Siam gave the West Siamese cats and Siamese twins. The original Siamese twins were Eng and Chang Bunker, known in Thailand as the Chinese Twins because of their Chinese father. In the case of the cats, they originated in Siam. But Siamese twins, of course, did not. There are identical twins joined together physically in all parts of the world. Siam then its other word for itself, Thailand, or officially the Kingdom of Thailand. And the West thought it would be "politically correct" to start calling Siamese twins conjoined twins. Why not Thai twins? How ironic that would sound, two twins tied together indeed! But the cat world got to keep their Siamese cats. Anyway, at the basis of much of this is the fact that Thais don't speak English, do not share our poor alphabet. Indeed, our alphabet seems poor with its 26 letters (5 vowels and 21 consonants) compared to the Thai alphabet with its 73 letters ( 42 consonants and 31 vowels)! So you can appreciate the problem of trying to represent Thai sounds with only about half the letters. This give rise to many different ways to represent the sound of Thai words using the English alphabet. Oh, yes, and the Thai language has five distinct tones!
Here's a sentence in English translated into Thai: Siamese twins are not all from Thailand but the Bunker twins were from Thailand. ฝาแฝดสยามไม่ได้ทั้งหมดจากประเทศไทย แต่ฝาแฝด Bunker ถูกจากประเทศไทย See what I mean? Well we could all understand one word anyway!
The Bunker boys were born in Thailand in 1811 and died in North Carolina in 1874. Chang died first of natural causes. Moments after, Eng died. Some say he died of fright. I have my own ideas on the question, but I'll leave that for my next posting.
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