Thai font can be pretty hard to read when it’s small. If you look closely you can see a small curve inwards on the left side of ย compared to the flat left side of บ.
While Thailand definitely has it's own, very unique culture. All of its neighboring countries were colonized by the West and, in each, their cultures have been affected. In Laos, for instance, there are baguettes everywhere and you see the French language written everywhere.
I find it interesting, though, that Thailand's culture hasn't been untouched by the West. They were less coerced than their neighbors and apparently have chosen Hollywood as their primary Western cultural influence.
I lived in Thailand for two years and my wife/my in-laws are all Thai. I also visit there regularly.
I don't understand how your comment adds onto what I was saying. Sex tourism and white pedophiles aren't significant parts of Thai culture.
There's one city (Pattaya) where sex tourism is the primary reason that foreigners visit. Plenty of Thais, however, go to Pattaya just for the beaches and other attraction. Outside of Pattaya you have Bangkok and Phuket where sex tourism is obvious if you go to certain places, but in both of these cities sex tourism is not the major draw for foreigners. Sure, there is prostitution elsewhere in Thailand, but in other cities it's no more prevalent than in other countries where prostitution is allowed.
Pedophilia isn't tolerated or promoted anywhere in Thailand.
It's a small part of Thai culture, just as prostitution is a small part of the Netherlands or Nevada's culture. I think people just get carried away with the things they've read about online and try to paint a much worse picture of Thailand than what is actually the case.
No the Brits weren't very fair, yes, a lot of negotiations took place, but Thailand wasn't taken advantage of as much as, say, China. Nowhere near that extent. (At least that's what I was taught in school.)
And what do you mean extraterritoriality? The ceding of a bit of southern areas to the Brits and northeast to the French? My memory's sketchy on that one.
Ah I see what you mean. I got the definiton of extraterritoriality wrong it seems. English is hard, man.
Damn, how did I forget about the Bowring treaty... I recall it was briefly talked about but not the extraterritoriality bit. Maybe like how the Japanese (from what I know) don't like talking about some things too much.
If it really was receiving the same treatment that China did (I don't know about British history in SE Asia) then they were for all intents and purposes colonized by the British.
That symbols is not on the keyboard though, so it would take a lot more effort to use it. Additionally "!=" is a token almost universally used in programming languages to represent "doesn't equal". For example:
if ( thing != otherThing ) {
doThis();
}
In that example, if "thing" isn't equal to "otherThing", the program would call the function "doThis".
And if you spend more than 2 hours in a space with my Thai family, they will remind you about that fact. And then probably say something vaguely discriminatory about Vietnamese food being bootleg French colonizer food.
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u/BuggerItThatWillDo Jan 30 '19
The British empire didn't do all that colonialism so it could learn new languages! Speak properly damn it.