To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle. -- George Orwell


Essay

Categories

8888, America, Asean, book review, Burma, Burmese dictionary, China, Constitution Referendum, culture, Cyber attacks, Dr. Kyaw Thet, Dunwoody, Famous Burmese, Harry Shorto, Karen, Kayan, Khmer, laos, McNeil Tech, migrants, milk powder, minorities, Mon, Nargis, Natural Resources, Nay Phone Latt, Nelson Mandela, Obama, Padaung, photos, politics, prison, Rangoon University, sex industry, Shan, Thailand, unicode

Reflections

A Burmese student running after his death To the Future


Dictionaries

August went past so fast for me working with four dictionaries. Sigh..... Finally, here they are:

Burmese dictionary

http://sealang.net/burmese/

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

http://sealang.net/mon/

Mon dictionary is based on the Dictionary of Modern Spoken Mon by H.L. Shorto (1962, Oxford University Press)

Shan dictionary

http://sealang.net/shan/

Shan dictionary is based on the Shan-English dictionary by Sao Tern Moeng (ISBN 0-931745-92-6)

Karen dictionary

http://sealang.net/karen/

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.


Harry Shorto

From http://sealang.net/archives/shorto/:

Harry Leonard Shorto (1919-1995) was the world's acknowledged expert on the development of the Mon language over the last two millennia, and a leading scholar on Mon-Khmer and Austroasiatic linguistics in general. This site is devoted to presenting Shorto's published and unpublished work, as well as photographs taken by him in Burma in the mid-1950's.

See here for Harry Shorto's pictures taken in Burma in the mid fifties.

Mon-Khmer Comparative Dictionary

The following is from Amazon:

A Mon-Khmer Comparative Dictionary (MKCD) is the magnum opus of Professor Harry L. Shorto (1919-1995), formerly Professor of Mon-Khmer Studies in the University of London, School of Oriental and African Studies, until his retirement in 1984. He is the author of two standard reference works, A Dictionary of Modern Spoken Mon (1962) and the highly respected author of the standard reference to epigraphic Mon: A Dictionary of the Mon Inscriptions (1971) as well as the classic dictionary. Shorto held the Chair in Mon-Khmer Studies. The MKCD is Shorto's grand synthesis of seventy years of historical and comparative research on the Mon-Khmer languages. Meant to be published in the early 1980s, Shorto's manuscript was rediscovered by his daughter Anna, and has been carefully edited in line with the author's intentions. The MKCD presents 2,246 etymologies with almost 30,000 lexical citations; even today, it is the most extensive analysis of Mon-Khmer to appear since Wilhelm Schmidt laid the foundations of comparative Mon-Khmer exactly 100 years ago with the Grundzüge einer Lautlehre der Mon-Khmer-Sprachen (1905) and Die Mon-Khmer-Völker (1906). A Mon-Khmer Comparative Dictionary includes numerous Munda, Austronesian, Thai, Burmese and Chinese lexical comparisons. It is an incomparable resource for studying Southeast Asia's rich legacy of language contact, and for investigating distant genetic relations with its largest, oldest language family. Clearly establishing the terms of reference for future discussion of Mon-Khmer etymology, Shorto's MKCD joins such defining works as Emeneau and Burrow's A Dravidian Etymological Dictionary (1961) and Turner's A Comparative Dictionary of the Indo-Aryan Languages (1966-85) in the canon of 20th century comparative linguistics.

Posted at 08:00 Aug 30, 2008 | Tagged as: , , | WriteBacks (0) | permalink

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.

Posted at 08:00 Aug 02, 2008 | Tagged as: | WriteBacks (0) | permalink

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


Ludu Daw Amar's Funeral

Ko Hla has pictures of Ludu Daw Amar's funeral.
Posted at 08:00 Apr 10, 2008 | Tagged as: | WriteBacks (0) | permalink