But the xenophobic military governments of the past five decades prohibited the use of English loan words on the grounds they were culturally disruptive, scholars say. Under British colonial rule, English words leached liberally into Burmese, yielding such Burmese words as budget and beer. The very idea may not exist, possibly because little privacy is found in a society in which people traditionally lived and slept in common areas. When foreign experts recommended the government pass a computer privacy law, Burmese translators scratched their heads because there is no precise translation for privacy in Burmese. “At a time when everything is about the country’s political future, it’s a liability and a constraining factor.” “Burmese has a far poorer political vocabulary than English,” says U Thant Myint-U, a historian who is also an adviser to the president. No native words exist for other common ideas like racism, federal or globalisation.
The English word democracy was subsumed into the Burmese language decades ago – it is pronounced dee-mock-rah-SEE – but for many Burmese it remains a foreign and somewhat abstract concept. Today, as Burma embraces change, many foreign words are being imported wholesale, but their meanings are getting lost in translation. As the rest of the world was hurtling into the information age, the strict censorship of publications, limited access to global media and creaking connections to the internet stunted the evolution of the Burmese language, leaving it without many words that are elsewhere deemed essential parts of the modern political and technical vocabulary. As this former dictatorship opens to the world, language is a stumbling block.įor half a century, Burma was so cut off from the outside world, people were jailed for owning an unauthorised fax machine. If only the Burmese had their own word for it. It is the dawn of democracy in Burma (Myanmar).
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