This article and your comment actually clarified a lot for me. I always thought it was strange how many quintessentially "Thai" things have the word "Thai" in their names (muay thai, pad Thai, Thai tea, etc.) It didn't seem natural that people would make stuff and then self-consciously name it after their own ethnicity. It would be like Indians calling their tea preparation "Indian Tea" rather than just using "chai," the native Indian word for "tea."
The Indianness of the tea wouldn't have been a relevant thing if it's being made in India for other Indians after all. So why would Thai people invent a style of boxing and then call it "Thai style boxing" even in their native language?
It hadn't occurred to me that it was all a top-down effort to create a "national identity" and didn't organically develop from the folk culture at all.
Well, in Greece we call a particular kind of coffee "Turkish coffee" [1] and that's definitely not for nationalistic reasons, we're supposed to be enemies with the Turks. In fact, some people do call Turkish coffee "Greek coffee" and that seems to have started for nationalistic reasons, but to my experience most people mix the two names freely.
The reason is really to tell that kind of coffee apart from e.g. Italian or French coffee styles (we call filter coffee "French" whereas we don't call anything in particular "Italian coffee" but of course there's lots of preparation styles that originate in Italy).
So sometimes maybe it's a bit of a mix? If you have a variety of something that's distinctly different from what your neighbours are using you might want to call it "my-style X" just to know what you're talking about. Of course then there's a bit of nationalistic pride that comes with it "this is how _we_ do it" etc.
Do Turks call it the word for coffee or is it referred to as "Turkish coffee?" though? In Thai the Thais themselves call these things "X Thai" in their own language.
Like it makes sense to me that we might have domestic boxing and then decide that boxing from the country across the border is [Neighboring Country] Boxing. What was confusing for me is people calling THEIR OWN style of boxing "[Our Country] Boxing."
FWIW, in the case of Muay Thai it was basically invented as a sport in the modern age. It's derived from an older martial art known as "Muay Boran," which translates to "Ancient Boxing" and is more analogous to traditional martial arts like Kung Fu. Muay Thai was developed to create a Thai national sport to compete with Western boxers.
All tea originated in China. In southern Chinese dialects tea is called "Cha," which is where other languages got their "Cha" sounding word for tea, and this includes the Indian languages afaik.
The northern dialects' word sounded more like "tea" which is where the Western languages got their word for tea, through trade
You've got the geographic regions mixed up. Northern Chinese refer it to "cha", while Southern Chinese call it "te" (sounds like tailor). Even though India is geographically closer to southern China, they got the word from Portuguese.
The Indianness of the tea wouldn't have been a relevant thing if it's being made in India for other Indians after all. So why would Thai people invent a style of boxing and then call it "Thai style boxing" even in their native language?
It hadn't occurred to me that it was all a top-down effort to create a "national identity" and didn't organically develop from the folk culture at all.