notes and study aids on Myanmar language

Thursday 29 April 2010

Ngaba (16)


This translation of Maung Htin's Ngaba covers the text on page 18, as shown in the scanned image below. The first sentence begins on the preceeding page with the words "ယခုမူ သည်စကား".

Tuesday 27 April 2010

Ngaba (15)


This translation of Maung Htin's Ngaba covers the text on page 17, as shown in the scanned image below,

Monday 26 April 2010

U Thuzana


This post contains the Myaing Gyi Ngu Sayadaw (U Thuzana)'s foreword to his biography ဘဝအချိုးအကွေ့များ ယွန်းစလင်းအမြုတာ (Life behaviours turning to the essence of the light) written by မြိုင်နန်းဆွေ. A review of the English translation of the biography is available here. I must admit that I find my translation of this particularly piece woefully confusing.

Sunday 25 April 2010

Ngaba (14)


This translation of Maung Htin's Ngaba covers the text on page 16 (as shown in the scanned image below), which begins with the first full paragraph in the left hand column starting with the text "ဤကားငဘ၏". The translation continues to the end of the last paragraph at the bottom of the right hand column.


Friday 23 April 2010

Ngaba (13)


This translation of Maung Htin's Ngaba covers the text on page 15 (as shown in the scanned image below), which begins chapter 3. The translation, starting from the top of the left hand column continues to the end of the last paragraph, which finishes on page 16 with the text "ကာလ ပျက် လျှင် လူဆိုးအတွက်ပူ၊ အထူးသဖြင့် ဖြိုးတုပ်ကို ကြောက်ကြောက်ပြီးပူ၊ ဟိုသင်းအတွက်လဲပူး၊ သည်သင်းအတွက်လဲပူ၊ သြော်... ပူ... ပူ... ပူ...".


Wednesday 21 April 2010

Ngaba (12)


This translation of Maung Htin's Ngaba covers the text on page 13 (as shown in the scanned image below) starting from the first word at the top of the left hand column and continuing to the last sentence at the bottom of the right hand column. This concludes chapter two of Ngaba.


Tuesday 20 April 2010

Ngaba (11)


This translation of Maung Htin's Ngaba covers the text on page 12 (as shown in the scanned image below) starting from the first full paragraph at the top of the left hand column (which opens with the word "ဖြုတ်ကနဲဆို") and continues to the last sentence at the bottom of the right hand column.


Monday 19 April 2010

Ngaba (10)


This translation of Ngaba covers the text on page 11 starting from the quote "လူဆိုးတွေတော့..." at the top of the right and finishing with the last sentence, which continues onto page 12 with the words "တာမျှလုပ်စရာမလိုဘူး၊ ကိုလုပ်လဲ မခံနိုင်ဘူး။ ရှေ့ရေးနောက်ရေးဆိုတာ...".


Ngaba (9)


This translation of Ngaba covers the text on page 10 starting from below the red line in the scanned image below and continuing until the end of the last sentence, which finishes on page 11 with the words "တွေ့ကြုံခဲ့ဖူးသည် မရှိ၍ ကြောက်စရာကောင်းသည်မှာ ဘာ့ကြောင့်ဟု အကြောင်းမရှာတတ်။".


Sunday 18 April 2010

Dagon Taya (12)


This post covers the final pages (numbers twelve and thirteen) of Dagon Taya's short story "A fragrant hazy night" (မွှေးမြရီဝေသောညတစ်ည). The translation begins from the text "... ... ... ... ..." at the top of page twelve and continues to end of the text on page thirteen.

Dagon Taya (11)


This post covers page eleven of Dagon Taya's short story "A fragrant hazy night" (မွှေးမြရီဝေသောညတစ်ည). The translation begins from the first full sentence at the top of the page and continues to the final sentence at the bottom of the page, which ends on page twelve with the words "တွေပါ၊ စာပေတော့ချစ်ပါတယ်၊ ဒါပေမဲ့ လေ့လာရုံကြံခါသေးတယ်၊ ဒါကြောင့်မို့လဲ ရှင့်စာတွေကို သဘောကျမိတာပါ၊ တစ်ခုတော​ မေးပါရေဦးရှင်၊ ရှင်ဘယ်လိုရည်ရွယ်ချက်တွေနဲ့ ဝတ္ထုတွေ ရေးပါသလဲရှင်".


Saturday 17 April 2010

Dagon Taya (10)


This post covers page ten of Dagon Taya's short story "A fragrant hazy night" (မွှေးမြရီဝေသောညတစ်ည). The translation begins from the first full sentence at the top of the page and continues to the final sentence at the bottom of the page, which ends on page 11 with the words "ဝတ္ထုထဲက စကားလုံးတွေအတိုင်း တစ်သဝေမတိမ်း ကူးပြီး ချစ်သူတွေရေးတာပဲ".


Dagon Taya (9)


This post covers page nine of Dagon Taya's short story "A fragrant hazy night" (မွှေးမြရီဝေသောညတစ်ည). The translation begins from the first full sentence at the top of the page and continues to the last sentences at the bottom of the page.


gaing



In his 1975 text Sangha and State in Burma, Michael Mendelson argues for translating the Myanmar term gaing into English as "sect", as explained in the quote below from page 86.

"Sect is being used here as an approximate, if slightly unsatisfactory, substitute for the word gaing (Burmese). Spiro (1970: 315-320) suggests "branch" as a gloss for the term gaing. A gaing, from the Pali term gana (a chapter of monks), is, sociologically speaking, a group of taiks who recognize the somewhat charismatic leadership of a sayadaw who is considered the leader. It may at first have practices or beliefs (such as ordination rites, unique textual interpretations) no different from other established sects, but it may develop such differentiating characteristics and become both a self-defined and lay-defined sect, or what is known in Pali as a nikaya. Lay definition be a wealthy lay supporter (taga) usually precedes self definition. The difficulty is that the Burmese word gaing (collection, assemblage) is used by informants to cover both the Pali gana and nikaya. The problems involved with these terms are discussed in the Introduction. A further difficulty is that gaing can also have messianic overtones (Mendelson 1961a, b, 1963b, c)."

Michael Aung-Thwin, however, prefers the term "order" rather than "sect", as he argues in the quote below, taken from page 18 of his December 2009 paper "Of Monarchs, Monks and Men: Religion and the State in Myanmar."

"The Shwegyin considers itself stricter in discipline that the Thudhamma, the Maha Dwaya considers itself stricter that the Shwegyin, while the former's own offshoots consider themselves stricter that it. But in fact, all of these Orders are distinguished from one another more by the degree of adherence to the Vinaya--such as whether or not to wear sandals, or use umbrellas when going on their daily rounds for food--than by any substantive philosophical or doctrinal differences, hence my use of the term "Order" rather than "Sect."

Friday 16 April 2010

Dagon Taya (8)


This post covers page eight of Dagon Taya's short story "A fragrant hazy night" (မွှေးမြရီဝေသောညတစ်ည). The translation begins from the first sentence at the top of the page, which begins on page seven with the word "သူတို့သည်", and continues to the last sentences at the bottom of the page, which ends on page nine with the words "ကင်ကို မော့​ကြည်မိလေသည်။"


Wednesday 14 April 2010

Dagon Taya (7)


This post covers page seven of Dagon Taya's short story "A fragrant hazy night" (မွှေးမြရီဝေသောညတစ်ည).  The translation begins from the first sentence at the top of the page and continues to the last full sentence at the bottom of the page.

Sunday 11 April 2010

Dagon Taya (6)


This post covers page six of Dagon Taya's short story "A fragrant hazy night" (မွှေးမြရီဝေသောညတစ်ည).  The translation begins from the first sentence at the top of the page (for which the starting "ကျွန်" of "ကျွန်တော်၏" is printed at the end of page five.  The translation continues to the last sentence on the page, which continues onto page seven with "တက်ကြွလာ၏။".


Saturday 10 April 2010

Dagon Taya (5)


This post covers page five of Dagon Taya's short story "A fragrant hazy night" (မွှေးမြရီဝေသောညတစ်ည).  The translation begins from the first full sentence at the top of the page and continues to the end of the last full sentence at the bottom of the page.

Friday 9 April 2010

Dagon Taya (4)


This post covers page four of Dagon Taya's short story "A fragrant hazy night" (မွှေးမြရီဝေသောညတစ်ည).  The translation begins from the first full sentence at the top of the page and continues to the end of the last sentence which runs onto the following page with the words "အချစ်ဇာတ်လမ်းကို ဖွဲ့နွဲ့ထား၏။"

Thursday 8 April 2010

Dagon Taya (3)


This post covers page three of Dagon Taya's short story "A Fragrant hazy night" (မွှေးမြရီဝေသောညတစ်ည).  The translation begins from the first full sentence at the top of the page and continues to the end of the last sentence which runs onto the following page with the words "စာပေကိုအကဲဖြတ်ရန် ဉာဏ်မရှိဟု ယူဆလိုက်သည်။"

Wednesday 7 April 2010

Dagon Taya (2)


This post covers page two of Dagon Taya's "A hazy fragrant night." Page one can be found here.


Tuesday 6 April 2010

Dagon Taya (1)


This post covers the first page of Dagon Taya's short story "A Fragrant Hazy Night" (မွှေးမြရီဝေသောညတစ်ည). An informative article on Dagon Taya's life and work is available here.


Monday 5 April 2010

Precious Stones


This post provides a translation of a short piece of writing entitled "Precious Stones," by Aung Thu Nyein, also available on his blog here.

Thursday 1 April 2010

kusala and kuthou



In a previous post I highlighted Gustaaf Houtman's explanation of the "Pali Trap", a concept which he uses to explain the tendency of anthropologists and other scholars to translate Myanmarised Pali terms according to their canonical Pali definitions rather than according to colloquial Myanmar usage.  Quoted below is a good example of such a "terminological shift" of a Pali word adopted into Myanmar, taken from Melford Spiro's Buddhism and Society: A great tradition and its Burmese vicissitudes, p. 97.

"In nibbanic Buddhism, it will be recalled, there is a distinction between kusala, good action, and puñña, merit acquired by such action.  Throughout the Therevada world, however, one or the other of these semantically distinctive lexemes--puñña and kusala--has been dropped and its meaning assimilated to that of the remaining lexeme.  "Merit" and "good," distinctive concepts in nibbanic Buddhism, have been fused into a semantically undifferentiated concept which is rendered by one lexeme alone.  Thus, in Ceylon and Thailand, kusala has been dropped in favor of puñña (Sinhalese, pin; Thai, boon), while in Burma puñña has been dropped in favour of kusala (Burmese, ku.thou)."

This "terminological shift" has led to the common Myanmar phrase "ကုသိုလ်ရတယ်" (kuthou-ya-day), meaning to "get merit" (as a result of doing a meritorious act). By contrast, as I understand it, according to canonical usage, one would "do" a kusala act and "get" puñña.