tp,
yes some great points indeed.
you see, many months before you came on here, we had a discussion about kickboxing borrowing the thai style roundhouse,teep, and leg kicks.
some people didn't like this because they thought maybe people who didn't know any better might think kickboxing developed these kicks and not muaythai.they wanted to give credit where credit was do.
i simply said that muaythai has borrowed concepts as well as techniques from other fighting sports but still call it muaythai and don't give actual credit to these other sport(s).
of course this wasn't the case.
i was watching a few of ramba's fights, and during the fight i see ramba throwing some very nice hooks and uppercuts.
nothing wrong with that. but what caught my attention was that the thai commentators were referring to these punches with western names rather than thai names. i used this to prove that boxing has influenced the sport enough for the commentators and spectators to recognize these western terms that obviously came from western boxing.
i was told these always were part of muayathi, and that the thais just do with their language.
i couldn't understand why certain techniques of thai origins,say the teep for instance had kept it's thai name but these supposed thai techniques, the hook and uppercut, were given western names.
the point i was trying to make was that you can not criticize one sport for borrowing from another, when your sport has done the very same thing.
but some how muaythai was justified.