Category: Burma

In the 1950s and early 1960s, there were several daily newspapers in Burmese (e.g. Kyemon, Myanmar Ah Lin, Yangon, Tun Nay Zin, Mahn Daing, Botathaung) and English (e.g. The Nation, Guardian). There were also a few evening newspapers.

We will cover the following :

• The Nation
• Guardian Publications
• Working People’s Daily

The Nation

The Nation was one of the early English newspapers published in the Union of Burma.

• Edward Michael Law-Yone founded and served as Chief Editor.
• The Nation was shut down in May 1963.
• U Law-Yone was imprisoned for five years.
• In 1970, he moved to Thailand.
  Continued publishing The Nation in Thailand.
• Finally moved to the USA.
• Children : Marjorie, Hubert, Byron, Wendy

Guardian Publications

• Guardian Daily newspaper in English
• Guardian Magazine (published monthly)

Editors

• Guardian U Sein Win (Early Journalist)
• Daw Khin Swe Hla (Assistant Editor, moved to WPD)
• U Soe Myint (Chief Editor, moved from WPD)
• P. Aung Khin (Assistant Editor)

U Khin Maung Zaw (KMZ, EC76) wrote :

The late Chief Editor of Guardian and Working People’s Daily (English) U Soe Myint was my father-in-law. He was an accomplished musician and played several instruments.

He was the eldest son of U Thein Maung, known to many by his pen name Htin Lin, who translated many books into Burmese in those days. U Soe Myint’s siblings include U Soe Win (RIT EC70, ex-UCC, ex-PTC), U Kyaw Zaw (GBNF – RIT EP72, DCA) and U Khin Zaw (ex-UCC Cupertino, CA, USA).

In honor of his great grandfather, my son is named Htin Lin.

Dawlay’s Family Circle

Daw Khin Swe Hla founded “Dawlay’s Family Circle”. After she moved to Working People’s Daily, several male editors (e.g. P. Aung Khin) continued as “Daw Lay”.

Uzin Bobby Myo Tun (A69) wrote :

I worked very closely with P. Aung Khin (Paul) in the preparation and editing of the Guardian Daily’s Sunday Supplement page ‘Dawlay’s Family Circle’ in the mid-1960’s. It was great fun compiling shorts on regular features such as ‘Popular Fallacies’, ‘Birds of Burma’ and filler jokes. I learnt much on proof reading of dailies from those days. I also wrote some short stories for the Sunday Supplement and the Guardian magazine. P. Aung Khin, endearingly known to most as Uncle Paul, wouldn’t let me compete in the Scrabble tournaments. Instead, I was asked to be one of the judges on those occasions. Those were the days! Thanks for bringing back those memories.

Essay Contest

Daw Lay’s Circle sponsored “Essay Contests”.

The winners include

• Errol Than Tun (Uzin “Bobby” Myo Tun, A69)
• L R C Truitwein
• Tin Maung Maung Aung
• Hla Yee Yee (MEHS61)
• Winsome Ba Thike (MEHS61)
• Katherine Ba Thike

Scrabble

• Scrabble was played at the Guardian premises (on weekends).
• Saya Des Rodgers, Nelson Rodgers and the Tiger Scrabble Team (U Tin Shwe, U Ba U) are some of the regular players.
• They also played Scrabble at YMCA.

My Writings

• In July 1969, my poem “Men on the Moon” (honoring the Apollo 11 mission) was published in the Guardian.
• In the 70s, at the request of U Soe Myint, I wrote articles on Computers and Computer Applications for the Guardian.

Working People’s Daily (WPD)

The BSPP Government introduced two newspapers :

• Loke Tha Pyi Thu Nei Zin (in Burmese)
  with Shwe Oo Daung as Chief Editor
  
• Working People’s Daily (in English)
  with U Khin Maung Latt as Chief Editor
  Successors : U Than Saw, U Ko Lay

U Khin Maung Latt

• Number One told the Chief Editors that there would be no censorship for the editorials.
• One day, Number One asked U Khin Maung Latt if he wanted to be an Ambassador.
• Daw Khin Myo Chit responded, “Ko Latt can go back to teaching”.

U Than Saw

• U Than Saw succeeded U Khin Maung Latt as Chief Editor.
• U Soe Myint (Assistant Editor, eldest son of U Thein Maung) married Aida Than Saw (daughter of U Than Saw). U Soe Myint later moved to Guardian and became Chief Editor. He is the father of Daw Khin Khin Latt (spouse of U Khin Maung Zaw / KMZ).

U Ko Lay

• U G. Ko Lay (RUBC Gold) was Chief Editor at the time when I wrote poems and translations for WPD.
• Father : “Motley” Ko Ko
• Spouse : Daw Nyunt Nyunt Win (Physics, Registrar of RASU).

WPD Sunday Supplement

The Sunday Supplement published translations (e.g. of modern Burmese short stories).

The translators include well known authors and scholars such as

• MMT (former Chief Justice U Myint Thein)
• Tet Toe (U Ohn Pe, author and lexicographer)
• ZMT (former ambassador U Zaw Myint Thein (a) U Zaw Win)
• Sao Hso Holm (English Honors First Class, LLM, son of Arzani Mong Pawn Sawbwa Sao San Htun)

Translation of Short story

• I was the exception.
• Daw Khin Swe Hla (who started “Daw Lay’s Circle” in the Guardian before moving to WPD), wanted to encourage aspiring writers.
• She requested me to translate “Nge Thay Loe” (a short story by Saya U Thu Kha).
• I received fifty kyats for my translation “Still So Young“.
  Pen name : Maung Hlaing Phyo
• Saya U Thu Kha was given fifty kyats for his original work.

Poem

• WPD published poems
  
• WPD published my poems (e.g. Our Unity)
  Pen name : Maung Hlaing Phyo

Translation of Poem

• WPD also published translations of Burmese poems.
  
• WPD published my translation “To my alma mater“.
  Pen name : Maung Hlaing Phyo
• I received fifteen kyats for my translation of the poem.

Beginning of Censorship

• After the Coup D’etat in March 2, 1962, the Revolutionary Council and the Government took complete control of the news media and the newspapers.
• Most newspapers were shut down.
  The Nation was one of the earliest.
  U Law Yone was detained.

• Finally, only four newspapers were left.
• Two new newspapers (Loketha Pyithu Nay Zin and Working Peoples’ Daily) were added to bring the total to six : four in Burmese and two in English.

• The News Agencies (e.g. AP, Reuters) could only send the news to the newly established NAB (News Agency Burma).
• U Ohn Pe (Tet Toe) headed NAB.
• He was succeeded by U Kyaw Min (Min Kyaw Min).
  

• The news were censored.
• The uncensored news were translated into Burmese.
• The NAB news were then distributed to the six newspapers.

• Later, two groups of three Chief Editors (one from English and two from Myanmar newspapers) were formed to review and censor the articles and poems submitted to the papers.
• It was an example of collaborative pre-screening.

Protective Verses (1)

ဗုဒ္ဓါနံ ဇိဝိတဿ နသက္ကာ ကေနစိ အန္တရာယောကာတုံ တထာမေဟောတုဧတေန သစ္စဝဇ္ဇေန သောတ္ထိ ဆန္ဒပြပြည်သူလူထုအပေါင်း ဟောတုသဗ္ဗဒါ

မြတ်စွာဘုရား၏အသက် ဘေးအန္တရာယ်ကို တစုံတစ်ယောက်သောသူမှ ပြုချင်းငှာမတတ်နိုင်။ ဤမှန်သောသစ္စာကြောင့် ဆန္ဒပြသူအပေါင်း အခါခပ်သိမ်း ဘေးကင်းပါစေ

Protective Verses (2)

ဉုံဗုဒ္ဓ စက္ခုံ တစ်ကိုယ်လုံးခြုံ
ဉုံဓမ္မ စက္ခုံ တစ်ကိုယ်လုံးခြုံ
ဉုံသံဃာ့ စက္ခုံ တစ်ကိုယ်လုံးခြုံ

ဉုံဗုဒ္ဓ စက္ခုံ တစ်အိမ်လုံးခြုံ
ဉုံဓမ္မ စက္ခုံ တစ်အိမ်လုံးခြုံ
ဉုံသံဃာ့ စက္ခုံ တစ်အိမ်လုံးခြုံ

ဉုံဗုဒ္ဓ စက္ခုံ တစ်လမ်းလုံးခြုံ
ဉုံဓမ္မ စက္ခုံ တစ်လမ်းလုံးခြုံ
ဉုံသံဃာ့ စက္ခုံ တစ်လမ်းလုံးခြုံ

ဉုံဗုဒ္ဓ စက္ခုံ တစ်မြို့လုံးခြုံ
ဉုံဓမ္မ စက္ခုံ တစ်မြို့လုံးခြုံ
ဉုံသံဃာ့ စက္ခုံ တစ်မြို့လုံးခြုံ

ဉုံဗုဒ္ဓ စက္ခုံ တစ်ပြည်လုံးခြုံ
ဉုံဓမ္မ စက္ခုံ တစ်ပြည်လုံးခြုံ
ဉုံသံဃာ့ စက္ခုံ တစ်ပြည်လုံးခြုံ

မြန်မာ ပြည်သူ/ပြည်သားများ အားလုံး ဘေးအန္တရာယ် ကင်းကြပါစေ

Burmese Currency

• The Union Bank of Burma issued Burmese Currency notes backed by Gold Reserves.
• The bills were signed by authorities (e.g. Sithu U Kaung, U San Lin).
• One US dollar traded at 5 – 6 kyats, and one Sterling pound around 12 – 13 kyats.

Old Receipt from 1979

• The Old Receipt (for 146 Kyats and 50 Pyas) is a testament of the purchasing power in the 70s.
• It was for a farewell dinner for Saya U Myo Win (M/Ag65, GBNF) by 25 members of the RIT Automobile Club.

Decline in the value of the Kyat

Between 1962 and 1988, three rounds of Demonetization, mismanagement, … saw a huge decline in the value of the Kyat.

Snap shots of the exchange rate :

• 1 Kyat = 4 (or more) Bahts (Early days)
• 1 Kyat = 1 Baht (Baht Taik Kyat Taik Khit)
• 4 (or more Kyats) = 1 Baht

Notes

• In 2021, Myanmar was hit hard by Covid-19 and a senseless “Failed Coup”.
• They resulted in a sharp decline of Economy, Education, Heath and Social Services.

Early days

• In the early days, most students know Burmese and English well.
  Many went on to become bi-lingual writers and outstanding translators.
• Rangoon University had students from overseas (India, Nepal, Japan, Russia).
• Some (e.g. one Russian, one Japanese) majored in Burmese.

BRS

• Several British scholars and/or teachers helped set up the Burma Research Society (BRS) and published the BRS Journal.
• The journal contains transliteration of old Burmese/Myanmar inscriptions (kyauk sar). For example, use three English letters KOL => Ka gyi, Lone gyi tin, Ta chaung gin to transliterate the Burmese word “Ko”.
• BRS also helped conduct “Research Congress”.
• Saya U Win (Geography) was the last presenter at the Research Congress. Higher authorities came in and declared the immediate demise of BRS.

Burmese Typewriter

• The advent of Burmese typewriter (around Burma’s Independence) allowed reasonable typing of Burmese characters and words.
• Olympia provided two models : Portable and Standard (which had more keys such as “Tha gyi” and “Pat sint” characters. Some tricks had to be employed to type Pali and less common Burmese words.

Burmese Language Studies

• There were exchange programs between the RU Burmese Department and some foreign Universities (e.g. in Osaka, Japan; School of Oriental and Asian Studies, UK; Northern Illinois University, US).
• U Hla Nyunt (father of Mary Nicely) taught Burmese at the precursor of Defense Language Institute in Monterey, Northern California.
• Professor Harada (“Chit Mann Nwe”, born in Mandalay) of Osaka University won the National Literary Prize for translating the novel “Thway” into Japanese. He invited Sayagyi U Wun (Minthuwun) to help compile the Japanese-Burmese Dictionary and to do research with Burmese Language Professors at Osaka University.
• Sayagyi Dr. Hla Pe (author of “Burmese Proverbs”) a close friend of Sayagyi U Wun (Min Thu Wun) and Sayagyi U Thein Han (Zaw Gyi). He and his colleagues (notably John O’kell) advocated the need for Burmese word processing on Apple Mac, and also [co]published “Learning Burmese/Myanmar” and others. Software was developed to input Burmese characters into a Mac using transliteration.
• A few years back, the National Language Center at the University of Maryland (College Park) had a project to develop listening and reading comprehension courses for Burmese and have it available on its network.
• Daw Khin Htwe retired from The Library of Congress. She was in charge of Burmese manuscripts and books. During her days, the query system used a phonetic system.
• Some monasteries and/or organizations in US have offered Burmese classes and “Sagar Waings”. But, there are some who do not want to invest their time to learn Burmese without a hefty ROI (Return on Investment).
• Saya U Kyaw Hlaing taught Burmese at NIU (Northern Illinois University), which has an Asian Collection and Burmese Sub-collection. He later taught Burmese for a Summer course at the University of Hawaii.
• Dr. Than Tun was a Research Scholar at NIU.
• Saya U Saw Tun is current Head of the Burmese Department at NIU.
• Daw May Kyi Win (GBNF) served as Librarian of the Burmese Sub-collection at NIU.
• Cornell University, New York offers Burmese language and literature courses. The Burmese sayama also works for the French Department.

Development

• To please the then Number One, the Burmese spelling was revised twice by the Myanmar Sar Ah Phwe.
• Despite the fact that the ancient pagoda was called “Botathaung” and not “Bo Tit Htaung”, the Burmese were forced to use “Tit” everywhere instead of “Ta”. Violators are fined ten pyas per occurrence.

Word Processing

• The initial Burmese Word Processing was done at UCC.
  
• Without standardization, several Burmese Fonts and Keyboards were developed by the industry.
  
• Zawgyi Font was used in most web sites.
  Met one of the authors in Mandalay, who explained the background of its development.
  
• Unicode was proposed as a standard for information processing, but it took a long time for web sites and smart phones to comply.
  There are now Unicode sets for Myanmar and some languages used by the indigenous people.
• There are some limitations in the Unicode-compliant systems. e.g. Saya U Moe Aung found it difficult if not impossible to type “Theikkha” and similar Myanmar words.
  
• A compromise solution is offered by “ZawDecode”.
  One can read Unicode well, and 80 – 90% of Zawgyi.
• Some use two devices (e.g. two phones, a phone and a lap top) with Zawgyi on one device and Unicode-compliant font (e.g. Pyidaungsu) on the other device.
• Some switch the “Preferred Language” setting as needed
  May require a restart
• Some save read-only documents as PDF.
  PDF readers are free.
  PDF writers are usually not free.
• Some use converters / translators.

Decline

With the use of SMS, the spelling skills have deteriorated.
“Kha Lay” (child) became “Khay”.

False Pride

One Burmese parent back in Yangon proudly claimed that her daughter is attending a prestigious “international school” to study overseas and she does not speak Burmese.

How times have changed !