Activities အဖွဲ့လှုပ်ရှားမှုများ

Follow-up meeting, March 26, 2024

A first follow-up meeting was planned for March 21 to 27 at the Thai-Myanmar border with four participants from two Htanaw villages. Due to the deteriorating situation in Myanmar, including southern Shan State, traveling to the border was considered too risky at this point and the meeting had to be postponed. A one-day online workshop was held instead, with five participants from Taung Poe Hla and Naung Inn. The internet connection proved to be stable enough to have a few hours of video conference. During this meeting, the participants discussed mostly the layout and examples to appear in the primer, which is approaching finalization. The spelling as such was not questioned and was accepted by all involved native speakers. The orthography draft can be considered as completed, the next steps will be to spread the writing among the language community. Besides the primer, more material, including video clips, songs, texts, and more will have to be produced to reach a broader segment of the population.

Htanaw orthography development workshop မြန်မာအက္ခရာနဲ့ ထနော့စာလုံးပေါင်းသတ်ပုံ ဖွံ့ဖြိုးရေးစီမံကိန်း

December 8-14, 2023, Chiang Mai University, Chiang Mai, Thailand

A first international workshop on Htanaw orthography was held at Chiang Mai University, Thailand, between December 8 and 14, 2023. The workshop was organized and hosted by the Myanmar Center, Chiang Mai University in cooperation with the MCL (Switzerland). Eight native speaker participants from Taung Poe Hla and Naung Inn villages in Shan State, Myanmar, represented the language community and discussed the newly developed orthography with scholars from Chiang Mai University, Thailand and the University of Zurich, Switzerland.

The participants were introduced to the draft orthography and tested its adequacy in reading and writing exercises. After six days of workshop and social activities, including informal talks, outings, and recording of primary language data, the basics of the orthography were discussed and agreed on by the participants. The workshop was an important step towards finalizing the orthography and continuing the language documentation project.

Implementation of the orthography will be continued through regular online sessions with members of the language community (as far as internet connection with Myanmar allows).

Organizers

Myanmar Center, Chiang Mai University

Myanmar Cultures and Languages Support Project (MCL)

Mr. Han Tin, CMU, Thailand/Myanmar

Dr. Mathias Jenny, CMU, Thailand/Switzerland

Co-organizers

Assist. Prof. Dr. Ampika Rattanapitak, CMU, Thailand

Dr. Rachel Weymuth, MCL, Switzerland

Ms. Alexandra Herdeg, UZH, Switzerland

Prof. Dr. Volker Dellwo, UZH, Switzerland

Language community participants

Ms. Nang Thin Zar, Naung Inn, Myanmar