The Story of Pan-Myaing-Le - III: Burmese inadequate for the modern world?

“YANGON, Myanmar — It’s the dawn of democracy in Myanmar. If only the Burmese had their own word for it.

As this former dictatorship opens to the world, language is a stumbling block.”

The opening sentence from the article “Those Who Would Remake Myanmar Find That Words Fail Them” that appeared in The New York Times on July 19, 2015 could have meant for bigger things than to simply irritate us. Surely the author Thomas Fuller couldn't have forgotten that neither the word “democracy” was their own nor ours, for that matter, at least originally.

Yet I was somewhat disheartened by this one from the Fuller quotes:

“Burmese has a far poorer political vocabulary than English,” said U Thant Myint-U, a historian who also serves as an adviser to the president. “At a time when everything is about the country’s political future, it’s a liability and a constraining factor.”

Still, I want to question whose liability it was and whose liability will be for now. The past was all so clear and hardly need pointing fingers. Then for now and the future there's no choice. The responsibility to convert liabilities, if any, to assets is ours.

But I wasn't at all troubled by this application developer's lament.

"When I talk about my work to my mother and her friends, I can't explain it in Burmese," said Daw Ei Myat Noe Khin, a software and app developer in Yangon. …

“When I talk about my work to my mother and her friends, I can’t explain it in Burmese,” she said.

Does she need to explain to her mom and her friends about the complexities of her work as if to her co-workers and her peers?

“There is no word in Burmese for developer, so I used the English word programmer,” she said. “If they don’t understand programmer, I say, ‘It’s what is inside your phone and makes it work.’”

But this may be exactly what they need to know and would like to know.

“They say, ‘Oh, it’s something to do with computers!’”

And Fuller didn't spare us the freedom of calling computer as “ကွန်ပျူတာ” in our language:

And they say it using the English word.

There is no Burmese word for computer. Or phone, for that matter.

Highlighting the follies of being lost in translation, Fuller could have been inherently pessimistic, or quite amusing at times, according to your taste:

Mr. Thant Myint-U, … , says he has been in meetings between the president and foreigners where translation is done by some of the country’s top interpreters. “Ten percent is still lost in translation,” he said.

Vicky Bowman, a former British ambassador to Myanmar, says 10 percent is optimistic. “I would say it’s more like 30 percent to 50 percent,” she said.

Ms. Bowman is director of an organization called the Myanmar Center for Responsible Business. When she and her colleagues wanted to translate the name of her organization for Burmese speakers, it took hours. They came up with a Burmese name that in English sounds like a bad Internet robo-translation: “Myanmar economic sector having and assuming the responsibility, support-help department.”

Enter linguischtick:

To me this is as effective as a word by word, complete refutation of Thomas Fuller by a linguist. It seems like you may choose to read only this article and still would not be loosing or distorting any of Fuller's observations or arguments. Here are some samples.

On the Fuller article:

The article is full of fallacies, bad arguments, and misinformation that leaves us with the impression that Burmese is linguistically impoverished, and that the speakers of the language have no chance of making it in the modern world.

…

Thomas Fuller, would rather you walk away with the idea that Burmese is uniquely weird and its speakers are linguistically disabled. He seems to have little idea how translation or linguistics works, and he presents mundane issues in language variation as insurmountable obstacles for Burmese speakers. There’s also some good old fashioned linguistic relativity thrown in too, letting us know that if the Burmese don’t have a word for something, they probably can’t think about it properly. I love that pseudoscience from the 1930s is still having some influence on journalists today.

On the allegation that Myanmar language is stunted (highlighted text by Fuller): Not to worry. Myanmar certainly is not crippled. We could crawl, walk, and then run.

“Limited access to global media and creaking connections to the Internet stunted the evolution of the Burmese language, leaving it without many words that are elsewhere deemed essential parts of the modern political and technical vocabulary”

... It’s not a “stunted” language because it isn’t yet common for speakers to acquire Western technology. This is sort of like saying that Congolese languages of Central Africa are stunted for their lack of words referring to snow and ice. How will people speaking those languages ever be able take part in the discussion on global warming without words for “glacier”, “sea ice”, or “permafrost”?

This article has a very alarmist tone to it, like “oh my god what are those Burmese going to do? How will they survive?”. They’ll do the same thing everyone else did when they started to use computers: they’ll just make new words. ...

On the linguistics of the Myanmar language:

“The structure of the Burmese language, part of the Sino-Tibetan language family, varies considerably from English. Written Burmese has no spaces between words and is generally wordier than English.”

This is literally the only hard linguistic data provided in the entire article, and it’s totally useless.

Burmese has no spaces in writing. Why do we care? How is this relevant? How does this prevent them from understanding what a democracy is, or how to translate the word ‘privacy’? Written Chinese has no spaces either, and that country is an economic and technological powerhouse. The fact is only here to further that author’s attempt to paint Burmese as a primitive language.

On the loanwords in Myanmar language:

““They [Burmese speakers] say, ‘Oh, it’s something to do with computers!’ ”

And they say it using the English word.

There is no Burmese word for computer. Or phone, for that matter.”

This is the concluding paragraph of the article, and it really shows how the author fails to understand what a loanword is. This is really too bad, since the concept is central to whole article. Saying that Burmese has no word for ‘phone’ or ‘computer’ is a bit like saying that English has no word for ‘kangaroo’, ‘igloo’ or ‘kindergarten’ because these are borrowed from other languages. If we really wanted to push it, we could even say that English has no word for ‘phone’ either, because that’s a borrowing from Greek (the prefix ‘tele-‘ is also Greek). At some point, after a word gets borrowed, it becomes a native word, and it is silly to treat it like a borrowing anymore. The pronunciation of the words has shifted to match the borrowing languages, and it becomes integrated into the grammar.

Then there were the refutations on Fuller which my selection gives but a subjective glimpse. You shouldn't miss reading the article, think, and decide for yourselves.

Back to the story of our software developer cited by Fuller. In real life I imagine that most of us would have been in a situation like her. Once or twice my mom and my step-father, long dead and gone, asked me about the Government job I held, when I was freshly recruited. They didn't really care for the answer. They were just immensely proud.

But if she really want to explain about her work to common folks who seriously want to know, I've just been thinking about tipping her with the story of what the famous mathematician Henri Poincare said about making a scientific discovery and rushing out to the street to explain to the first person he met. Or a more recent idea of explaining to a potential donor about your project during an elevator ride (the elevator test). But then I couldn't get the right quotes from the Web in time.

So I turned to my old trick of Googling and searched for “explaining science to layman”. Even with the first page of results I know I was on the right track:

• 40 Key Computer Science Concepts Explained In Layman's Terms

• 40 Key Computer Science Concepts Explained In Layman's ... - Lifehack

• What are some interesting analogies when explaining computer ...

• Can you explain any complex-science in simple terms, in a way that ...

• 18 Complicated Scientific Ideas Explained Simply | Mental Floss

• How scientists lose the average layman « Hot Air

• How scientists should communicate with laymen - SCI-ART LAB

• Explaining Science to the Layman - hopefully - AFA Forums ...

• 36 Computer and Data Science Concepts Explained In Layman's Terms

• Why don't scientists publish a "layman's version" of their findings ...

As I went on looking I found this: “Explain it to me like I'm a kid: scientists try to make sense of gravitational waves” on theguardian website, February 12, 2016. It was about the “blockbuster announcement that scientists had detected gravitational waves, ripples in the fabric of spacetime that were first anticipated by Albert Einstein a century ago” that was made just a day before.

And I said to myself: Forget what all those guys said about “Burmese”. I'm sure some Myanmar would be able to present in our own language the contents of this article about gravitational waves which the experts have tried to “really break it down in its simplest terms – as though we were children”. And I'm sure the translation could be done admirably.

After that if anyone is still skeptical about any Myanmar capable of communicating or grasping the essence of such phenomena and advanced concepts, let's see.

The Story of Pan-Myaing-Le - II

Continuing from my last post, the exchange between weetigerer and keyilan revealed that the OP weetigerer was basically grumbling about learning Myanmar language despite the fancy wording he/she'd used like stronger and united culture ... becoming culturally identifiable around the world ... being a forgotten race … etc.

weetigerer: Let me be clear that I'm not against the script, I just find unsuitable and confusing from time to time as someone learning Burmese.

keyilan: Sure. And for someone learning Mandarin or English they're going to run into the same issues. As I said, scripts are simply not made for the sake of the learner.

Here the gloomy rally for script reform sharply contrasted with the cheerful attitude of a different kind of visitor to Pan-Myaing-Le. It was all about Hacking Burmese. “I define hacking a language as attempting to acquire enough vocabulary and sentence structures so you can get through your first conversation in a foreign tongue. Complete mastery is not the goal of the initial language learning sprint but many of the techniques are the same whether it is short- or long-term language learning.” (Hacking Burmese: Learning Burmese Essentials Fast, Mark Koester, December 2013, available here).

I decided to learn as much Burmese as I could in the two weeks ...

While I cannot claim to have become fluent in Burmese in such a short amount of time, I think Burmese presents a good example of a foreign language that is hackable.

Mark's recipe for learning Burmese Essentials Fast was nothing new and could have been described as common sense, if you like, and then what really mattered seemed to be his commitment to learn.

For me, learning a foreign language is best started with a few initial “meta” steps:

1. meta-research: what kind of language is it? what are the characteristics? related languages? pronunciations pitfalls?
2. meta-research: what learning materials exist for this language? books? websites? apps?
3. resource gathering, i.e. picking up various books, audio files on that language.

What is positive with Mark is that he didn't complain, for example, “why စ or ဆ is used” and quietly went on “hacking Burmese”.

The meta-research gave me a chance to scan some of the learning resources I’d found and select one or two to focus on initially. Compared to languages like Chinese or even Vietnamese or Thai, learning Burmese resources are pretty scarce. Even googling “learn Burmese” turned up pretty slim pickings.

In some ways this is a good thing since it allowed me to avoid wasting too much time selecting which resources to use or not and then get on with the actual content creation and learning process.

Fortunately, after checking out some quite old books on Burmese, I found a great and free resource by one of the best scholars and teachers of Burmese, John Okell, an audiobook called Burmese By Ear - Essential Myanmar.

With a happy marriage of “Memrise” and Okell's Burmese By Ear he has created the course “Burmese by Ear: Unit 1 and 2 on Memrise.”

Now you may wonder why weetigerer chose to advise us on changing our script rather than creating something with his/her own hands on Memrise, for example. According to Mark:

Memrise is a pretty interesting learning and course creation platform. While Memrise already includes tons of courses on a wide-range of languages, it’s much more open than most other language sites or software. Some courses are created by the site admin but many more are user created.

The Story of Pan-Myaing-Le - I

ပန်းမြိုင်လည် (Pan-Myaing-Le) or at the middle of the flowering woods is the name of one Myanmar classical song I loved. It is a type of classical song known as Yodaya, or Thai song. As U Thaw Kaung had recounted about the Yodaya genre in his The Ramayana Drama in Myanmar:

… Prince Pyinsi and the young U Sa, only 23 at the time, wrote some of the songs set to adapted Thai music, as these songs called Yodaya (or Ayutthaya = Thai) have come down to us in the Maha Gita, collections of Myanmar classical songs and music where their names are appended under the songs they wrote. ..

U Myint Kyi, Myanmar scholar and researcher of Myanmar music, wrote that though Thai songs and music of the Ramayana were at first directly translated into Myanmar, “later new lyrics were composed in our own language with melodic adaptations of the original Thai style in the same manner as western pop music has been adapted to our own lyrics now”.

But လည် could be a clipping of မျက်စိလည် (getting lost) and getting lost in the flowering woods was the helpless feeling I have when I came across these words (Should Burmese language develop a new writing script?, by weetigerer on Reddit, accessed December 3, 2016):

I understand this will be an unpopular opinion because most people are already comfortable with your current script. But I've been studying about it for a while. And the current writing script was not catered for the spoken burmese language at all.

It does represents the consonants and the appropriate vowel sounds. But words representing a meaning are very phonetically poor. And there's no reason to why စ or ဆ is used. Or even different combinations representing the same pitch.

And it's really odd now that I found out Burmese is Sino-Tibetan, to be using a script made for the indian language family, which explains alot of the imperfections.

My question is, should Burmese invent a new script for themselves?

I wasn't feeling helpless because the logic of the arguments and the killer insights they intend to convey weighed heavy on me. Rather it was the helpless feeling of pity for such a pathetic lack of appreciation for other lives and other cultures in the guise of science. Writing my dumb posts, time to time, I remember reading Aldus Huxley muttering about some guy standing in front of the Dolomites: “Who does he think he is?”. Meant to pull myself back when I tried to overreach myself.

… "What pretensions!" I kept repeating. "Who on earth does he think he is?" The question was not addressed to Cézanne in particular, but to the human species at large. Who did they all think they were?

"It's like Arnold Bennett in the Dolomites," I said, suddenly remembering a scene, happily immortalized in a snapshot, of A.B., some four or five years before his death, toddling along a wintry road at Cortina d'Ampezzo. Around him lay the virgin snow; in the background was a more than gothic aspiration of red crags. And there was dear, kind, unhappy A.B., consciously overacting the role of his favorite character in fiction, himself, …

Even with my zero knowledge of language studies, I am convinced that learning Chinese involves memorizing much much more than learning Myanmar language. But the OP (weetigerer) seemed to be obsessed with insisting the opposite!

And even my Burmese friend agree that they also do find it confusing, her words: "For an phonetic writing system, it demands a lot of plain memorizing because of there are a lot of ways to spell out one sound". Me being chinese, who has a lot of memorizing to do as well, tried learning the language to prove her wrong, she's right... Even chinese has very little "plain memorizing", we still have patterns and formulas on how this particular word came to be or why.

Most astonishing is his (her?) implied claim that we could leapfrog to prominence and prosperity (from “being a forgotten race”!) through this simple mantra: “develop a new writing script”.

I'm not asking it to be romanized like vietnamese, I'm requesting so that Burma's culture become stronger and united. With Burmese people becoming culturally identifiable around the world. Aren't you all tired of being a forgotten race? Even your own people frequently struggles to get the correct spelling of each word. Even though they sound the same. Its inefficient. Don't romaize it, change it so that it represents Burma. Thats my point.

It must have been a remarkable leap of faith for weetigerer to tie up some loose pieces like, (i) same sounds with different spellings led to an inefficient language, (ii) even we Myanmars struggles to get the correct spelling of each word, (iii) changing the script would lead to a language that represents Myanmar, (iv) that will make our culture stronger and united, and (v) will give us a cultural identity and will not be a forgotten race anymore.

Actually, the all the 11 comments mostly consisted of OP weetigerer insisting to developing a new writing script for Myanmar language and keyilan, a linguist, refuting it. Additionally, miserablesomiserable says:

I'm very surprised our chinese writing didn't reach burma, which is DIRECTLY below china. Since I'm chinese I doubt I have any say in this.

... It's never too late to change and reunite, especially Burma, you're a forgotten country. Everyone thinks of Indonesia or Philippines whenever Burma is mentioned. You were stripped of your cultural identities. ...

My point is, you can start rebuilding Burma by changing your writing system to something that represents our ancestral race. …

And he/she proves to be no less imaginative than the OP!

Then I realize that it was not me, but guys like weetigerer and miserablesomiserable were the ones destined forever to be lost in the flowering woods.

P. S. We noticed that the question by the OP quoted under the second paragraph in this post as accessed on December 3 has been deleted as of the above screen shot of reddit accessed just before this post has been published.

Statistics Bill 2016 – III

Today one of my friends told me that she had recently read an article in the newspaper that said that the term တရားဝင်စာရင်းအင်း in the Statistics Bill indeed stands for "official statistics". If so, how would we say "non-official statistics" in Myanmar language? Clearly တရားမဝင်စာရင်းအင်း would be unacceptable.

That was obvious at once from the title of the document by the Committee for the Coordination of Statistical Activities we cited in our post "Statistics Bill 2016 - I", namely, "Development of guidelines/best practices on the use of non‐official data" (my emphasis here).

This reminds me of a parallel situation in the education area. They have "formal education" and "non-formal education". Using the same English-Myanmar dictionary by Myanmar Language Commission that I have mentioned before and looking up for the word "formal", we find:

Here we see that the Myanmar word "တရားဝင်" appears again now for the English word "formal". Last time the same Myanmar word was used for "official". Happily people in education called formal education "ကျောင်းသင် ပညာရေး" so that non-formal education (not informal education) effortlessly becomes "ကျောင်းပြင်ပ ပညာရေး”.