Amanda's Becker pages 185-258

Four of the things that I liked from this reading:

• on p. 187, Becker says, "Words and phrases are staged only as sentences." I like the idea of sentences being a stage for phrases and words to come together to tell a story.
  
• on p. 216, Becker says, "There are many un-Engilsh phenomena here that are lost if we move too quickly to an English understanding." This was a good reminder to me that there are many things in English that cannot be expressed in other languages, and vise-versa. This goes back to what he said in the previous page, that "there are two extremes . . . totally familiar language and totally unfamiliar." It is important to get as familiar as possible with the original language to avoidmisrepresentation of meaning. If we just assume that we know what a text is trying to say, then important meanings can be lost.
• I liked the quotes from Hla Pe on p. 219 -- it shows the way that poets used the language to fit the imagery, and then it shows how the poet's language was studied andincorporated into the language.
• on p. 228, Becker said that ti has a "structural prominence in the poem as a whole. It occurs as the final word in every 'stanza' -- every main rhetorical figure, thus marking the rhythm of the poem." The function of ti reminded me of the Indo-European ring structure, where they marked the beginning and the end of a structure with similar words.
  
• I know this is the fifth one, but I just wanted to share one more. On p. 228, Becker also says that "One of the uses of grammatical analysis is to help us cross theterra incognita between English and Burmese, moving further from English, closer to Burmese." I liked this because it illustrates the difficulty of capturing theexuberances and deficiencies in one text and then representing the text in an entirely different language. It also highlights the importance of knowing as much as you can about a language -- the connotations, the expressions, the categories -- to lose the least amount of meaning as possible in a translation.