English name for Route 118 in Chiang Mai province

I happened to notice what I think is an improper transliteration of the English name of highway 118. The name tag (in Thai) is ถนนแก้วนวรัฐ and the English name in the tag name:en is Kaewnawaratt Road.

I have never seen a Thai name end in “tt” and I was suspicious that something wasn’t right so I ran the Thai name through the Thai Romanization program to check it out. That program returned “Thanon Kaeo Nawa Rat”

I know some of the signs on that road actually skip some spaces and use “Kaeo Nawarat Road” while other signs discard all the spaces to get “Kaeonawarat Road”. Either way, the name:en as tagged is not correct. There is the issue of the two "t"s and also the mixup of spelling “Kaewnawaratt” that should be “Kaeonawarat”

I’m looking for some help from a Thai speaker I reckon. The history on the way only goes back to early 2019 and some people from Kaart have been mucking about lately so I can’t determine who put this spelling in the tag. Frankly, I can well understand how an English speaking mapper could screw up a complicated word like “Kaeonawarat” but maybe neither spelling is correct.

Opinions, other information?

Cheers,

Dave

The correct RTGS transliteration is Kaeo Nawarat.
By the way, this is the king’s name, his name in Wikipedia is “Kaew Nawarat” as link: (also RTGS name provided)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaew_Nawarat
I don’t know where is the source of his name in Wikipedia, maybe some document at that time is spelled like this.

Thank you for the reply,

Okay, I think we agree on the correct spelling. And those inconsistencies pointed out by the Wikiedia article are perhaps one reason we see the mix-up in spellings.

So, should we change the spelling on all those tags? I certainly don’t want to have the name ending with “tt”.

Also, just to make matters confusing, I would be willing to bet that some of the physical street name signs on that highway use the incorrect English transliteration. It happens all the time.

So?

Yes Kaew Nawarat or Kaeo Nawarat is better than Kaewnawaratt for sure.

I think we can avoid the name on the sign because most of them have no consistency, some of them even spell different for the same street, what a shame.
As RTGS System is not always used in Thailand, I suggest as follows:

  1. Road name that derived from person’s name, just follow their own way of transliteration, e.g., Sri Nagarindra Road, not Si Nakharin Road; Bhumibol Bridge, not Phumiphon Bridge. The Bangkok Metropolitan Administation’s signs are following these rule.
  2. Place name that have an official English name, use their name, e.g., Suvarnabhumi Airport, not Suwannaphum Airport; Tao Poon MRT Station, not Tao Pun MRT Station.
  3. Place name that have a common transliteration for a long time that everyone knows, but doesn’t match the RTGS System, use the more common way, e.g., Pattaya, not Phatthaya; Bangkok, not Bang Kok. These kind of name is quite consistence in the sign.
  4. In general, if it not suit all 3 above, use RTGS System.

(For the name that suit rule 1-3, we can add RTGS name in alt_name:en)

In case of ถนนแก้วนวรัฐ, it is debatable which is the best way, it should follow rule (1), but now we don’t know how King Kaeo Nawarat use his name in romanization. Maybe research some historical document can solve this.
Until we resolve it, I agree with you that we should use the RTGS System, “Kaeo Nawarat”, as you said that some sign also use this transliteration too.
We can add other transliteration in alt_name:en, such as “Kaew Nawarat”, according to Wikipedia, and maybe also transliteration from other sign in situ.

Thanks again nitinatsangsit,

I’m willing to make the changes if nobody disagrees. I propose these tags

name:en=Kaeo Nawarat Road
alt_name:en=Kaew Nawarat Road
source:name:en RTGS trans. of Thai name
source:alt_name:en=Wikipedia

changeset comment: change name:en transliteration of Kaewnawaratt Road to accepted RTGS standards

Dave

I’d say that if a name variant appears on street signs, it should be included under alt_name:en, even if the spelling is non-standard. If someone is using it, a user might look it up under that spelling.

Fair enough, Paul. I’ll check to see what variation there is in the signage. It’s possible that there are two variants 555. I’ve seen that happen more than once.

I cross-checked this with Jo.

She mentioned the common expected spelling would be Kaew. Like in Huay Kaew (spells Huay also differently than in RTGS).
This follows point 1 of nitinatsangsit which sounds very reasonable. The points 2-4 I usually follow myself. For 1 I often lack the historical knowledge to actually notice that something is named after a person.

So I would vote for “Kaew Nawarat” in name:en and the uncommon RTGS in alt_name:en or name:th-Latn (as proposed by some).

A while ago I had the idea to add a “spell checker” to osmose checks for matching street names to common names and their spelling. Thai should be easy, for name:en we could do similar by having a list of “approved” transliterations. Either manually curated or created by a majority vote of used spellings.

Based on frequent signs at several intersections I used “Kaewnawarat Road” as the name:en even though RTGS would spell it the way you did, Stephan. I did see one large sign at the junction of 118 and 1367 that spelled it with the space as RTGS suggests and as you did but I actually forgot to add it as alt_name as I had intended.

Russ reported that the official start of the 118 is at the intersection with the 121 so I removed the ref tags from those sections of Kaewnawarat Road before that junction. I also removed those sections from the 118 route relation.

118 certainly starts earlier. I think from superhighway onwards. See the road sign there:
https://www.mapillary.com/app/?lat=18.804501988446216&lng=99.0190434243028&z=17&pKey=Fipl-MFekySZxZ7dUIZjgg&focus=photo

Is this a mile-stone? then it would the the zero here:
https://www.mapillary.com/app/?lat=18.80442095084466&lng=99.0192649055416&z=17.838868698962784&pKey=6JykDRaxbXi3umKa6l7DwQ&focus=photo&x=0.6977719967174654&y=0.7247173792107718&zoom=1.1207970112079702

You are absolutely correct, Stephan. The route sign is quite obvious. I hadn’t seen it before.

The “milestone” you referred to isn’t an actual milestone but an increasingly common plastic marker I’ve observed that appears every 100 meters on some roads. This marker has “100” below a line with a “0” above it. To me, that means “this marker is 100 meters distant from kilometer zero”, which I think we can safely assume is the junction with the Superhighway. I will add the ref=118 to those segments of the highway and add them back to the 118 route relation.

As I was checking my highway tagging again, I noted that I did add an alt_name:en tag on the dual-carriageway segments of the 118, that is, the segments beyond the Superhighway, and I tagged it “Kaew Nawarat Road”.

Since alt_name:en and name:th-Latn is used for a different purpose.
alt_name:en can be “Kaeo Nawarat Road” but name:th-Latn should be “Thanon Kaeo Nawarat” (Thai Language in Latin alphabet)
I suggest to use both.

Regarding official data from Department of Highway, the National Highway 118 under administration of the Department of Highway is started at National Highway 11
http://hris.doh.go.th/highway?search=118

Okay, I did the editing. Please check my work when and if you have a chance. My eyes are starting to see double when I look at those tags 555

This conversation brings up another similar naming issue that I will start a new thread to discuss. It is the Thanon Somphot Chiang Mai 700 Year road. (ชม. 3029).

Thanks to all.

This is a wonderful resource. But I cannot understand how to obtain data about roads having a prefix, for exanple, ชม. 3029.

Can any Thai speaker help?

Roads with 2 character prefix are under Department of Rural Roads. The most reliable source is here:

https://gis.drr.go.th/drr/Map2.aspx (Their server is quite poor, sometimes it has to be waited for a while.)

The Rural Roads under their supervision is blue lines.
I recommend to use this source only for this type of road. For National Highway, the DOH website is the most updated for their new road and transferred-out road.

And for local highway, like อย.ถ4-0001, under the supervision of local administrative organization, the most reliable source is the highway registration data: http://localroadregis.drr.go.th/lmp_rd_regis/waydata/roadregister/summarize_regist.html?cid=5619
However, the local highway have much inconsistencies. It’s depend on each local administrative organization how accurate and orderly they registered.

Thank you, nitinatsangsit.