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Bangkok set for official change of name to "Krung Thep Maha Nakhon"


webfact

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1 minute ago, StayinThailand2much said:

Imagine, you just heard the song "One Night in Bangkok" on the radio... Inspired, you decide on your first trip to Bangkok. You search for a flight to and hotels in Bangkok, but all you can find is 'Krunthep Maha whatsoever...' Then you see offers in Manila and Bali; you heard of these exotic places too, and book there...

Sorry, Great minds think alike!

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2 hours ago, trainman34014 said:

Don't laugh; i've heard similar things said in many country's when people ask me where i live !    Another view you get when in Singapore or Malaysia,Taiwan etc is  ''Ah yes; Thailand, the Lunatic Asylum of South East Asia'' !

'Bangkok' has a certain image in my country, yes. But what will change? - If people ask me where I live now, and I tell them 'Krung Thep Maha... (nevermind)', they will just ask me 'Where is that?', cause no-one will know. So, I'll have to tell them: "It was formerly known as 'Bangkok', which will only extend the conversation about this place and its image...

 

And as for the 'Lunatic Asylum'; every time I travel to Laos, and the receptionist at the hotel asks me where I'm arriving from, the conversation goes like:

 

Me: "From Thailand..."

 

Receptionist: "Oh, Thailand? Thailand has many problems."

 

Me: "You bet."

Edited by StayinThailand2much
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44 minutes ago, clivebaxter said:

Bring back serfdom, another step back into the past. ????

Didn't know they abolished it, as most of the land in Thailand is NOT (red) chanoted.

Edited by KhunLA
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2 hours ago, lemonjelly said:

Krung Tep would be a closer transliteration. The Thai obsession with the letter “H” is weird 

The transliteration 'Thep' is the correct one....

 

The typical transliteration systems all use the 'h' to denote a hard consonant - so 'ph' is a hard p sound as in 'paste' or indeed Phuket. And also 'kh' is the transliteration for a hard 'k' sound like the C in 'cake' - whereas 'k' on its own is a 'g' sound like the g in 'game' - and that does mean Phuket is properly pronounced with a 'g' sound not the wrong hard k sound... mind you it would be better transliterated as Phuuket to indicate the long initial vowel sound.

And similarly, 'th' is a hard t sound like t in 'taste'.

 

Transliteration systems all have to deal with the problem of the Western alphabet only having 26 symbols... whereas Thai has many, many as it is phonetic.

 

 

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12 minutes ago, coops said:

Transliteration systems all have to deal with the problem of the Western alphabet only having 26 symbols... whereas Thai has many, many as it is phonetic.

And the Thais didn't make it easier for themselves, and others, randomly using English and French transliterations, with the effect that many place names in Thailand are spelled in half a dozen (or so) different ways.

Edited by StayinThailand2much
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6 minutes ago, toofarnorth said:

My wife still calls Myanmar Burma.  Makes sense ' Oh he speaks Burmese he also speaks Myanmarese '.

Saying that Americans speak English .

They all do...Pah-ma.

 

But tbh the Myanmarese (?) Call it Myanmar as well.

 

Burmese is the predominant language. Dozens more.

 

The American insistence to call it Burma is just stupid. The name was changed decades ago. There are dozens of ethnicities the nation hardly just belongs to the Burmese.

Edited by TheScience
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45 minutes ago, StayinThailand2much said:

Imagine, you just heard the song "One Night in Bangkok" on the car radio... Inspired, you decide on your first trip to Bangkok. You search online for a flight to, and hotels in Bangkok, but all you can find is 'Krungthep Maha whatsoever...' Then you see offers in Manila and Bali; you heard of these exotic places too, and book there...

 

For me, 'Mumbai' just doesn't inspire the same wanderlust as 'Bombay'. And 'Persia' also sounds more inviting than 'Iran'... And while Vietnamese more and more call 'Ho Chi Minh City' by its former name, the Thais go backwards to a less wordly name. Just imagine New Yorkers renamed their city 'New Amsterdam'...

 

Exactly.

 

 

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4 hours ago, webfact said:

Krung Thep Maha Nakhon will be the official English spelling from now on.

I hope they extend all the necessary spaces on auto-fill boxes and any relevant documents that require a full address.

It's almost impossible now to fill some out correctly

 

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