She’s famous for a lifetime of campaigning for democracy in Myanmar, has been honored with a Nobel Peace Prize, and now, thanks to an electoral triumph, she is the leading political figure in her country.
But for anyone who speaks or writes about her, she presents something of a quandary: What do you call Daw Aung San Suu Kyi for short?
Western notions of first and last names don’t really apply in Myanmar, formerly Burma. Burmese people generally don’t hand down family names from one generation to another, or change a birth name upon marriage. And there’s no particular pattern to the number of syllable elements, except that very short names like U Nu are becoming a bit less common. (Courtesy of The New York Times)
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