Bangkok name change announcement causes confusion

Visitors have their photo taken at the Temple of the Emerald Buddha on Nov 1 last year, its first day of reopening after the Covid-19 closure. (File photo: Pattarapong Chatpattarasill)
Visitors have their photo taken at the Temple of the Emerald Buddha on Nov 1 last year, its first day of reopening after the Covid-19 closure. (File photo: Pattarapong Chatpattarasill)

The Office of the Royal Society (ORST) is taking flak from netizens over confusion about what Thailand's capital should be called between Bangkok and the official Krung Thep Maha Nakhon.

However, Krung Thep Maha Nakhon has been the capital's official name since 2001.

The cabinet on Tuesday approved a Prime Minister's Office draft announcement of the name change, as proposed by the ORST.

The new official name, Krung Thep Maha Nakhon, will not come into effect until it is vetted by a committee.

In the ORST's announcement, Krung Thep Maha Nakhon will become the official name of the Kingdom of Thailand's capital. However, the name Bangkok will be put in parentheses.

The ORST also updated the official spelling for other countries, including Rome and Roma for Italy's capital, the change of Myanmar's capital from Yangon to Nay Pyi Taw and the change of the Kingdom of Nepal to the Federal Democratic Republic of Nepal.

However, a government spokeswoman said nothing had been changed in the capital's name but for punctuation marks. "Krung Thep Maha Nakhon; Bangkok" with a semicolon between them which has been used since 2001, will now be changed to "Krung Thep Maha Nakhon (Bangkok)", she said.

The Thai name Krung Thep Maha Nakhon would be used only as its official name. The name Bangkok would still be recognised in parentheses, she said.

On its Facebook page, the Office of the Royal Society also posted a message that both names could be used, Krung Thep Maha Nakhon and Bangkok, after its announcement on the name change drew public criticism.

Bangkok governor Aswin Kwanmuang on Wednesday said that actually the official name of the capital -- Krung Thep Maha Nakhon -- remains unchanged in the latest update by the ORST because it has been in use since 2001. However, most foreigners refer to the capital as Bangkok, he said.

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Vocabulary

  • announcement: a spoken or written statement that informs people about something - การประกาศ
  • cabinet: the group of government ministers who make and approve government policy - คณะรัฐมนตรี
  • committee: a group of people who are chosen, usually by a larger group, to make decisions or to deal with a particular subject - คณะกรรมการ
  • confusion: a feeling that you do not understand something or cannot decide what to do - ความสับสน
  • criticism: comments that show that you think something is wrong or bad - การวิจารณ์
  • flak: criticism - การวิจารณ์, การต่อต้าน
  • netizens (noun): people who use the Internet a lot - พลเมืองเครือข่ายคอมพิวเตอร์
  • official: done by people in authority or decided by the government; announced publicly - เป็นทางการ
  • parenthesis (noun): either of a pair of marks, ( ) placed around extra information in a piece of writing or part of a problem in mathematics - วงเล็บ
  • punctuation: (the use of) special marks that you add to writing to separate phrases and sentences, to show that something is a question, etc - การใช้เครื่องหมายวรรคตอน
  • recognised: well known - เป็นที่รู้จักกันดี
  • vetting: examining something or someone carefully to make certain that they are acceptable or suitable - ตรวจสอบ
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