Opening a Can of Worms in Burmese Teaching: Tackling Controversial Words in a Language Class

A collection of Burmese books (photo by Kenneth Wong)

When I stand before my American students as a Burmese teacher, I'm acutely aware I'm not just a vessel of linguistic knowledge, acquired from academic training and research. My Burmese mastery is largely the product of my Burmese upbringing and voracious reading habits. To my students, I'm therefore the personification of Burmese culture. To borrow my poet friend Ko Ko Thett's words, I carry "the burden of being Burmese." That burden includes the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Burmese language is a window to the Burmese soul, to the country's history and the people's view of the world. Pali-derived words like thissa (truth), meitta (compassion), and dhokkha (misery, suffering) reflect Theravada Buddhism's influence. Long ago, they might have been confined to dharma talks, to the tranquil viharas. But today, fishmongers and butchers are as likely to use them as scholars and monks. Unlike traditional Burmese words, these are spelled with double- or stack-consonants, with significant deviation from conventional spelling rules. Gautama Buddha may have been the emblem of compassion, but, let me tell you, these Buddhist terms show no mercy to my poor students who must memorize them.

Phrases like nat phwet (to be kidnapped by spirits) and sayings like kyar kyaut lo shin gyi koe, shin gyi kyar htet soe (fearing the tiger, you seek refuge from the great spirit lord, only to find out the lord is worse than the tiger) reveal the population's devotion to the animist spirits and minor deities, called nats. In rural Burma, villagers and townspeople still make routine offerings of fruits and flowers to these supernatural beings, still pester them for boons and protection in times of need. The Burmese tiger has probably been hunted to the edge of extinction, but the spirit lord shin gyi and his cohort still command fear and reverence.

In the first-person pronouns that show respect, one finds traces of Burma's feudal past, of a time when the rulers looked upon their subjects as slaves. In reverential terms used to address members of the clergy, one sees a hint of the unequal positions held by men and women. In the popular terms for LGBQT, one finds clues to prevalent attitude toward gays and lesbians. In the history of the word for people of south Indian origin, one finds the odd way a word of praise morphed into one of disdain for foreigners.

Strictly speaking, these are not pertinent materials to a language class. I can sidestep these controversial aspects of the culture by concentrating on vocabulary and grammar. Since, as a Burmese-American, I must answer for the shortcomings of my culture, that might even be the prudent approach to take. But in doing so, I feel I also deprive my students of the wisdom and knowledge that can only come from a deeper understanding of the cultural norms and attitudes that spawn the words and phrases they're learning.

The rhyme to discourage physical violence tells us, sticks and stones may break your bones, but words can never harm you. The law today forbids us from the use of sticks and stones to settle ours disputes, so words stand as our sole choice of weapon. To use that weapon to combat old-fashioned ideas and outdated attitudes, my students must employ the language with all its nuances and make deliberate choices. To equip them with that skill, I believe it's worth opening a can of worms in Burmese teaching.

A First-Person Slave 

When introducing my students to the first-person pronouns (In English, "I" is your only choice, but in Burmese, male and female speakers use different words for "I" in formal speech), I usually ask them to also look up the word for "slave."

They were surprised to find that kyun, the word for slave, is part of kyun-naw ("I" for male speakers) and kyun-ma ("I" for female speakers). The contemporary pronunciation of kyun-naw and kyun-ma hides the connection to its slavish etymology because the words are pronounced kya-naw and kya-ma instead.

In the Elementary Handbook of the Burmese Language (Superintendent Government Printing, 1898), Burmese linguist, scholar, and archeologist Taw Sein Ko records, “Kyun-daw means the slave of a high personage … Kyun-daw myo means of the family of such slaves. Kyunote means a little slave. This form may be contracted into Kyote.”

Kyote is still in use today, especially in rural areas. Burmese speakers often use kyote when they want to put on a folksy air. 

Holier Than Thou 

In Burmese, laypeople have to use a special set of pronouns and expressions when speaking to members of the holy order, such as monks and nuns. The implication is that the clergy lives a holier spiritual life; therefore, they deserve reverential addresses. Could these terms offer a clue to the men and women’s -- or monks and nuns’ -- positions in the Burmese Buddhism's hierarchy?

The words to refer to monks are phone gyi or phone phone. The root word, phone, is the word for accumulated spiritual merit or authority. Burmese usually describe supernatural beings, saints, and shrines with a reputation for answering their prayers as "phone kyi dae" (it has great spiritual power).

A common superstition among many Burmese is that, if a man walks below a woman’s sarong (hta-mein), his phone or spiritual authority will diminish. This belief makes some men go to great length to avoid the women’s sarongs drying on the clotheslines overhead in narrow streets hemmed in with multi-storied apartment buildings on both sides.

The head monk or abbot of the monastery is usually sayah daw (spelled sayah taw, sacred teacher). The suffix taw suggests grandeur, auspiciousness, and sacredness. One might use taw to show reverence when talking about Shwe Dagon zedi taw (the great Shwe Dagon Pagoda), for instance. At the Taungbyone spirit festival on Mount Popa, when people refer to female deities, they’re called mae daw (spelled mae taw), the sacred mother.

By contrast, nuns are called thila shin (keepers of the precepts) or sayah lay (junior teacher). The suffix lay is not a putdown. But it suggests being lower, lesser, or littler. Whereas one would never refer to Shwe Dagon pagoda is Shwe Dagon zedi lay (because of its massive stature and reputation), one might refer to a neighborhood shrine as a zedi lay (a cute, charming, small shrine).

The head nun of a nunnery may be called sayah gyi (senior or great teacher), but the word for an abbot, sayah daw (sacred teacher), is seldom applied to a head nun. Also conspicuously absent in the terminology for the nuns is the word for spiritual authority, phone.

Sitting on a Foreign Origin

A Facebook post calling the late U Ko Ni "kalar"

One internet meme circulated on social media by Burmese users quips, “If you ask someone what their race is, they should be able to reply Kachin, Mon, Kayar, Rakhine, Shan … [names of the major ethnic races recognized as part of Burma]. But if they don’t answer, they’re probably Kalars.”

The ultra-nationalist social media users sometimes call the late U Ko Ni, a constitutional scholar and advisor to Aung San Suu Kyi's NLD party, as “Ko Ni Kalar.” (U Ko Ni was assassinated in January at Yangon Intl. airport. Many believe his Muslim faith, along with his work to undermine the Burmese military’s power in the parliamentary structure, made him a target.)

An internet meme mocking "kalars"

Examples like these suggest the Burmese word kalar -- the word for people of south Indian origin -- is a hurtful, racist word and should be avoided. Certainly the word can be used as an insult, to highlight someone's skin color or foreign ancestry as a sign of inferiority. But tracing the word's origin and a more careful examination of its usage over time reveals kalar can be benign or hurtful.

The Myanmar-Ingalaik Abidan, or the Myanmar-English Dictionary compiled and printed by the Dpt. of Myanmar Language Commission, Ministry of Education, Union of Myanmar (1993, 2nd printing), lists the Pali word kula as the origin of kalar.

In U Hote Sein's Pali-Myanmar Abidan, or U Hote Sein's Pali-Burmese Dictionary (published by Chantha Yaungzone Publishing, Pazundaung township, distributed by Palika Byu-har Association, Bahan township), the Pali word kula is defined as: race, noble race, home, one's parents' home, or a patron feeding and taking care of one. 

But somehow, over time, the word kalar in Burma became inseparably linked to people of Indian origin. Lentil beans, for example, are called kala-bae (spelled kalar pae, meaning "beans of the kalars"); and a type of chili known for its extraordinary heat is called kala-awe thee ("chili that makes the kalar scream"). People with Indian ancestry who live in Burma may also refer to themselves as kalar lu myo ("of the kalar race"), and India as kala-byi (spelled kalar pyi, meaning "the country of the kalars"). In these cases, the word kalar is devoid of toxic connotations. Nobody should be insulted by the word kala-bae or kala-awe thee (least of all, the lentil and the chili).

It's worth noting that, during the colonial era, the Burmese -- especially the nationalists -- used the word kala-phyu, or "white kalars," to refer to Europeans and Caucasians. Much earlier, in the historical work Hman Nan Yazawin or The Glass Palace Chronicles (compiled around 1830s), Filipe de Brito e Nicote, the Portuguese adventure who declared himself king of Thanlyin and ruled there briefly, was described as "kalar nga Zingar" (Zingar the kalar). Was de Brito so sunburned and darkened from years of military campaign that he was virtually indistinguishable from the south Indians? Who knows? But a more probably explanation is, people back then used the word kalar to refer to a much broader category of foreigners than Indians.

Even the construct of the Burmese word for "chair" -- kala-htaing (kalar + seat) -- strongly suggests the furniture might have been introduced by foreigners. So, if one were to ban the word kalar altogether, one may also have to come up with other awkward -- and possibly comical -- alternatives for lentil, chair, and many other words. (It's a little too late to rebrand lentil as Myanmar pae, or "the beans of the Myanmars.")

Besides, I'm of the opinion that solving social problems at the linguistic level is a cop out, because the proposed fixes don't address the root causes. English speakers have effectively stopped using the derogatory N-word for black people, but the recent police shootings of unarmed black men suggests the society's attitude and treatment of the marginalized segment has not changed much.

At a Loss for Word in Sex 

Burmese offers quite a litany of words for gay -- main-ma-shar, achauk, gan-duu, jee-bone, to name the most frequently used ones. But the flavors and tones of these words -- the images they conjure up, the reactions they invoke -- are largely negative, I'm afraid.

They're usually used to describe someone who has adopted the opposite sex's mannerisms and dresses in a flamboyant, laughable fashion. The easiest way to provoke a hot-blooded Burman into anger is to accuse him of being a main-ma-shar or gan-duu, because it comes with the implication that he's so effeminate he can't put up a fight.

That makes it difficult to talk about people like Aung Myo Min, an openly gay man who is the executive director of Equality Myanmar, a human rights advocacy. (Aung Myo Min is the subject of the documentary This Kind of Love directed by Jeanne Marie Hallacy, released 2015). It's equally challenging to write about, for example, the first LGBQT Film Festival in Yangon.

English words like gay and lesbian give one the option to describe a person's choice of lifestyle without putting him or her down. In contrast, the moment one uses a Burmese term like main-ma-shar or achauk, one introduces the disdain and sneer inseparable from the word.

New Vocabulary for the New Era

100 Important Expressions for Myanmar Society’s Transformation

The country's transition to civilian rule, one can already see, has injected a new vigor and vitality to the language itself. With the previous censorship rules largely abolished, Burmese writers, reporters, and editors scrambled to find ways to talk about topics that were previously tabooed -- topics like democracy, human rights, privacy, and others.

They cobbled together the words pwint lin (frankness) and myin thar (easy to see) to create the Burmese version of "transparency": pwint lin myin thar. They strung together the words lain (sex), tu (same), and chit-thu (lover) into the Burmese term for "same-sex lover": lain tuu chit thu.

Ko Myint Zaw, an environmental activist, published 100 Important Expressions for Myanmar Society’s Transformation (Juu Sar Pay Publishing, Yangon, Myanmar, July 2012). In it, the archaic Pali word for machination and machinery, Yann-da-yar, was pressed into service as part of the Burmese expression for “structural violence": Muu wah da yan-dayar ...

And the quintessential Buddhist phrase Thanthaya -- the cycle of death and rebirth, Samsara in Burmese spelling -- is recycled to depict the notion of endless, insufferable cycles in the Burmese version of “Vicious cycle": A-soe kyawt thanthaya.

Burmese language will endure, so long as the country and its people do. And my students, in time, will make their own marks in the way they use the language, in the choices they make, and with the phrases they invent.

Opening the can of worms, I believe, is the best way to foster transparency, to halt the machination of structural oppression, and to end the vicious cycle of discrimination against certain subgroups.

Note: This is a summary of the talk I gave at the 2017 Association for Asian Studies Conference, as part of a panel discussion.

Further Reading
(Mis)Interpretations of Burmese Words: In the case of the term Kala (Kula), Khin Maung Saw, Moe Ma Ka, January 2016
The Myanmar-Ingalaik Abidan, or the Myanmar-English Dictionary compiled and printed by the Dpt. of Myanmar Language Commission, Ministry of Education, Union of Myanmar (1993, 2nd printing)
U Hote Sein's Pali-Myanmar Abidan, or U Hote Sein's Pali-Burmese Dictionary (published by Chantha Yaungzone Publishing, Pazundaung township, distributed by Palika Byu-har Association, Bahan township)
100 Important Expressions for Myanmar Society’s Transformation (available in Burmese only, Juu Sar Pay Publishing, Yangon, Myanmar, July 2012)

Glossary of Burmese terms
သစၥာ thissa (truth)
ေမတၱာ meitta (compassion)
ဒုကၡ dhokkha (misery, suffering)
နတ္ဖြက္ nat phwet (to be kidnapped by spirits)
က်ားေၾကာက္လို႕ရွင္ႀကီးကိုး၊ ရွင္ႀကီးက်ားထက္ဆိုး kyar kyaut lo shin gyi koe, shin gyi kyar htet soe (fearing the tiger, you seek refuge from the great spirit lord, only to find out the lord is worse than the tiger)
ကြၽန္ kyun (slave)
ကြၽန္ေတာ္ kyun-naw (I, male speaker)
ကြၽန္မ kyun-ma (I, female speaker)
ကြၽန္ေတာ္မ်ိဳး kyun-daw myo (a slave of high personage)
ကြၽန္ုပ္ kyunote (a little slave)
က်ဳပ္ kyote (folksy way to say "I")
ဘုန္းႀကီး phone gyi (monk)
ဘုန္းဘုန္း phone phone (monk, in casual speak)
ဘုန္းႀကီးတယ္ phone kyi dae (to have great spiritual power)
ဆရာေတာ္ sayah daw (abbot, sacred teacher)
သီလရွင္ thila shin (nun)
ဆရာေလး sayah lay (nun, junior teacher)
ဆရာႀကီး sayah gyi (head nun, senior or great teacher)
ကုလား kalar (people of south Indian origin, people of dark complexion)
ကုလ kula (Pali, race, noble race)
ကုလားပဲ kala-bae (spelled kalar pae, beans of the kalars)
ကုလားေအာ္သီး kala-awe thee (chili that makes the kalar scream)
ကုလားလူမ်ိဳး kalar lu myo (of Indian race)
ကုလားျပည္ kala-byi (spelled kalar pyi, the country of the kalars)
ကုလားထိုင္ kala-htaing (chair, or the seat of the kalars)
မိန္းမလ်ာ main-ma-shar (gay, effeminate man)
အေျခာက္ achauk (gay, effeminate man)
ဂန္ဒူး gan-duu (gay, effeminate man)
ဂ်ီပုန္း jee-bone (gay, effeminate man)
ပြင္႔လင္းျမင္သာ pwint lin myin thar (transparency)
လိင္တူခ်စ္သူ lain tuu chit thu (samesex lover)
မူဝါဒ ယႏၱရား muu wah da yan-dayar (structural violence)
အဆိုးေၾကာ႕ သံသရာ A-soe kyawt thanthaya (vicious cycle)