To the FutureSep 07, 2008
Dictionaries
August went past so fast working with four dictionaries. Sigh..... Finally, here they are:
Burmese dictionary
Burmese dictionary is mainly based on the Myanmar-English dictionary published in 1993 by the Myanmar Language Commission and republished in 1996 by Dunwoody Press (ISBN 1-881265-47-1)
Mon dictionary
Mon dictionary is based on the Dictionary of Modern Spoken Mon by H.L. Shorto (1962, Oxford University Press)
Shan dictionary
Shan dictionary is based on the Shan-English dictionary by Sao Tern Moeng (ISBN 0-931745-92-6)
Karen dictionary
Karen dictionary is based on the Drum Karen-English Student dictionary published by the Drum Publication Group in 2008.
If you do use them and find any errors or mistakes, please let me know.
Apr 30, 2008
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)
- Representing Myanmar In Unicode, Details and Examples by Martin Hosken and Maung Tun Tun Lwin
- Myanmar Unicode Standard
- The old unicode standard was implemented in some fonts, such as Padauk, Myanmar1 and MyMyanmar. Get MyMyanmar here.
Apr 16, 2008
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.
