What’s in a Name?

I have always had a modest curiosity about place-names. This started off with me as a youth who wondered how British place-names came to be, and this was a reasonable thing as a large proportion of place-names in Australia are taken from places in the UK, Cardiff springing to mind in an instant as it is the next suburb from the one where I live.

I have a map of Thailand which is bilingual to a large degree; most of the place-names are in both Thai and English, but most of the smaller places have their names only in Thai. Needless to say, the map would be useless to anyone who was looking for a small village and could not read Thai.

To get back on track – no pun intended – I have looked at some of these places on the map and pondered on their names. As a starting point, I looked at the name of the Amphur town which encompasses my wife’s village, Nong Song Hong, and looked the three words up in the Thai to English dictionary. Song and Hong were exactly what I expected; the number “two” and “room” respectively.

I got a small surprise when I looked at the Nong. I thought that it would mean “young” or similar, but I was wrong. The dictionary definition said:

หนอง:n. swamp, marsh; pus

So one could say that the literal translation means “Two swampy rooms”. That seems odd to me, so I consulted my Thai step-daughter.

She explained that there were two rivers which paralleled one another in the area, and where they diverged, they each formed a swampy area about the shape of a large room. Thus the confusing name. I have looked at satellite imagery of the place, and it shows that there are now two separate water reservoirs there, and they are close to one another, giving credence to the young lady’s explanation.

I looked a little further afield, and looked at the name of the village where my ex-girlfriend comes from, “Baan Laew”, and when I saw the dictionary definition, I had myself a little chuckle. It said:

เล้า:n. pen, fold, coop. colloq. brothel

I looked in a different direction and found a town called Waeng Noi, not far from a larger town called Phon, which is on the main highway between Korat and Khon Kaen. I didn’t look for the “Noi”, I am certain that that means “little”, but a look at the “Waeng tells me that it means either “longitude” or “sword”. One has to wonder how a town gets called Little Sword... And there is another town not far from there called Waeng Yai. I looked at this place on the map, and couldn’t see how the hell it was “yai”, but a quick reference to the step-daughter told me that it used a different “y” letter that looks like one of the Thai “t” letters when truncated.

So now I am starting to learn how to spell in Thai. The place-name literally translates as “Big Sword”. Again, one can only speculate and wonder about how the place acquired that name.

The name “Phon” is a good example of both unwritten vowels and the change of a letter’s value. If it was transliterated into English, it would be “PL”. However, by convention, when 2 consonants that form a single word do not have a vowel between them, an “O” sound is pronounced between them. Further to confuse the issue, an “L” sound may not end a word; when an “L” ends a word, it is pronounced as an “N’. Thus, the place is called “Pon”. For anyone who is wondering, the name means “power, force, strength”.

Another place-name which is a good example of unwritten vowels and change of consonant value is the word "Nakorn". From the Thai to English dictionary:

นคร: city, town, metropolis

You can note that there are only three characters in Thai, but it turns into six characters in English. The three Thai characters have the face value of NKR, The unwritten vowel rule says that where there is an orphan consonant in front of a normal three-letter word, an "a" sound is inserted between. The KR portion of the word becomes three letters because it gets an "o" sound inserted in its middle.

I might be doing a bad job of explaining this, it is not an easy concept to absorb, but once you "get it" it makes perfectly logical sense. And it applies throughout the Thai language. If you see three consonants forming an individual word, you mentally insert an A and an O in the relevant places.

Another word that will bring this rule into perspective is "satang", Transliterated from Thai, it is "stang" with another unpronounced consonant on the end. There is already an A between the second and third consonants, so there is no need to insert anything there, but an A needs to go between the first and second consonants.

And for this very reason, where you would say "smoke", the Thai will say "samoke". "Drink" will become "darink", and so forth.

Looking in a different direction on the map, I find a place called Puai Noi, and I look in the dictionary again. This one has me really wondering. The “Puai” is defined as “rotten, decomposed, tender, stewed”, and the “Noi” is “little”. Just to be certain, I ran this past my stepdaughter, and she said that the town name is not the word that I found in the dictionary, there is a small stroke above one of the letters – a stroke which I missed – in the dictionary which changes the meaning of the word. She asserts that the word means “without clothes”. So I now imagine that this place-name came into being because the children were seen to be without clothes. That’s a reasonable thing to happen in the tropical Thai countryside where buying children’s clothes may be a strain on the poor farmer’s budget.

At least we all know that Bangkok's other name, Groong Tep, means the "City of Angels".

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