No English Equivalent

So, it's 2AM, and I'm sitting at my (awesome) desk, looking at the (Burmese) dictionary entry for "hsi", which states:

"noun particle showing direction of action to or from a person (no English equiv.)" [1]

Like a Science Fair volcano project, my brain seems to fizzle and steam every time I read that sentence. What -oh, what!- could it ever mean? And, more importantly, how did we get to the point of me studying this language so late at night.

My increased study of Burmese has coincided with a gradual loss of interest in Chinese. There's a variety of fun reasons for this, but the most neutral is this: I just don't think I have room in the ol' noggin to store 6,000 pictographic characters. I shudder to think what gem of knowledge might be jettisoned just to store an arbitrary character like "mao" (defined as: hair, brush, or communist leader, depending on the context). Burmese is alphabetic, so I need only memorize a few hundred letters, pronunciations, and rules.


In fact, the story of how I came to be studying Burmese is pretty interesting: it began with a project to create a typing system, after a discussion with one of my friends (Jake, all the way on the left in the picture). At the time, I thought it best to approach the problem without any knowledge of the language, and that proved very helpful. Later, people started asking for language-specific features, so I had to learn some. And the more I learned, the more I liked.

That picture actually makes me feel a bit nostalgic, since it features a table full of friends that I've lost touch with for one reason or another. Well, except Jake; we still meet up. It's a bit unfortunate that I'm getting nostalgic about Singapore while I'm in Singapore, though. This is fortunate for my readers, however, as it saves you from the original topic of this post. Indeed, the only way I can overcome nostalgia is by covering all things new. Well, let's get started!

We're approaching release version 1.7 of the software I mentioned earlier. Here is a graphic I made for the web page which encourages users to "talk about" this release to their friends; the boy is saying the name of the software (in Burmese, as it's appropriate). At the time, I was overworked, and this was the easiest picture I could throw together to express the concept of "tell your friends". It turned out to be positively adorable. Now that we've actually got real people using the software, releases are a lot more fun! In particular, I have to actually check for bugs these days...

I'm sure I mentioned that we moved a few months ago. I just found out that our new location is in the same zone as that famous author guy you may have heard about if you looked into Singapore literature even just a little bit. I think he's back in Britain now... but his books were pretty good. Besides being very accurate, they snagged you with their simple but endearing passages, a bit like one of my other favorite authors, also British. It seems our friends from the mother land have a real knack for using English effectively, an observation re-enforced from living with one of them years back.

I've fallen a bit out of love with pictures, partly due to the rather true stigma that Asians take lots of photos. Seeing that my latest pictures are from 2008, however, does something to spur my motivation. Plus, webcam conversations have shown me just how far a picture can go to making someone feel like they're right here, enjoying Singapore with me.

For example, this picture -from my phone, hence the graininess- makes it very clear how much fun moving house was. Clearly, I was down not only to my last shirt, but to my last power socket as well. Then again, pictures are limited --I can't recall if I'm moving in or moving out. I think I'm moving out of my old room.



Well, that's all for now, loyal fans. My next goal is more pictures --and also, Star Trek. Ooh, and Japanese food tomorrow! And... more debugging (sigh).



Works Cited
[1] Mesher, G. "Burmese for Beginners". Lesson 6, pp. 158-159