OkRUNG THEP MAHA NAKHON could also be a mouthful, however it's much less prone to provoke sniggering amongst these with a teenage mindset than its better-known different, “Bangkok”. That's one interpretation for steering printed on February sixteenth by the Workplace of the Royal Society, Thailand’s reply to the Académie Française. A dense press launch famous that this pithy four-word model of the for much longer formal Thai identify for the nation’s capital needs to be the usual for official functions and needs to be used when writing in Roman script, too.
Some Thais criticised the federal government for abruptly altering how their capital is thought around the globe. However it's hardly the primary to contemplate rebranding a world-famous metropolis. Politicians have lengthy liked to rename locations to go well with their whims. Not often do residents clamour for change.
Usually a metropolis’s identify is modified to shed colonial or different disagreeable reminiscences. Among the many best-known is Bombay, named by the dastardly British, which grew to become Mumbai in honour of a neighborhood goddess, Mumbadevi. Batavia, the Roman identify for a part of the Netherlands, grew to become Jakarta when the Dutch left. Frunze, commemorating a distinguished Bolshevik, grew to become Bishkek because the Soviet Union crumbled. Equally widespread are merely tweaks to spelling to replicate native pronunciation: Kanpur not Cawnpore, as an example, or Yangon for Rangoon.
In Australia, varied locations related to settlers or that includes offensive language have been given Aboriginal names as an alternative. Tasmania’s Suicide Bay, the place 30 indigenous males had been murdered, is now known as Taneneryouer, that means “trauma”. In India, the ruling Bharatiya Janata Celebration is changing Muslim-sounding names in pursuit of its Hindu-nationalist agenda. Faizabad district in Uttar Pradesh is now Ayodhya district, and town of Allahabad has develop into Prayagraj. In 2019 Kazakhstan’s capital, previously Astana, (ie, “capital”), was renamed Nur-Sultan in honour of Nursultan Nazarbayev, a former president who retired that 12 months.
Inevitably, some adjustments are contentious. Town authorities of Ishigaki in southern Japan renamed an space beneath its jurisdiction to incorporate the phrase “Senkaku”, as a scattering of islands there are identified in that nation. That aggravated each China and Taiwan, which lay declare to the uninhabited cluster of rocks, and know them because the Diaoyu islands. China, for its half, final 12 months renamed a number of villages it claims in north-eastern India to replicate its most well-liked spellings.
Nor do all adjustments stick. Few folks confer with Bangalore as Bengaluru or to Chittagong as Chattogram. Rebranding Bangkok, too, could be unlikely to vary how foreigners confer with it. Which may be why Thai officers rapidly clarified issues the subsequent day: Bangkok continues to be high-quality to make use of, they stated—however so is Krung Thep Maha Nakhon.
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