Those Who Would Remake Myanmar Find That Words Fail Them

[Jonathan Fairfield]

Those Who Would Remake Myanmar Find That Words Fail Them

By THOMAS FULLER

YANGON, Myanmar — It’s the dawn of democracy in Myanmar. If only the Burmese had their own word for it.

As this former dictatorship opens to the world, language is a stumbling block.

For half a century, Myanmar was so cut off from the outside world that people were jailed for owning an unauthorized fax machine.

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.

Today, as Myanmar embraces change, many foreign words are being imported wholesale, but their meanings are getting lost in translation.

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/20/world/asia/those-who-would-remake-myanmar-find-that-words-fail-them.html?_r=0