A Study Of Chinese Place Name In Bangkok Thailand

The settled down history of Bangkok Chinese can be traced back to the Thonburi period. For broken free from poverty, many Chinese immigrants chose Bangkok as their destination. As a result, these immigrants have and gradually formed one of the biggest communities in Bangkok. Due to the large scale of the Chinese community in Bangkok, Chinese language and Characters serve as communication and writing tools in the daily life. As an important part of language, geographic names can reflect such factors as the language, culture, history, economy and geographical condition of a nation. The development of Chinese community contributes to the creation of Chinese geographic names of Bangkok.This paper takes the Chinese place names of Bangkok as its study object with the materials focusing on "The Marketplace and Street Map in Siam capital city" printed in 1924 and Bangkok Chinese newspapers between 1924 and 1938. By the adoption of literature research method, comparative approach and statistical method, the literature is processed and studied.The main body of this paper is divided into three parts:introduction, text including five sections and conclusion, shown as follows:The introduction dwells on the origin, purposes, scope, value and methods of research and makes a brief survey of current research situation at home and abroad.Part One of the first chapter specially describes the history of Chinese migration moving to Siam in various periods and the background of shaping the Siam Chinese social mechanism, and introduces the Chinese dialects used by Bangkok Chinese. Part Two summarizes the basic knowledge of geographic names in Thai and the translation and writing of Chinese characters accepted in Thai language in ordinary used.The second Chapter mainly analyzes "The Marketplace and Street Map in Siam capital city". To begin with, it introduces the origins of the map, then analyzes its creating background. Taking in the rich content of the map, one must make a comparison by using many relevant Thai documents for reference when seeking place names in Chinese-Thai. Therefore, in this chapter the comparison method between the place names in Thai and their literature is also introduced. In addition, a major part of this map is the commercial list of local Chinese. We classify the business categories in the list with the use of statistical method to showcase a picture of the then business situation. What’s more, the listed telephone numbers are presented in Suzhou numerals (traditionally used by shopkeepers to mark prices) which we analyze and interpret so as to mirror their use value.In Chapter Three, we mainly describe the background of Chinese newspapers in Bangkok and the material range and methods of place name study. We pick the addresses in Chinese from the local Chinese newspapers, first analyzing the writing methods of Chinese addresses, then the place names. The research shows that the Chinese live in Siam, but they still write addresses in accordance with the Chinese writing form, which indicates that Chinese integrate other languages with their mother language, the thinking mode of which is reflected in their use of addresses.Based on the research of the former two chapters, in Chapter Four, we conduct a further study on the naming methods and word-building of Chinese address in Thai. The result shows that the naming methods of Chinese addresses in Bangkok can be classified into transliteration, free translation, the combination of the two methods and creation by local Chinese. The first method being most frequently used and the combination of the first two methods being the most unique. From the perspective of word-formation, some of the place names in the combination of transliteration and free translation method are based on Chinese word-building and some on Thai ones. This shows that the Chinese there name addresses based on their linguistic thinking, that is, Chinese way of thinking. Meanwhile, they are affected by the local linguistic thinking method. After comparing place names in Chinese and those in Thai, we discover that we are unable to find the names in Thai for some of them in Chinese and there is no Thai translation of most names created by the Chinese. At the same time, the Chinese characters used in address names embody how Chinese use the characters. The study on the form of Chinese characters shows that popular form of characters are widely used and it is normal that the popular Chinese characters and standard ones are adopted together in the Chinese community in Bangkok.In Chapter Five, we discuss the Chinese-Thai transliteration of place names as one of the research purposes of this paper. To understand the intention of using Chinese characters in the transliteration of place names, we compare the Chaozhou sound, Cantonese accent, Hakka dialect with Thai language, which shows that Chinese phonetics are the same or similar to Thai’s on the whole in terms of initial consonant and compound vowel.The conclusion sums up the research finding, points out the limitation as well as outlines further research prospect.