Chiangmai Or Chiang Mai?

[Sao Jiang Mai]

Ooh my favourite pet peeve! And for those who say there is no standardised romanisation or that it doesn't matter, firstly there is and to me it certainly does! You don't have some people spelling New York while others spell Newyork, you don't choose to spell it Lon Don, so why deviate from the officially - and Royally - sanctioned Chiang Mai as per the Royal Institute. If we can't even spell our own name right I don't know how we are going to market Chiang Mai as TAT seems to be planning to do.

Chiengmai Gymkhana Club was founded in 1898 and used teh spelling of the time (pre Royal Institute) therefore they have kept their name. Some web sites choose Chiangmai AND Chiang Mai in their text for Search Engine Optimisation purposes so that searchers who use both spellings can find their web site. Don't know if its the case here though. But I agree, it's been bugging me for a while this Chiangmai Forum.

[realthaideal]

Thanks for your compliments, oh human form of K. Orang. Perhaps, with all your erudition you try on a bit of the Thai alphabet for and get some simean synergy going, expanding your already gifted frontal lobes. You'd see the differences between what Thai say and how they write it is quite interesting. Many many hours of mental musings to be had from the gift of Thai literacy, and sadly even I am still only of juvenile stature in my reading capabilities. I bought myself a big old poster of the Gor Gai (hate that it's usually called Kor Kai - once again we have come full circle with transliteration) and then looked at it every day as it was in a conspicuous place on the wall. Then in some spare time, just wrote. Just copied the letters, getting used to their shapes, the subtle differences between some of them. And noting the really different ones that stand out so easily you learn them rt away. And for example if you know fish is Pla, and then under the picture for 'Por Pla' (a plosive bp really... here we go again) is a three letter word, and the pic tells you the first one is Por, you can deduce the other letters. Seriously, you can start reading in about a half hours time. I dare you !

And K. Sabai Jai, well, thank you for teaching me. You know, with Phnom Penh being a 'Moon Mountain' - please I hope I'm at least getting this one right - I had assumed that the chopped off Wieng Jan was referring to a City of the Moon, not a City of Sandalwood. But this explains to me something: why some friends of mine went to Lao to purchase some very expensive and special wood that burns very very slowly and has a pleasing odor. They lit it for me, and I knew I recognized it, but wasn't sure entirely what it was. The Thai word they had been given for it in Lao was something along the line of 'Mai Krist, or Krisn' (I forget) and to them this was implying that this was a biblical incense wood (Old n New testament, or some Hindu Krishna stuff). Now it all comes together.

And back to topic: Chiang Mai - a rose of the north by any other name .....

[orang37]

Sawasdee Khrup, Khun Sabaijai, Khun RealThaiDeal,

Really enjoy your recent comments on the Thai language.

During the time I believe you replied to my first version of my last post on that thread, I edited what I said; appreciate any reply (to the edited version) whether on the forum or by PM, thanks.

Thanks for your suggestions on getting Thai literate, Khun RealThaiDeal; I have no excuse for my not doing so already (I actually learned the Devnagri script and diacritical markings before I went to India for a year on a Berkeley Fellowship and got off the plane able to read street signs phonetically ... although, of course, I never mastered the wonderful complex range of aspirated sounds mixing "b" and "p" and "d" western English phoneme sounds). Right now I just don't have head-room to continue intense involvement in computer programming and doing my own creative writing, and add in Thai. Unfortunate, but I also feel that it would take so long to get to the point I could read anything to the "depth" anything I'd really want to read that it's probably not going to happen. To some extent I came to same conclusion in India with Hindi-Urdu which is "zaaban i bazaar," polyglot language of the trading caravans that came with the Mughals as they swept across India destroying a patchwork quilt of nawabarates, emirates, maharajates, etc. Hindi-Urdu (like English reached back into Latin and Greek) had to go back to an archaic language (Sanskrit, and a conqueror's "high culture" language [urdu]) to create a technical, scientific, aesthetic vocabulary. I saw, in India that if I wanted to study a language, it would be something like Tamil which has an unbroken 3000 year old history of cultural and literary development.

Khun Sabai Jai,

Clearly you can have "effective" cohesive regulation of language, as in France, but you can also have "ineffective" regulation where there is a "top-down specification" but it is not "enforced" widely. I don't know if that is the case with the Thai official convention you mention.

I notice you are a "super moderator," and I would like to express to you that I hope we don't end up seeing language discussions that have some level of "intellectual content" being routed off to the Thai language forum when, imho, they have direct relationship to northern Thailand per se.

After all, as you well know, until the coming of the railroad, and, before that, during the long historical process of bringing many areas of Thailand under centralized control from Bangkok (via the Monthon system), Chiang Mai was, in many ways, another nation (many of the first Chakri dynasty kings relating to Chiang Mai as a "vassal state," as well as a key geo-political alliance in order to neutralize first Burmese, and then Western power, aggression ?).

.. and : to all ... :

That unique heritage of Chiang Mai is, of course, not "tangible" to many Farangs who could care less, but for some of us it is a wonderful thing to learn about, to discover. I imagine you are aware of the work of the former editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review, Michael Vatikiotis (he did a doctorate in northern Thai history at Chiang Mai University), who, in a speech on the 700th. anniversary of Chiang Mai, commented on how the former social-class stratification/segregation of Chiang Mai, and its repopulation at times by conquered people (and refugees, like the Mon silversmiths who came to Wu Lai road fleeing the rapacity of Burmese overlords) has, paradoxically, contributed to the ethnic "richness" of the culture of Chiang Mai today.

To make this more specific : I refer to the practice of enslaved or captured of voluntariliy migran peoples being given poor quality land (Wu Lai area was "bottom land" long ago, and malarial), not being allowed to live inside the walled city, or be there past a certain time of night. Being forced to remain in certain occupations (as the silversmiths were), remain in certain enclaves. Being used (corvee) for the "dirtiest" work three months a year or more ... if not technically "enslaved" or gifted by the monarch to support certain temples.

Those of you who might think I am implying a value judgement here : I find the fact that both Ayudhya and Lanna Kingdoms were built on slave labor, constantly re-settled by raiding for population, etc. in no way any different than knowing that the Alhambra was built for the Moorish overlords by Christian slaves supervised by Jewish civil servants. Or knowing that my own great-grandfather owned slaves in the U.S. Or knowing that Thomas Jefferson, often cited as the very "role model" for a nation not having a "national debt" was himself in hock up to his eyeballs to English and Scottish banks (as were most of his Tidewater Virginia plantation owner peers) to the point that at the very time he ran for Presidency on a platform of doing away with "national debt" he consciously knew that his lands and future dream home, Monticello, would be taken away from his family ultimately because of his debts. Which didn't stop him from spending $10,000 US dollars (a fortune at the time) on wine alone in his first year in office (hey he had to have somethng to take his mind off his black slave, Sally Fields, with whom he had several children).

Forums like TV that are moderated slightly and "broad spectrum" tend to often evolve toward the "lowest common denominator" : food, sex, griping about how bad whatever Thai officialdom you've lately bounced off of, rumors, posturing, etc., and, of course, some of us are literally "possessed," as is this blade of grass on which has fallen an unfortunate flea from his formerly comfy home on the back of a tick in the ear of a mangy soi dog, this sad mutant accomodation of an Orang soul-mind and an aging human form.

I think we can also allow lucid convesations with intellectual content to co-exist here, even if they draw "swarms" of tangential off-topic comments. Hey, my "human" enjoys creating tangential off-topic; he can't help it, it seems : he rationalizes this by saying to himself that the smell of "fatuous over-generalization" and "self flattering reductio ad absurdum" just works, for him, like catnip does for a cat

best, ~o:37;

Edited July 30, 2009 by orang37

[Limbo]

An interesting side-note : I understand that it was only in 1980 with publication of research by the late Dr. Hans Penth on a 15th. century stele (the Chang Sa now in the Chiang Mai museum), that there was a general scholarly consensus that "Lan Na" did mean, in fact, "one million rice fields," rather than "many rice fields." See the book by Sarassawadee Ongsakul I mentioned before for details. (pp. 11 and following) And here I have to "qualify" the words "scholarly consensus" by saying that I don't know whether Professor Ongsakul is referring to "outside western scholarship" or being inclusive of both Thai scholarship and western scholarship.

Sorry to hear that Dr. Hans Penth moved on, though he has had serious and very unpleasant health problems for quite a while. RIP!

He also wrote a book on Lan Na, but long after writing it, he once told me that it in fact the whole thing was a hypothetical construct.

It was a little group, mainly working as 'acharns' at the University of Chiang Mai, that pushed the concept untill everybody thought that it existed.

"If you would write down the essence of Lan Na, you wouldn't need more than an A4".

Thanks for your tip Orang37 (Belanda?). I will look for it here in Chiang Rai, somewhere it should be found.

I like the 'muang' word as telling us more about this area, the khon muang, the phasa muang (also the book Muang Metaphysics, a study of Northern Thai Myth and Ritual of Richard B. Harris - Pandora, Bangkok 1984).

You erect a building that looks like a matchbox, you put a 'galair' on top and suddenly it is a 'Lanna' building. Help!

Was it a social-cultural need to create a distinction between the north and the center?

Or was it simply instrumental in the battle between the northern 'acharns' and the irritating dominant and powerful Silapakorn group, that even here in the north controlled every penny spend on art, science, museums, art-faculties, excavations etc etc.?

Hardly anything was delegated to the people here in the north.

A million rice fields, yes, why not? Are the 12.000 ricefields (Sib-song-pan-na) in Yunnan part of it? Of course: Lan Na!

There is probably not a country in the world were during a certain period the outer crossbeams of the roofs (English?) were decorated and therewith accentuated, but the galair or galae became the symbol of 'Lanna', that also according to the late professor Dr. Hans Penth should be written Lan Na.

Limbo

[ChiangMaiFun]

So... is Admin going to ignore us again... or correct the name of the forum?

[sabaijai]

So... is Admin going to ignore us again... or correct the name of the forum?

See post #30 above.