Archive/mirror: https://archive.ph/P1QWp
spoiler
What are you doing step monk
You know what this would make a great script for?
A documentary about that official. What’d you think I was gonna say?
It’s pronounced more like /pawn/ than /porn/. On a related note, I think there was a dust-up a few years back about Thai students in New Zealand being asked to change their names, or at least their spellings because no porn in school I guess.
Yeah, romanizing Asian names is done poorly to be honest. I saw it a lot in Korea. They had this ‘official’ system that they followed, but to be honest it mostly caused more issues. The common joke at the olympics was the Korean guy named suk, but it was pronounced more like sock than suck. and if they’d just spelled it like that , it would eliminate those jokes entirely. Spelling it pawn or pon would eliminate that connotation completely.
It’s a very common part of Thai names. Not sure what the origin is, but you see it all over the place.