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Sunday, May 25, 2014

Taiwan or Thailand

Ταϊβάν ή Ταϊλάνδη

When people ask me where I am from, I answer: Taiwan.  But after listening to my answer, about fifty percent of the time they think I am from Thailand.

It is easily confused by people who do not know their geography well.  The Vancouver edition of the Metro Newspaper had a mistake on a title for a correct news report about the recent military coup in Thailand. This post by Brian Glucroft is very good to point out the above mistake http://www.isidorsfugue.com/2014/05/taiwans-government-not-overthrown-by.html?m=1

For people in doubt about the geographical locations of Taiwan and Thailand, just go to this link and "WAIT" for the map to show you where Thailand is, and then it directs you to show where Taiwan is, it gives you the answer so clearly that you should never make a mistake again http://www.mapcrow.info/Distance_between_Thailand_TH_and_Taiwan_TW.html

Taiwan http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geography_of_Taiwan is an island (area including the surrounding small islands under its jurisdiction) 36193 / 8336 = 4.34 times the area of Crete http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crete.

By the way, the Greek language does not have a good phonetic translation of "Taiwan", it should have been translated as "Ταϊουάν" instead of "Ταϊβάν".  But it is hard to translate a place name in another language per http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exonym_and_endonym.  Afterall, in Taiwan they call Ελλάδα (Greece) "Σίλα" 希臘 but phonetically it should have been translated "strangely" as ㄝ拉打.

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