A conversation over ICBMS5-CMU with Saya Gustaaf Houtman Made me look again at Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in English and Burmese.


The English begin "All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights".

The Burmese translation carries the same aspiration, but not the same political texture. Here is my take.


Burmese is a deeply hierarchical language. Rank enters pronouns, forms of address, politeness, religious registers, giving and, receiving and everyday self-positioning. That matters when concepts such as, dignity, rights, equality, and voluption mutual enter Burmese.


အခွင့်အရေး, for example, is our established word for rights. But အခွင့် also inhabits a semantic field that means, permission, and allowance. This does not mean Burmese speakers must understand simply rights as from above. Yet it leaves available a political imagination in which rights can sound closer to something authority permits than to something that limits authority.


But the translation has nuances.


English says human beings are endowed with reason and conscience, language that still faintly suggests an unnamed giver. Burmese simply say these capacities ရှိကြ of humans have them.


And where English gives us the abstract noun reason, Burmese expands it into "ပိုင်းးကးးးးေဖန်တ်တ်တ်သောာဏ်" a capacity to recognize, examine, judge and criticize. In this respect, Iy may suggest a more active intellectual subject.


Then brotherhood မေတ္တာ becomes.


There are both gains and losses. Brotherhood emphasizes common membership, but through a patriarchal kinship metaphor. မေတ္တာ Avoid that gendered frame and can be more universal. Yet it shifts the emphasis from reciprocal political belonging to moral disposition.


That matters. Rights can't depend on whether we feel love-kindness towards one another.


What interests me, then, is not to one simply translate is better or worse. Translation relocates political ideals into another semantic world. Something is preserved, something is lost, and something new is possible.


Burmese carries hierarchy. That is real. But linguistic hierarchy is not political destiny.


Meaning emerges through the interaction of language with institutions, material arrangements, social norms, and human agencies. Words constrain what is easy to imagine and say, but we can also reclaim, stretch, and transform them through practice.


One of the philosophy behind The Calling Digest begins there. Words shape worlds, but worlds also reshape words.


Maybe the more question is not Burmse is hierarchical. Obviously it is.


How do distinguish the hierarchies by carrying from the hierarchies reproduced by institutions, material arrangements, and political power? And once we make that distinction, which inherited meanings should be resisted, reclaimed, or transformed if equality is to become not translatable, but ordinary political?