A tribute to Yodayas - I

As a musically-illiterate song lover, I loved all beautiful songs, irrespective of the genre and language. This remark, I should add, is not specifically designed to irritate my long-lost friend, who won’t care for anything that is not soft, slow and pleasing to the ears and invariably in Myanmar language.

Anyway, I was looking for Myanmar classical songs sung by the late Win Oo, a successful actor, short story writer, and songster. Once I’d heard him sing the classical song “Kha-nway-sun” or Eve of spring accompanied by Myanmar harp, played by virtuoso harpist U Ba Than. It was a fabulous performance by both artists and I would have liked to enjoy more of that genre of music that is known as “Yodaya” in our language. For some reason or other, I wasn’t able to find some more songs in this genre on youtube until a few days back. Then I discovered that the same duo had recorded a number of classical songs in the pinnacle of classical music known as “Maha Gita” or Greater Music.
After enjoying a few songs in this series I discovered the “Sylvan” composition better known as ပန်းဟေဝန် or “Flowering woods”, which I read somewhere as the song that inspired Prince Pyinsi to compose his classic ပန်းမြိုင်လယ် or “In the midst of the flowering woods”. Alas the author of this beautiful composition was unknown and it must have been lost passing down the lyrics of the song orally and its music composition by ear from generation to generation.

As a fredgling in NLP, but an old birdie in biological age at which it is barely able to spread its wings, I was suddenly inspired to find out the author of this piece of music. I guess it could be done by using what is known as stylometric methods in natural language processing. Wikipedia described stylometry as “… the application of the study of linguistic style, usually to written language, but it has successfully been applied to music and to fine-art paintings as well.” I am citing two interesting applications of stylometry from the Wikipedia article:

In April 2015, researchers using stylometry techniques identified a play, Double Falsehood, as being the work of William Shakespeare. Researchers analyzed 54 plays by Shakespeare and John Fletcher and compared average sentence length, studied the use of unusual words and quantified the complexity and psychological valence of its language.

In 2018, Mark Glickman, senior lecturer in statistics at Harvard University worked with Ryan Song, a former statistics student at Harvard, and Jason Brown, a professor at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, applied stylometry to find that, most likely, The Beatles’ song “In My Life” was composed by John Lennon, but with a 50% chance that Paul McCartney wrote the middle eight.

Assuming that the ပန်းဟေဝန် song was written by one of the authors of other Yodaya songs with known authors, I would need to have the lyrics of those songs in Unicode text as well as the one I would be investigationg for authorship. The Rectified National standard version of the text of Maha Gita songs has been downloaded from here.

It contained a total of 35 songs in the Yodaya genre of which authorship for 16 has not been shown. That means trying to identify athorship of any one of the songs from the other half of songs with known authorship would be doomed to fail unless one is extremely lucky, I guess. Well, first thing first, and I could start converting song images from the pdf file to Myanmar Unicode text.

Looking for OCR (Optical Character Recognition) application, I was lucky to find at once the blog post by Hla Hla Htay, “OCR for Myanmar Unicode text” which shows how Myanmar text images could conveniently be converted to Unicode text by simply opening them with Google Docs.

Here’s how I did the OCR for the ပန်းဟေဝန် song:
- (1) I opened the Maha Gita pdf file with GIMP software (GIMP is open source and very powerful) - (2) Selected the page containing the ပန်းဟေဝန် song to import; it contained two songs
- (3) Cropped the song I want to process and saved it as a png file (may be you could as well use the jpeg format)
- (4) Uploaded the graphic file to Google Drive
- (5) Opened the uploaded file with Google Docs, and it was done!

You’ll see that the graphic file of song when opened in Google Docs shows the image at the top part and the Unicode text below it. Now you can download the file to your computer hard disk. I saved it in the odt or open document format to be used with LibreOffice software.
As we would expect, the resulted text is not perfect. Some characters came out incorrect and a few characters were missed altogether. In addition to the default 72-dpi resolution of the graphic file, I tried increasing that to 200-dpi and 300-dpi to see if that will improve the OCR. It seems that there wasn’t much improvement as seen below.
The yellow highlight shows incorrect characters and red highlight shows omissions.  

Result for 72-dpi

Result for 200-dpi

Result for 300-dpi

You’ll see that, it is not too much work to correct the errors in the text file. Still it will be some work for me to convert all the 19 “Yodaya” songs with known authors to begin my research in stylometry. May be you would be inspired to beat me in this game.

Thitpok Pin Forever - III

The name Thitpok (သစ်ပုပ်) comes from Thit (wood or tree) + pok (putrid smell). In Myanmar it is not uncommon to change “inauspicious” or “bad” names into something that sound exactly the same but with a different spelling and thus a different meaning, sometimes with the risk of becoming nonsensical. Now by changing the second syllable “ပုပ်” to “ပုတ်” the name becomes Thit (wood or tree) + pok (pat or strike) which is nonsensical. Also, this tree’s other name is “ဘိုင်”, which in one sense means “without money”; still another bad name!

The Abridged Myanmar Language Dictionary (1980) by the Myanmar Language Commission says that this tree has buttress roots, bluish-white bark, and gray colored wood with putrid smell:

Just recently I accidentally discovered that the Yangon Heritage Trust has given their 32nd Blue Plaque to our Thitpok tree of Yangon University. Accidentally because YHT does not keep a regular blog but mainly communicates their work through the Facebook and unfortunately I do not keep a Facebook account. Through this discovery I was happy to see that YHT has used the correct spelling on their plaque.

The old name plate with the wrong spelling has been moved up the trunk, for posterity’s sake I guess. YHT’s post on Facebook of September 6, 2019 says:

The 32nd Blue Plaque in Yangon is unveiled at Thitpok Tree in the University of Yangon campus. This is the first blue plaque which commemorates the natural heritage of Yangon. The installation ceremony is attended by Union Minister of Education, Dr Myo Thein Gyi, the Chief Minister of Yangon Region Government U Phyo Min Thein, the Speaker of Yangon Hluttaw U Tin Maung Tun and distinguished guests.
Thitpok (Tetrameles nudiflora. R. Br. Datiscaceae) is a deciduous tree and one of the most well-known trees in Yangon. Although it is difficult to tell the exact age of the tree, it is undeniable that the tree has been in the campus since University of Yangon was set up in 1920.
Thitpok Tree is considered the main icon of University of Yangon, along with the Convocation Hall, Judson Church, the Inya Lake and Kantkaw trees (Ironwood). Throughout its life, the tree has welcomed and said goodbye to generations of students. It has witnessed student movements since the colonial times. It has featured in literature portraying the university. The tree is not only important to the University of Yangon, which itself will celebrate its centennial in 2020, but also invaluable for the city of Yangon.

Viewed from a blurry distance this photo took me back to the old days. The first row sans their long scarfs could have been our Science and Arts girls. I could be one of the guys at the back wearing the traditional jackets.

I remember the time they ordered us to start wearing such traditional jackets. We had to comply, and on the first day I was caught by the movie camera of the government Information service nonchalantly talking with my friends, walking down and turning around the corner of the Math wing corridor. That scene was in the news footage customarily played in the cinemas before the movie begins. It was the only silver screening I got out of my life and the rest is history. 

Those were the days my friend.

Thitpok Pin Forever – II

The centenary of the founding of Rangoon University (now Yangon University) falls on December 1, 2020. I couldn’t remember if I had collected any of the annual magazines of the Rangoon/Yangon University or the “အိုးဝေ”(The Peacock’s Call) magazine of the Rangoon University Student’s Union. I must have at least a few. But leaving the shelter of my parent’s home in east Yangon to work in the districts for more than fifteen years took its toll on the few belongings I carried with me, especially my books. My kid brother help cleaned our parent’s home by selling most of my books left at home to the scrap paper buyers. Then termites cleaned up some of my prized collections that I carried. Back to Yangon in 1978, I still have the Yangon University Golden Jubilee commemorative publication of 1970 issued with the blessings of the Revolutionary Council Government. And I still got it.

I leafed through 500-plus pages of the book. Now I felt a little indignant, not finding my icon the grand Thitpok Pin, neither on the cover nor anywhere in the text. I have lost its back-cover so I don’t know if it is there. Looking hard, I found our Thitpok Pin here in a reproduced page from the University annual magazine of 1939:

If you look harder you’ll find the Thitpok Pin with the freshly built buildings of Rangoon University (1920?), with view from the north:

and view from south:

The shape of the canopy and buttress roots of the landmark tree in the old photographs clearly identify our Ole Thitpok of today:

Too bad I couldn’t find as yet the (1920?) original photos of the "freshly built Rangoon University" on the Web!  In the above old photographs, the Ole Thitpok looked at least as tall as the buildings flanking it. Those photographs were not dated, but the the description "freshly built Rangoon University" in the text accompanying the photos could mean 1920, though I am not sure. That means it is more than 100 years old and may be you could add a decade or two. I guess you could ascertain it best through historical and scienctific research. 

Now, a challenge, if you like, to get it done before the centennial.

Thitpok Pin Forever - I

In our days it was known as the Rangoon University. Our freshman year as science students was at Yankin College, miles away from the main campus. Art students did their freshman classes at Htee-dan College in the west of Rangoon. It was June 1958, if I remember it right.

Like most of the science students, we’d done Physics, Chemistry, and mathematics at high school and therefore except for the labs and English classes we found it quite convenient to skip classes at will. Those days the two colleges had to share academic staff and they provided one or two buses to shuttle between the two places. We were not allow to board the buses. But never mind. We waited at the road junction and jumped them when they slow down or momentarily stopped there. This year-long adventure in the “island of beauties”, as we called Htee-dan, produced nothing for me, except one.

Our sophomore year was at the main campus of the Rangoon University. We met again.

Then there was this ugly incident of July 1962. That certainly needs stronger words than “ugly” and “incident”. Looking for records, I found only this remark at the margin of one of my notebooks:

That reads: “July 7, 1962: Don’t want to write anything– bad men”.

I vaguely remember that our university closed after that. I couldn’t remember for how long, but I’d read somewhere that it was for four months. Then reopened, and closed again. This note was from November 28, 1963. It said that on the late evening of that day the government declare closed the Science, Social Science, and Arts Faculties of the Rangoon University.

I couldn’t recall when and where we took our final exam in 1963. It could have been off-campus, as the University Council Office declared on the morning of December 11, 1963. But that must be for the academic year 1963-64, or was it? Now I am confused. Then I remember that I started working with SAMB (State Agricultural Marketing Board) by December 1963, so that I must have taken my final exam on March 1963 or thereabouts.

On the other hand, the declaration said that the exams for Rangoon and other universities would be held in March 1964 at specified regional centers and students need to apply for permission to sit for the exams at District Security Council Offices.

Those were the beginning of the tumultuous days. …

A decade later I was transferred to a provincial town and was accompanied by my family. Coincidentally, she happened to be with her family in a peaceful and misty town across the hills some twenty miles away. But we never met. That’s the way it was.

I passed a good part of my life like all ordinary people with nothing much to say or no stories to tell. Then there’s a few things in my life that I can’t physically collect to call my own, yet it’s my own and of others at the same time. I think that’s one way to define what love is, and its free. 

The great Thitpok Pin is the one of those little things we hold dear, and I would say it belongs to all of us that way. I believe this heritage tree still symbolizes all the strength, righteousness, and the steadfastness the sacred campus and the institutions on it and their histories, we dreamed, would be bestowing on us, when we saw the majestic tree for the first time. Then it’s no harm when time passes, we failed to realize our dreams, and there is this nostalgic, sweet sadness for the tree and the campus.

In June of this year my son took me to visit this campus again after an interval of so many years! All the familiar places seems still there, with a few additions. I noticed the additional library building and the building for Information Technology. But I felt a bit suffocated. My gazes seem to be obstructed by some fencing in every direction. Anyway, we had tea in a tea shop in the same place that was known as the “Science Canteen” in our days. Tea is still good, but the place has swollen and the shops appeared to be a lot more crowded.

Approaching the old Thitpok from south from the tip of the Math wing, I saw it neatly fenced.

I would label this picture as “An old man, an umbrella, and one Thitpok tree”. At the back and on the fencing the nameplate looked strange.

Since when did they change the spelling of the name of the tree to “သစ်ပုတ်”? We had always known that the correct spelling is “သစ်ပုပ်”, and that its another name is “ဘိုင်”.

Petsut-Gamon-Anan

Tey from Thailand requested pictures of Hpetsut, Gamon, and Anan flowers from me. I guess Tey may be a student of Myanmar language (judging from my post to which him/her request has been added) or just someone generally interested in Myanmar. Anyway I am glad myself to find out more about these flowers and glad to share what I've found to all lovers of trees, flowers, and Myanmar.

Frankly, I have not known until now that Hphetsut (Phetsut, or Petsut) is the name of a tree and its flower, though I'm quite familiar with Petsut-(rain) or Petsut-(water) or Petsut-(mushroom). Myanmar-English dictionary by the Myanmar Language Commission gives Petsut, Gamon-In, and Anan as:

Gamon is a generic name today for ornamental herbs grown indoor or outdoor and therefore there is no specific flower associated with it. So Tey's “Gamon” would most likely to be the Gamon-In orchid which Common Names from the Checklist of the Plants of Myanmar website of the Smithsonian Institution identifies as Dendrobium scabrilingue.

Searching for pictures of Engelhardtia spicata (Petsut) and Dendrobium scabrilingue (Gamon-In) gives a large number of hits and below are some from Thailand. Petsut picture is from Flickriver.

Gamon-In picture is from http://www.sa.ac.th/biodiversity/contents/3plant/3.7.2.html

Around 1965 while I was with a land survey team working near the famous Kyaik-hti-yo pagoda in the Mon Sate, Myanmar I remember seeing miniature orchids said to be Gamon-in sold on the roadside. As far as I can remember the plants were erect with terminal racemes of white, star shaped flowers less than 1 inch across, deliciously scented, on pseudobulbs not much more than 4 inches or so tall. I think they looked more like Dendrobium draconis than Dendrobium scabrilingue.

As for Anan, only a week ago I was trying to identify the famous heritage tree I had photographed in the Botanic garden in Singapore on May 13, 2014 and as you would have guessed it turned out to be the Anan tree! They called it the Tembusu tree: