Wednesday, December 14, 2016

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.”




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:

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.


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