I have noted with some amusement the comments made with regard to the Sunday Times article by Anandawardhana in his post titled 'Ayeshea gets it wrong'. Specifically a section in which I had talked about the necessity/importance of knowing English with regards to blogging in Sri Lanka. I don't know how much of a difference this will make to anyone, but I was not referring to blogs worldwide and merely the importance of English in relation to the possibility of blogs becoming mainstream in Sri Lanka. I assure you that no disrespect was meant to anyone blogging in Sinhala and Tamil - kudos to you - but I was making reference to the fact that a knowledge of English is necessary to blog under the current situation. Therefore for a blogger to be born under CURRENT CIRCUMSTANCES IN SRI LANKA, English (like it or not) is a pre-requisite to begin blogging. And before you go up in smoke again, consider this:
Even NAVIGATING the web is still not possible in Sinhala. Is it? Take a look at your Kottu website - can someone with NO knowledge of English be able to get there and set up a blog? Similarly like it or not, even those blogging IN Sinhala have not been able to enjoy widespread readership because we do not possess a uniform Sinhala font. Therefore Anandawardhana, even YOUR site largely appears as a series of blocks on my office computer, while some other blogs written in Sinhala display themselves across my monitor as a string of question marks. Therefore it so stands that you and I would have to download the SAME Sinhala font for me to be able to read your posts - and as we both know, there are many fonts available.
What I was talking about was that given the CURRENT context - which is that navigating the net is not possible in Sinhala since we have no Sinhala browsers and that even writing in Sinhala does not ensure wide readership, knowledge of English is necessary (at least a basic one) to be able to begin to blog in Sri Lanka. For this same reason, blogging CANNOT become mainsteam until this situation changes. Tamil has a uniform font, but then I noticed that there were very few comments left in response to some of the posts on these blogs. But again, a majority of the people in this country cannot read Tamil (sad truth and possibly a root cause of the conflict but that's another post altogether). So it stands that the sad and harsh truth is that until the Internet in general is made available to the masses by breaking the language barrier, blogging will remain the domain of a few hundred people at most. And in a country of 18.5 million this is hardly mainstream.
Secondly, not that this is important, but I have never professed to be an "expert" on blogging - so I really don't know where this "self professed expert" tag is coming from. I just happened to have researched and written a thesis on blogging, based on which I have drawn some conclusions which may or may not be accepted and may or may not be correct. Last I heard, writing an UNDERGRAD thesis did not give anyone the right to consider the author an expert. And least of all the author.
And thirdly... I am not monolingual - I know my Sinhala very well thank you very much... (alhough I must confess that I know no Tamil which continues to worry me slightly to date - ideally I would be trilingual but I hope to rectify that soon)
Well that about wraps it up from my point of view - I hope this has cleared up some of the confusion/resentment that this article seems to have generated. And finally, purely objectively I thought the article was a good one - but then different strokes for different folks I guess.
Oh and I can put my thesis up for general mangling as soon as I get my results which are due today hopefully. Fingers crossed - and you may all have something to rip apart within the course of this week. :-)
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25 comments:
Your analysis of the 'Current Circumstances' in Sinhala is incorrect.
Sinhala does have a uniform representation, known as a Unicode. This is not a font, it's a global allocation. It's default in Windows Vista and you can download the service pack for XP from www.fonts.lk.
This has been official since March or before I think, I know there was a Presidential circular around that time.
With the Unicode Sri Lanka is ready for Sinhala blogging. English is not a prerequisite for blogging, in Sri Lanka or anywhere in the world. In fact, as Dave Sifry mentioned in his latest State of the Blogosphere, a minority of blogs are in English (36%). There are actually more blogs in Japanese and Chinese.
That said, I thought the article and your contributions to it were good. It is obviously difficult to use Sinhala online, but it is certainly much easier than a year ago.
Now it seems that people have started to bash you just because you lightly mentioned that, one need to have "knowledge of English" to blog among other things.(see Anandas comment section)I assume those will come here too.
I was trying to write a blog for some time in sinhala. But it is so difficult even with (some :))"knowledge of English". Yes it is doable some how, but not easy as Anandawardhana says. But the flip side is there are so many other languages that you can blog, just as English. In fact there are more Japanese language blogs than English blogs.
So it is the problems with sinhala language implementation in computers that discourage blogging in sinhala, not the lack of knowledge in English really. You may argue that the other surrounding services are in english and such, but I think that is minor and provided the solid/consistent language implementation those will also become available in sinhala.
And a little advice to you: There is long history about the issues on sinhala language implementation issues. So if you are unaware of the whole story, be careful.(I hope you got your exam results already)
when you have some time to kill you can get some idea of what I am talking about if you read http://www.lirneasia.net/2007/04/software-issues-in-sri-lanka-part-7/
ma'am
while appreciating your work on blogging i want to say that your historical analysis is also incorrect... well its in a gray area 'cos blogging has become cultural and all that now... but it would have been nice if you had mentioned the roots of blogging... tracing back to the bulletin boards... well i've not read your thesis but i'm going with the Sunday Times article...
all the best with your thesis
cheers
about the whole english thing...
english is important not just with blogging but with a lotta things... and most ppl know english characters and they can spell phonetically...
i've seen ppl send phonetically typed sinhala sms's in english all over... like in the bus... and they flirt and probably even have sms-sex this way... and since 199X we've been chatting on irc and IM using phonetically typed sinhala msgs in english...
eg. "api mehemai dath madinne"
language is just an interface between your thoughts and your audience... and i think there are more important things than language to start blogging... like you need to be willing to express yourself... and you need to be jobless... and have access to a computer... (which needs power to operate it and of course an internet connection...)
lets face it... for someone to type "api mehemai dath madinne" in sinhala characters... he/she would have to know the sinhala keyboard... and have a keyboard driver... or else he/she will have to cut and paste characters like a ransom note... and the present unicode character set sucks... its linguistically inaccurate... eg the hal keerima - ඩ්
ආනන්දවර්ධන obviously is fluent in typing in sinhala characters... so he blogs in sinhala... can you type like him? well i can... my grandmother knows english but she cant type... she's like "where the E"... so my point is.... we who are ignorant when it comes to typing sinhala characters will be like my grandmother looking for keys... saying "ko meh payanna"...
Indi - I admit I had no idea about the unicode - my bad. But my thesis was submitted before March, which is when you say this was introduced, so it would not have been relevant to me at the time in any case. And quite frankly if this is the case then people will have to KNOW about it before they can begin to use it. I had NO clue until you talked about it and while some may feel that it is a shocking display of ignorance (which I will be willing to concede), I dont know how many people outside of our blogging sphere know that. And I still count myself among that...
Shehal - I dont know if I can agree with your statement that blogging is cultural. (judging from the amount of blank stares and But my thesis DOES talk about the roots of blogging - the article was about a specific topic and not my thesis :-D I'll put it online sometime soon.
Namal - I am very aware of the fine line of talking about Sinhala implementation :-) but my thesis was marked two months ago. My results got delayed because of a third year repeat.
Anyways thanks for the feedback guys :-) I'll put up my thesis soon...
If you wrote it before March then it makes sense. Blogging in Sinhala is still hard anyways. It's a minor point in thesis, regardless.
Per the BBS stuff, it's a kinda meaningless distinction, everything on the Internet came out of BBS/Usenet culture. Blogging is established enough that researchers can (and do) discuss it as its own entity.
read this history part of this link...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blogging
did IM come out of bbs/usenet? no irc was the root of IM
did p2p file sharing start with bbs/usenet? irc was...
usenet or newsgroup as the name suggests is a group where ppl post news and other topics and it would go as a threaded discussion...
today we post a topic and tag it... and someone would reply... and someone else would reply to that reply and there will be discussion going...
blogging isnt something that popped up all of a sudden... its not like some building which was erected on xx/xx/xxxx...
my point is that modern day blogging evolved from bbs/usenet... i'm not tracing back to the origin of the interent... although bbs's were one of the first few things to be implemented when the internet was introduced... i'm talking about the pre-http era... the early 1990s... when considerable amount of ppl had access to BBS's... the average person did not but it wasnt a restricted thing... and its something that was there in sri lanka during the early 1990s... and there were companies offering these services for a fee... so they were making money of out it...
ppl back then did the same thing we're doing now but slightly differently... discussions and topics were categorized... but anyone could write and discuss anything related to that newsgroup... its like how we tag our blog posts... just that there was no free tagging back then...
ma'am
about what i said about "culture"
i didnt imply the traditional "culture" term... by culture i meant "the blogging culture"... as in... we have a way of blogging these days... its different to what it was back then... when it didnt have a name... and today we even have a name for it... and if you're talking about how old the term was - i agree with you... its only a few years old... in that case global warming is only a few years old...
To add some more on the current situation of Sinhala:
Even though the circular was in March, the whole Unicode Sinhala ¨thing¨ was around for about a decade. Sinhala was available on Linux many years ago. Right now I am using Fedora Core Linux, with no additional hacking involved. I can read and write in Sinhala properly. Yet I understand that having Sinhala support in Linux does not really count here, considering the fact that only a small fraction of the total computer users work in Linux.
Why most people tend to believe that current Sinhala implementation has a major issue is because the one OS they use, Windows, doesn´t support it very well (which no longer is the situation though). We really can´t blame on any one person for Windows´ delay. Sri Lanka doesn´t have the market needed to convince Micro$oft that they need to provide built-in support for Sinhala in a hurry. They did support Unicode Tamil since Windows 2000, if not earlier, I guess.
I´ve been using Sinhala on Windows too, for some time now. I agree that it was quite inconvenient for a non tech-savvy person to get it working. But that no longer is the case, as Vista, the latest version of Windows, which incidentally was released recently, comes with Sinhala support built-in.
start-quote
¨and the present Unicode character set sucks... its linguistically inaccurate... eg the hal keerima - ඩ්¨
end-quote
If you see the wrong ¨hal kereema¨ it is a problem with your operating system. If you have proper Unicode support it should render the matching hal kereema. (believe me, I can see the proper ¨hal dayanna¨) I don´t want to make this too technical, so please search on the LK-LUG sinhala mailing list archives (http://mail.linux.lk/lurker/list/sinhala.html) to learn more.
I am not trying to say that current Unicode Sinhala is perfect, it may have minor issues, but none of them are critical enough to hold it from being implemented and people from using it. There are few people (or is it just one Mr. D. Duck ;) -- read the thread Namal has provided for more information) who wants to make money out of their patents, who tries to make a big fuss out of nothing. So it would have been really nice, if you have given it a little thought, and did some research, before making comments like ¨Sinhala implementations has a problem¨ or ¨Unicode character set sucks¨. Well if you did, you wouldn´t have said so in the first place :)
As per Shehal´s ¨ko me payanna?¨, do you remember the good ol´ days when you started typing in English and were like ¨where the hell is this P?¨. Yes, it is hard typing in Sinhala, first, but only till you get the hang of it.
Dear Ayeshea,
I'm sorry I didn't know about this response until I noticed an incoming link from this blog on my stat counter.
Thank you very much for responding. Please permit me to reproduce this post with all the comments as a separate entry on my blog. So my readers will have the opportunity of seeing different dimensions and aspects of the story. I can see others have explained enough about the issue. So, I have nothing much to say. Let me correct one last "mistake" or a misinterpretation. You have said that you completed your dissertation bfore March etc etc as an excuse for your unawareness of online Sinhala. Actually I was talking about your interview(published last week June 2007) not your dissertation, and I believe that the interview was taken way after March and after Sinhala blogs appeared on kottu.org. However, both are irrelevant when it comes to Sri Lankan Sinhala blogs. First few Sinhala blogs appeared almost two years ago. See http://www.indi.ca archive for links and discussions about this. Those bloggers blogged without Unicode, using a font designed by Indi Samarajiva. Those days Kottu had a little note on the frontpage about Sinhala blogs and a downloading link to that font. Malintha Samarakoon and some other regularly updating bloggers started blogging using Unicode Sinhala in 2006. With a little google search anyone can find out the whole history of online Sinhala, Sinhala blogs and also Tamil blogs :-)
Ayeshea, I am really happy that you took up writing about blogs. It's simply GREAT! I never mean to discourage such work. When it comes to Sri Lankan context, NO doubt you are a pioneer in this field. I personally know some people("academics") who have know clue about blogs and "new" online publishing trends but they take up teaching mass communication for postgraduate students. But I'm optimistic about seeing a brighter future when I see people like you; from a newer generation. I consider you as a possible friend of SL bloggers(including Tamil and Sinlala ones) Please take my post as constructive criticism. I apologize if my post hurt your feelings. But I remain firm about the points I raised. Cheers and good luck with your future work.
Your dissertation was shit ayeshea. And your retarded comments should have never been published in the Sunday Times. You are a shameless, self-hating little prat. Being able to read and write English doesn't make you superior to anyone.
perhps it was... perhaps it was.
i think ron is a bit frustrated..maybe he doesn't get enough..use your hand mate...!!!!
Ron, that should make you feel better.:)
Ayeshea, regardless of the criticism, which I think only helps the wider cause, hats off to you on researching this emerging trend and getting your views out there. If nothing else, you have stimulated debate on the topic, which is fantastic! Obvious testimony to this is right here on your blog and also on Anandawardena's. Will look forward to reading your dissertation, hope you do post it here.
Let's hope debate on new media catches up with the times in Sri Lanka - or at least is well integrated into curriculae for media/communications.
Good work!
I'm the editor for a new magazine that we hope to publish in September. For one of the articles in our magazine, we are featuring several Sri Lankan blogs and your blog is amongst those. We would like to include a few screenshots of the blogs in question to illustrate the article and would like to have a screenshot of your blog as well. Do we have your permission to use a screenshot of your blog in our magazine? (Please respond to me via e-mail since I might not be back here in time to see your response). Thanks!
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