![]() To this end, a new dictionary and an encyclopaedia are being prepared, and thousands of new words are being coined. Our problem now is to give it the technical vocabulary needed to cope with the wide range of modern science. With the printing press and a mass reading public Burmese has again become more simple and colloquial. The language of old Pagan was simple and direct that of succeeding periods of our literature became learned, rigid, and ornate. We have many loan-words that came to us with the Sanskrit of Hinduism and the Pali of Buddhism, from Arab traders, or from contact with our neighbors, the Shans, Thais, Malays, Chinese, Manipuris, and Bengalis. Our grammar is very simple, but its word order is sometimes the reverse of English. These complications make our language difficult but also one of the most musical in the East its subtleties of sound have greatly enriched our poetry. ![]() As an example, ka, in the abrupt tone, means "to dance" kã, in the level tone, means "to shield" while kã:, in the falling tone, means "to spread wide." Or, if I wanted to say, "I saw a tall horse," it would be "Myin: myin myin thee." For this we use three tones: the abrupt, the level, and the falling tone. So each combination must do heavy duty, the differences in meaning being indicated by the speaker's tone of voice. Being monosyllabic, it has a shortage of basic root-words since the consonants can only be combined in a limited number of ways. In English, for example, you have separate root-terms for "sheep," "ewe," "lamb," and "mutton." To render these distinctions a Burmese will say: "sheep" (tho), "female sheep" (tho-ma), "young sheep" (tho-galay), and "meat of sheep" (tho-tha). The Burmese script is a form of the Mon script, which can be. Burmese orthography has strongly been influenced by Hinduism and Buddhism. To express anything but the very simplest things we must combine words of different meanings. Although Myanmar recognizes the English name of the language as the Myanmar language, specialists in the area of translation, and not only, continue to call it Burmese language. Nouns, adjectives, and verb tenses are formed by the addition of suffixes to the verbal roots -a process of agglutination, as the philologists call it. Many inscriptions on stone still survive there.īurmese, as is true of many Oriental languages, is monosyllabic generally speaking, each word has only one syllable. So far as we know, Burmese was first reduced to writing in the eleventh century at Pagan. "Our language comes from North and South" would look like this in Burmese type:īy this I mean that our actual words, and the way we put them together, came to us from the North, with the early migrations from China, while the way we write them came from the South, brought to Burma by Indian traders and missionaries at a slightly later period. That is, it does not have characters which originated as pictures, but an alphabet, of eleven vowels and thirty-two consonants, derived from the Pahlavi script of South India. The most recent standardization occurred in the 1970s.The Burmese language belongs to the Tibeto-Burman group of the Tibeto-Chinese family of languages, but, unlike Chinese, it is not ideographic. Unlike some other Brahmic scripts which have not undergone significant orthographic reform, Burmese writing changed in line with developments in the pronunciation of the language. The earliest known inscriptions using the Burmese script, which evolved from Mon, are from the 11 th century. This was adapted in the areas around the Irrawaddy River valley to write Mon, the historically predominant language of what is now Myanmar. The Burmese script is descended from Brahmi, most likely via the Pallava script. ![]() Burmese is written from left to right and requires no spaces between words, although modern writing usually contains spaces after each clause to enhance readability. The 33 consonants of Burmese are written in full, while vowels and tones are represented with the use of diacritics which modify the consonant letter. As one of many scripts derived from the ancient Brahmi system of India, it is categorized as an abugida, and unlike alphabets such as Greek or Latin, is not written with complete vowels. The Burmese script is used for writing Burmese and several other languages of Myanmar. It belongs to the Sino-Tibetan language family, and is related to Chinese and Tibetan. Burmese (မြန်မာဘာသာ), or Myanmar, is the official language of Myanmar.
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