Mrs. Leslie Milne

For the athlete, see Leslie Milne (field hockey).

Mary Lewis Harper Milne known as Mrs. Leslie Milne (1860–1932) was an English anthropologist who traveled extensively and wrote about the ethnic peoples of the Shan State in Northern Burma. Her best known book, The Shans at Home, was an account of the cultural practices and day-to-day life of the Shan people of the village of Namkham in Shan State and was based on the many months she spent living in that village. She was also the author of The Home of an Eastern Clan, a book about the life and culture of the Palaung people, and wrote the first, and what is possibly the only English-Palaung dictionary.

Published works

• The Shans at Home, London, John Murray (1910).
• An Elementary Palaung Grammar, Oxford, Clarendon Press (1921). Published in 1921, this was the first survey of the grammar of the Palaung language, the language of a hill tribe of the Shan State of Burma and of the Yunnan province of China. Mrs. Milne traveled to Namshan, the capital of the Palaung state of Tawngpeng, to the Palaungs of North Hsenwi, as well as to the Palaungs of Yunnan to collect material for this book.
• The Home of an Eastern Clan: A Study of the Palaungs of the Shan State, Oxford, Clarendon Press (1924).
• A Dictionary of English-Palaung and Palaung-English, Rangoon (1931).

References

• Shorto, H. L. (1973). Three Mon-Khmer Word Families. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, Vol 36 No. 2, pp. 374–81.
• Grierson, George A. (1922). An Elementary Palaung Grammar: Book Review. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, Vol 2 No. 2, pp. 339–40.
• Hodson, T. C. (1912). The Shans at Home: Book Review. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, Vol 12, pp. 27–29.

External links

• Works by or about Mrs. Leslie Milne in libraries (WorldCat catalog)