Testing Burmese typing

I tried to type out the following text using Padauk Unicode font. It was from http://www.planet.com.mm forum. I thought it was a nice irony about Bagan for banning gtalk/gmail.

ဆိုဒ်တစ်ခု ကြိုက်လို့ငါ၀င်
ရတ်ဂျစ်စတာ လုပ်ဖို့ငါပြင် တော့
ပေးစရာ မေးလ်မရှိ
ဒီဒုက္ခ  တော့ ပြေးစရာ နတ္ထိ ပါတကား။ 

စော်မကြည် ကျုပ်ဘ၀ 
ဆိုင်ဘာဂဲများနဲ့ 
စကောပြား စကားများပြောရအောင် 
အော် ဆရာသမား 
ဘန်းတာ တွေ ဖွင့်ပေးပါ ခင်ညား။ 

အနေဝေးကာနေ
သူဇာပျို နိုင်ငံခြားမှာ တခြားသူလုမှာစိုးလို့
စကားများ ပြောရအောင်
အော် ဆရာသမား 
ဘန်းတာ တွေ ဖွင့်ပေးပါ ခင်ညား။ 

သားတစ်ကောင် နိုင်ငံခြားက
တစ်ပတ်ခြားတစ်ခါ ဂျီတော့မှာတွေ့ ရာက
အခုတော့ ငါ့မှာလွမ်းရ
အမယ်မင်း ငါ့သားတို့ရယ်
အမေ့ကိုစာနာကြပါလား။

အများနာတကာနာကြားဖို့
တရားစာအုပ်များလဲတောင်းရအောင်
ဟဲ့ ဒကာ ဒကာမများ
ဂျီမေးလ်တော့ဖွင့်ကြပါလား။ 

အင်တာနက်သုံးနိုင်သော်ငြား
ကောင်းတာမှန်ရင် ပိတ်ကာထားမှတော့
အို............ ဂေါတမဘုရား
တပည့်တော်ခင်မျာ လူဖြစ် ရှူံးလူလုံးမလှ
ခွေးလုံးလုံးဖြစ်နေရပါပြီလား။

Unicode Notes

Zawgyi, although widely used by many Burmese web sites, is sadly not compliant with the Unicode standard. Let's hope they will support Unicode 5.1 in their future version. This page from zawgyi.org describes which fonts are compatible with Unicode 5.1 standard.

The Burmese text above can be viewed by any of the standard-compliant Unicode fonts: Padauk, Parabaik, ParabaikSans, and Myanmar3. I have the download link for Padauk in the following list.

Here is the list of tools/software, which I used.

• Keyman 6.0.15 from Tavultesoft: Keyman Desktop is a keyboard mapping solution, designed with the user in mind.
• myWinE keyboard [Right click and "Save link as"] from thanlwinsoft.org and the layout: MyWinE is an extended keyboard implementing Myanmar and Sgaw Karen support in Unicode.
• Padauk: download

Burmese unicode converter

I thought I would share this Perl script I have written to convert Burmese unicode from version 4.1 to 5.1. If any of you find it useful, please feel free to use it with GPL license. If you find any bugs, please let me know.

Download it here.

Hope

From New York Times regarding Barack Obama's victory for the Democratic nomination:

"We as black people now have hope that we have never, ever had," Mr. Sam-Brew [an immigrant from Ghana] said. "I have new goals for my little girl. She can't give me any excuses because she's black."

Emma Lazarus's The New Colossus

Emma Lazarus (July 22, 1849 – November 19, 1887) was an American poet. She wrote "The New Colossus" in 1883, that is now engraved on a bronze plaque on a wall in the base of the Statue of Liberty.

The New Colossus

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

Paul Auster wrote that "Bartholdi's gigantic effigy was originally intended as a monument to the principles of international republicanism, but 'The New Colossus' reinvented the statue's purpose, turning Liberty into a welcoming mother, a symbol of hope to the outcasts and downtrodden of the world".

At the Statue of Liberty in New York

Burmese-English dictionary

I have been busy working with the visual input system for our dictionaries. Check out the beta version for Burmese.

Go to http://burmese.sealang.net

Click on the keyboard icon (on your left panel) as shown in the following picture.

Click on the input characters so you can see the prediction. Please wait for a fraction of a second (because of the server delay) after you click on the characters. You will see the predicted Burmese words based on the dictionary order as in the following picture.

Warning about fonts

• If you use Zawgyi font, you won't see the correct rendering of some characters, especially subscript forms. Zawgyi is incompatible with the Unicode standard.
• Our dictionary uses the old Unicode standard with UTN #11 (the documentations are listed below)
1. Representing Myanmar In Unicode, Details and Examples by Martin Hosken and Maung Tun Tun Lwin
2. Myanmar Unicode Standard
• The old unicode standard was implemented in some fonts, such as Padauk, Myanmar1 and MyMyanmar. Get MyMyanmar here.

Politicizing Olympics

The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.

George Orwell said those words in his 1946 essay "Why I write."

Pro-Chinese governments, including Burma, and the Chinese government have been saying that olympics should not be politicized.

[Chinese] Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang says the Beijing Olympics is a grand event both for China and for the whole world, and that the Games should not be politicized.

The statement by Qin Gang is in itself a political one, describing a "grand event" showcasing the "rich and powerful" China. Olympics have long been used by various governments to promote their ideology. Hitler used the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, Germany as a tool to promote Nazi ideology by allowing only members of the "Aryan race" to compete for Germany.

Looking as far back as ancient Olympics events, winning athletes were heroes who put their home towns on the map. Winning medals at the Olympics signify the wealth and power of a town. A young Athenian nobleman used the number of his entries in chariot-race in the Olympics to defend his political reputation. [From Tufts]

Therefore, as far as I am concerned, olympics is a sporting as well as political event. As much as the Chinese government has the right to make the "grand" event successful, activists around the world should also have the right to express their anger towards the Chinese government and its policy.