Amphur vs. Amphoe
German blogger Noodlegei, who mostly writes on ways to use all the free applications and services from Google, some days ago tweeted a comparison of word occurrences in the Google books corpus. While I had read about this new corpus before, it was this tweet which made me think about using it for similar comparisons within the scope of this blog.
Whereas the word อำเภอ for the Thai districts is usually romanized as "Amphoe" following the RTGS romanization system, still rather popular on websites is the alternative transcription "Amphur" - Googlefight shows them as almost equally popular. But websites, especially with the thousands of copies of Wikipedia, are not that much good as a corpus, the books scanned for Google Books are of a much higher quality. And as a plus the Google Ngram viewer also includes the development over time. For the comparison of Amphoe vs Amphur it shows that the RTGS spelling is slowly becoming the more common one, but due to the rather low number of books containing this term years like 1982 with unusually many publications using Amphoe create a very significant peak, even with the smoothing function.