name from a cycle of 60 days, such as kap jai, dap pao or ruai yi.

This lesson shows you how to find the wan tai and wan meng of your birthday, step by step, with the converter of the Moradok Lanna calendar, real examples and a way to count it yourself by hand.

Try your own date of birth in the tool below.

Wan meng and wan tai: what is the difference?

The dictionary explains the wan meng as "counting days the Mon way, like the Thai way of counting days", from Sunday to Saturday, and adds that "some use numbers instead: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7". So the wan meng comes round every 7 days.

The wan tai comes from the hon tai count (ห฿นฯไท, Kham Mueang reading hon tai), which the dictionary explains as "a way of counting time or eras in which the mae mue and the luk mue are related". So the wan tai comes round every 60 days.

Step 1: open the date converter

1. Open the date converter of the Lanna calendar (in Thai).
2. Enter your date of birth in the box "เลือกวันที่ (สากล)" (choose a date, international calendar) and press แปลงวันที่ (convert).
3. Scroll down to the ปฏิทินล้านนา (Lanna calendar) box. The row "วัน" (day) gives two things side by side: the Kham Mueang name of the weekday, then "วันไท" and the wan tai name of that day.
4. The first line of the same box gives the waxing or waning day in the northern months, such as "แรม ๙ ค่ำ เดือนสาม", the 9th waning day of the 3rd northern month.

To see every other value for your birthday, open that day's page in the calendar, for example the Lanna calendar page for 1 January 2000 (in Thai).

Step 2: read the wan meng in Kham Mueang

The days of the week in Kham Mueang differ a little from central Thai. The dictionary records them like this:

Step 3: split the wan tai into mae mue and luk mue

Every wan tai name has two parts. The first part is the mae mue (แม่มื้, Kham Mueang reading mae mue, "mother day"), also called the mae wan (แม่วันฯ, mae wan). The second part is the luk mue (ลูกมื้, luk mue, "child day").

The dictionary explains the pairing under the word wan tai: the mae mue and the luk mue are paired in order, giving kap jai, dap pao, ruai yi and so on up to ka rao. When the mae mue run out at ka, they start again at kap, but the luk mue carry on, giving kap set, dap khai. This goes on "until 5 rounds are complete, at the 10th with the 12th, ka khai": 60 names in all.

Real examples: four birthdays

Every value in this table was calculated with the Moradok Lanna calendar. The first row is the example the dictionary itself gives under the word mae pi (แม่ปี, Kham Mueang reading mae pi), and our calendar gives exactly the same values.

Look at the first and third rows: both are Wednesdays but have different wan tai names, because the two cycles have different lengths. And for people born on 29 February: the date comes only every 4 years, but the wan tai never skips a day.

Step 4: count your wan tai by hand

The wan tai runs on every day without a gap, so you can find it by counting days from a date whose name you already know. Use the dictionary's example as the starting point: Wednesday 22 November 2006 is dap mao, no. 52.

1. Count the days from the starting date to the date you want (a date calculator on your phone will do).
2. Divide by 60 and keep only the remainder.
3. Count forward that many places from no. 52. If you pass 60, subtract 60.

If your date is before the starting date, count the days backwards, take the remainder in the same way, and count back from no. 52 instead (if you go below 1, add 60).

Your birthday in the northern months

The same box in the converter also gives your birthday as a waxing or waning day of a month, in the pak lem count that most Lanna people use, which runs two months ahead of central Thailand. For example, the 9th waning day of the 3rd northern month is the 9th waning day of the 1st month (เดือนอ้าย) in central Thailand.

Areas with Tai Lue and Tai Khün culture use the hora count, which is one month behind the pak lem count, so the tool above also shows the month number in the hora count. Read where the two counts come from in Duean Nuea.

The wan tai in inscriptions and manuscripts

Giving a date with both the wan meng and the wan tai is not just a calendar habit. Kannika Wimonkasem (กรรณิการ์ วิมลเกษม, 2002) explains that Lanna inscriptions usually begin with the era year, the year name, the month, the wan meng and the wan tai, which lets scholars match the dates in inscriptions with today's calendar. A line-by-line reading of an inscription date is in Duean Nuea.

Years are named with the hon tai count too, called pi hon tai (ปีห฿นฯไท, Kham Mueang reading pi hon tai), which uses the same "mother" names as the mae mue. For birth years and their animals, read Lanna Birth-Year Relics.

Summary

• One birthday has two Lanna names: the wan meng (the day of the week, every 7 days) and the wan tai (a name in a 60-day cycle).
• You can find them at once in the date converter of the Lanna calendar, in the "วัน" row of the Lanna calendar box, or with the tool in this lesson.
• A wan tai splits into a mae mue (10 names) and a luk mue (12 names), paired until all 60 are used.
• You can count it yourself from the dictionary's starting point: Wednesday 22 November 2006 = dap mao, no. 52.

Look up more words about days, months and years in the Moradok Lanna dictionary (in Thai), and read the rest of the series in The Lanna Calendar: Complete Guide.

Sources

• Moradok Lanna dictionary: วันไท · วันเม็ง · แม่มื้อ · ลูกมื้อ · แม่ปี
• Moradok Lanna calendar: date converter (wan meng, wan tai and northern-month date of every example)
• กรรณิการ์ วิมลเกษม [Kannika Wimonkasem]. (2002). ศักราช ศก ปี วัน เดือน ฤกษ์ และยามในจารึกล้านนา [Eras, era names, years, days, months, auspicious moments and watches in Lanna inscriptions]. Damrong Wichakan 1(1). Faculty of Archaeology, Silpakorn University. In Thai.
• Wikimedia Commons file description of the Wat Lam Chang inscription photo (Hariphunchai National Museum, Lamphun)