S'gaw Karen · corpus in collection

ကညီကျိာ်

S'gaw Karen · ≈2M speakers · fine-tuning on a community-curated corpus.

I COULD BE BOUNDED IN A NUTSHELL AND COUNT MYSELF A KING OF INFINITE SPACE. [ 2.2.254-255 ]ကညီကျိာ် · Karen & refugee communities, Thai–Myanmar border

The same thought, double the cost.

ENGLISH · EN-US
The river remembers what the map forgets.
words
8
tokens
8
tok/word
1.0
S'GAW KAREN · KAREN
ထံကျိကသ့ၣ်ညါ တၢ်လၢဟီၣ်ခိၣ်ဂီၤသးပ့ၤနီၣ်ဝဲ
words
6
tokens
15
tok/word
2.5
1.0 tok/wordvs2.5 tok/word· 1.9× the cost to think in your own language

Provisional counts — corpus in collection. Karen shares the Myanmar Unicode block but not its statistics.

The same block, a different language

S'gaw Karen is written in an extended Myanmar Unicode block the tokenizer sees the same alphabet as Burmese and treats them as one thing. They are not one thing.

The corpus, still in collection, will name what the base model conflated.

A border, and its libraries

Much of the written record lives in refugee-camp school archives, church hymnals, and diaspora newspapers. Provenance is careful. Consent is per-item and revocable.

This page is set with dashed rules where a claim is not yet community-verified. Do not remove the dashes to make the page look more finished.

section numbers · toggle blueprint for configs
[00] · plate

We work with open source models. Gemma-4 (and SEA-LION )is being used for Burmese, Karen, and Jinghpaw as well as; Llama-3.1-8B may be used for Rohingya, for byte-level fallback where Hanifi is unrepresented.

Curation
[01] · plate

Community participation and consent for curation and capture. Provenance recorded and fair compensation provided.

Normalization
[02] · plate

Converting legacy encodings and non-standard scripts into universal digital formats (e.g., Zawgyi to Unicode) is an act of cultural and historic preservation. Working alongside local linguists and community members, we systematically standardize text to be machine-readable while ensuring cultural context, orthographic nuances, and historical integrity remain intact.

[03] · plate

Adapting foundational base models to local linguistic realities through targeted, data-efficient techniques calibrated to each language’s structure and context. Training logs and loss curves are published directly to the public archive with complete technical transparency.

[04] · plate

Community-annotated benchmarks. Evals and benchmarks designed with local community and experts. Annotators acknowledgements and compensation. Inter-annotator agreement reported alongside every score.

THE CONTESTED QUESTIONS · KEPT VISIBLE, NOT RESOLVED FOR THE COMMUNITY
  • Q01How to represent Karen orthographic variants across religious and secular writing.
  • Q02Whether to include Pwo Karen in a shared corpus or keep it distinct.
[ 06 ] THE VOICES
named with consent · faces omitted by choice
Naw Paw Htoo
named
teacher, Mae La
duration · 1:47
anonymous
anonymous
hymn writer
duration · 2:20
Saw Eh Kaw
named
elder
duration · 3:12
[ 06 ] SOVEREIGNTY

The corpus belongs to the communities that made it. Consent is per item and revocable. Revocation is honored in the weights, not just in the archive.

Model weights reflect the terms and governance frameworks chosen with the community.

[ 08 ] COLOPHON

Completed at Mae Sot, in 2026, on the S'gaw Karen project, rank TBD. Released with community consent; evaluation held.

place
Mae Sot
date
2026.07 — provisional
hardware
TBD
license
TBD — community-elected
elsinore data co · undertext · v0.5 · 2026.07
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