As Myanmar draws closer to the November 8 election, you will see an uptick in international news stories about Myanmar.
One of the subjects that appears to have lit the foreign mind afire is the Burmese language, or rather, the Burmese language’s inability to convey progressive and democratic ideas due to the isolation of the country for almost five decades under military rule, a time in which the education system suffered grievously.
An article in the New York Times started the conversation, and an interview in the BBC is continuing it.
The main thesis here is that due to an underdeveloped language, the transition to democracy is made all the harder as the very notions that many associate with a free society do not exist.
The very Times-sounding headline is “Those Who Would Remake Myanmar Find That Words Fail Them.”
Here’s what we have to say about this: Nonsense!
Many languages borrow from other languages, and there are plenty of loan words in Burmese that are getting along just fine (beer, by the way, is one of them, though admittedly beer is not essential to the development of democracy, or is it?).
As Gandhi once wrote, truth and nonviolence are as old as the hills. You don’t need exact translateable words for concepts that are universal. The words might come later but the feelings are always there and will always be there.
Oddly, this is not an idea relegated to the foreign press.
“All these things — democracy, institutions, even freedom — I don’t think Myanmar people know what true freedom is or what to do with it,” U Thaung Su Nyein, editor in chief of local newspaper 7Day Daily, told the Times.
Really? People are just walking around without the faintest idea of what true freedom is or what to do with it?
What’s interesting is that a lot of terms that the international community is hellbent on bringing to Myanmar are ones that the English language should have disposed of itself because they are useless.
In the BBC interview, one example that’s mentioned is “capacity building.” There is no Burmese phrase for capacity building. Good!
As the BBC interviewer quipped, these types of NGO words “don’t mean a lot in English [either]”
Photo / Wikicommons
