Talk:Mon kingdoms

message: I just realized that there really are more lines of Mon monarchs than the early modern one in lower Burma (c. 1287-1539). There's also Haripunchai. These can be added to this page later, if someone wants or if I get to that point. This table serves as a to do list of monarchs to write articles for, everyone that doesn't have a link.
I guess "Ramanya" or "Ramannadesa" is good, but the name that this kingdom used to refer to iself should really be used. Perhaps Mon inscriptions would answer this question, better look at Shorto's dictionary of Mon inscriptions. "Monarchs" seems to be a Wikipedia standard.(Jonfernquest 15:43, 11 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Lines of Mon monarchs

message: I think we should write about History of Mon people rather than Mon kingdoms only. Soewinhan (talk) 13:00, 9 December 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: You may want to start with the history section of the Mon people article. It provides a good overview but can definitely use a rewrite. (I wrote much of the lead but haven't had time to redo the rest.) Also, the article is very thin--there's little else outside the history. The culture section has just a few sentences. If you are knowledgeable about Mon culture, and have good references (Burmese language books are fine), please contribute. Look up Nai Pan Hla's books on Mon culture and history. Hybernator (talk) 04:08, 15 December 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Title

message: Why has someone gone around posting the same blocks of text on several Mon-related articles? It comes across as a bit of a political campaign. More to the point, it doesn't add to the overall quality of articles about Mon stuff. If we're going to have an article, let's have a merged comprehensive one, rather than a plethora of little ones where some fan of "Michael Aung-Thwin" has gone around copypasting the same block of text with references to him - I've seen three instances so far, it's lazy to say the least; moreover, it doesn't add to the overall body of knowledge on the subject. There must be more researchers on this subject in the world whose take on things can be brought into the article.
macdaddy
*Since you're the same IP from the Jinakalamali page, look at my response at the talk page of Jinakalamali . As discussed on that page, Aung-Thwin's views are certainly *a* mainstream, if not the prevalent, view among the modern-day scholarship. I agree that more research is needed. Unfortunately, Pagan and pre-Pagan scholars are few and far between. (As of 2005, there had been just five PhDs worldwide whose dissertation papers were on Pagan. Ever!) Burma studies is still largely stuck on the theories/conjectures from the colonial times. If you can find other (ideally, peer-reviewed) sources, feel free to add. Btw, before accusing someone of a political campaign, do a bit more research beyond whatever Google spits out on the first page. Thank you. Hybernator (talk) 15:15, 2 August 2015 (UTC)
thread_title: Aung-Thwin part 2

message: Thank you for the above discussion. I can claim to be a sort of expert on 15th century Myanmar history with several long published papers in peer-reviewed journals  and frequently cited in Myanmar history Wikipedia articles (e.g. []). Michael Aung-Thwin (MAT) cites and uses my narratives in his 'Myanmar in the Fifteenth Century: A Tale of Two Kingdoms' and a 2018 Siam Society article on Tai history uses my narratives as a main source . 
As mentioned, the issues of where one would do a PhD on this topic or publish on it are real. 
Deep scholarly engagement with historical sources by scholars with the necessary linguistic skills is lacking. The most primary sources which would be their focus are, however, the right place to begin. This largely means 'chronicle narratives' since 'epigraphy' is lacking. However, many would not consider these chronicle sources primary sources at all since they are, following the tradition of Pali and Sanskrit literature, literary embellishments of history (cf the very similar Kashmiri chronicle tradition in Sanskrit:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rajatarangini).  
The work of Michael Aung-Thwin (MAT) consists of a far-reaching critique of the meager historical sources available, generating speculative theories in the process. Many, if not most, of the primary sources MAT employs are not publicly available in translation. This is a problem. For Razadarit Ayeidawpon, for instance, there is a rough translation manuscript, but you would have to go to the stacks of Chulalongkorn Library or the Siam Society to find it, which is where I found it, definitely an informal and very rough translation, but always cited in my works. For the Burmese chronicle, I have my own rough translation that I have used in the past and there is also one cited in Strong's 'Relics of the Buddha' (2004). And the manuscript of Shorto's translation of the most important Mon chronicle was handed out by a prominent scholar to other scholars with a promise not to share the original manuscript. An improved version by prominent Mon scholars was going to published about a decade ago but in the end never appeared. 
In short, all the important sources that should be cited by wikipedia articles such as this one are not publicly available. A lot of this stems from western academia favoring PhD work that can be transformed into tenure-achieving monographs, while not valuing scholarly translation.  This is not true in all scholarly domains however. Sanskrit and Pali studies have always prioritized close commentary on original texts. 
Advances in natural language processing in AI (e.g.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BERT_(language_model)) have made machine translation a lot more accurate and this should eventually help a lot with scholarly translations. For example, yesterday I stepped through the online copy of the Thai Razadarit epic at the Thai National Library  getting a rough translation just by using the Google Translate browser plugin I already had installed. This at least allows comparison with the Burmese and Mon versions and would be an substantial start for any scholarly translation. 
I will be contributing to Myanmar history pages. For starters, I will try to share the informal translation sources mentioned (at least on my Google Drive) that should be the first source used and cited before speculative work by MAT (which uses these sources). There is also important work to be added such as current archival manuscript work in Thailand by a researcher focusing on Pali verions of the Razadarit epic. I will help with editorial comments when I see places for improvement or innaccuracies (I had editorial responsibilities at the Bangkok Post for a decade). In the process, I will always provide citations and adhere to the high Wikipedia standards. As my ethnomusicology professor at University of Hawaii used to say, Wikipedia is the best original source for info nowadays in many disciplines. One can no longer dismiss it as scholars once did. Cheers. 
 
Yggdrasil1001  — Preceding undated comment added 04:41, 8 October 2022 (UTC)
thread_title: Aung-Thwin part 3