Names of newly created Muban

Other than originally planned I already processed the announcements on the creation of muban since 2003. While working through them, I have notice some interesting small facts on the naming of these entities.

As mentioned before, the names of muban are not unique, quite often one settlement is divided into several muban all sharing the same name. So it is not surprising that for the muban created in the last 5 years quite a lot of the new one inherited the name of the muban they are split off from. But instead of always having exactly the same name, quite often the new muban gets a suffix attached. The ones easy to understand are Nuea (เหนือ) meaning North and Tai (ใต้) meaning South for areas in the north or south of the settlement. However east or west are by far less common. Instead another common suffix is Phatthana (พัฒนา) meaning development, maybe this one is used for newly developed residential areas.

Thanks to summarizing the content of the announcements in XML, it was just a little bit of programming to have these numbers calculated, and I can update them anytime new announcements get published. Since 2003 there had been 841 announcements, creating 1966 new muban. Out of these, 352 received the same name as the parent muban, 59 with the suffix Nuea, 52 with Tai, and 77 with Phatthana. Less frequent suffices are Mai (New, ใหม่, 36 times), Samakhi (Unity, สามัคคี, 12 times), Thong (Gold, ทอง, 10 times) or a number (9 times). Mai also shows up as a prefix 28 times. There are only 5 times with the postfix Tawan Ook (ตะวันออก, East) and a single one with Tawan Tok (ตะวันตก, West). The province with most new muban in these years was Nakhon Ratchasima with a total of 144.

Finally, here are examples for each of the main cases:

• Village 10 of Saraphi, Saraphi, Chiang Mai is named Ban Pak Kong (บ้านปากกอง) and was split off from village 5 with the same name in 2004. [Gazette]
• Village 18 of Ta Lang Nai, Wang Nam Yen, Sa Kaeo is named Ban Non Thong Phatthana (บ้านโนนทองพัฒนา) and was split off from village 9 named Ban Non Thong (บ้านโนนทอง) in 2005. [Gazette]
• Village 13 of San Sali, Wiang Pa Pao, Chiang Rai is named Ban Pong Nok Nuea (บ้านโป่งนกเหนือ) and was split off from village 6 with the name Ban Pong Nok (บ้านโป่งนก) in 2006. [Gazette]
• Village 14 of Sop Prap, Sop Prap, Lampang is named Ban Sop Prap Tai (บ้านสบปราบใต้) and was split off from village 2 with the name Ban Sop Prap (บ้านสบปราบ) in 2006. [Gazette]
• And finally a case which is not covered in the statistics above - village 8 of Dan Mae Kham Man, Laplae, Uttaradit is named Dan Mae Kham Man Phatthana (บ้านด่านแม่คำมันพัฒนา) and was split off from village 1 named Dan Mae Kham Man Nuea (บ้านด่านแม่คำมันเหนือ) in 2003. [Gazette]