| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
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sociological, psychological, pedagogic, functional, and structural approaches (Röhrich, 1991). Folklorists have analysed and categorised tales from various regions in terms of the subject, title, motif, and ethnic or geographical area (e.g., MacDonald, 1982). The telling of folk tales has also been one of the activities that ‘provide[s] the descriptive linguist and the philologist with texts for phonetic, lexical and syntactical analysis and comparison’ (Abbott & Khin, 2000, p. 5).
Because these tales have been originally disseminated verbally, some modification is inevitable. Martin (1986) has mentioned that writing and printing may have affected ‘the production of stories “told” by an author who is not present to a solitary reader’ (p. 33). However, according to Rimmon-Kenan (1983), ‘story, as the narrated events and participants abstracted from the text, can be claimed as transferable from medium to medium, from language to language, and within the same language’ (p. 6). Jason (1977) also asserted that ‘the narrative can be translated into another language and even into another medium of communication…and still keep its structure’ (p. 99). Thus, the focus of the present study will be on the fundamental events forming the story structure of some Burmese folk tales written in English, which can be claimed to have survived paraphrase or translation.
The tales selected for the present study were collected and translated into English by Maung Htin Aung, who has been recognised for producing the first ever published collection of Burmese tales in English. Maung's works in English on the tales of Burma include: Burmese Folk-Tales (1948), Burmese Law Tales (1962), Burmese Monk's Tales (1966), and Folk Tales of Burma (1976). The introduction to his first published collection, Burmese Folk-Tales (1948), stated that tales of this kind were told in Burma up to about the time of the First World War, had become