Burmese language

The Burmese language is the official language of Myanmar. Although the government officially recognises the language as Myanmar, most continue to refer to the language as Burmese. It is the mother tongue of the Bamar, Rakhine, and other related sub-ethnic groups of the Bamar. Burmese is a member of the Tibeto-Burman languages, which is a subfamily of the Sino-Tibetan family of languages. It is spoken by 32 million as a first language, and as a second language by minorities in Myanmar. Burmese is a tonal and analytic language. The language utilises the Burmese script, which derives from the Mon script and ultimately from the Brāhmī script.

Names of the language

mranma ca means "written Burmese", while Mranmacaka.png mranma ca.ka: means "spoken Burmese". The mranma portion of these names may be pronounced or, more colloquially, . The Burmese saying "the pronunciation is merely the sound, whilst the orthography is correct" () reflects the differences between spoken and written Burmese, as spelling is often not an accurate reflection of pronunciation.

Dialects and accents

The standard dialect of Burmese comes from Yangon, because of its media influence, but there are several distinctive dialects in Upper Myanmar and Lower Myanmar. Dialects include Merguese, Yaw, Palaw, Beik (Myeik), and Dawei (Tavoy). The most noticeable feature of the Mandalay dialect is its use of the pronoun (kya. nau ) for both males and females, whereas in Yangon, (kya. ma. ) refers to females. The Rakhine dialect (Arakanese) is most reminiscent of archaic Burmese, especially in its usage of the sound, which has become a sound in standard Burmese. Dialects in Tanintharyi Division (such as Beik) often reduce the intensity of the glottal stop. However, there is mutual intelligibility between dialects.

Burmese is classified into two categories. One is formal, which is used in literary works, official publications, radio broadcasts, and formal speeches. The other is colloquial, which is used in daily conversation. There are various branches of the colloquial form as well. One form is used when speaking to elders and teachers. Different pronouns referring to oneself (such as the usage of or ) are used. When speaking to a person of the same status or of younger age, (nga ) is used. When speaking to a monk, a person must refer to the monk as poun-poun and to himself as (da. ga ). Burmese monks may speak to fellow monks using Pāli, and it is expected of faithful Burmese Buddhists to have a basic knowledge of Pāli.

Diglossia

Diglossia occurs to a large extent in Burmese. The discrepancy is quite large, and many linguists consider formal Burmese to be a separate language from colloquial Burmese. The written and prestige form of Burmese has undergone only a few changes and tends not to accommodate the colloquial phonology of standard Burmese today. In addition, different particles (to modify nouns and verbs) are used in the prestige form than in the spoken form. Literate Burmese speakers are able to interpret Burmese despite transcriptions that date many centuries because of intuition and innate pronunciation rules. For example, (hnai.), which serves as a postposition after nouns is only used in formal Burmese, and is (hma) in colloquial Burmese.

Despite the large differences, Burmese speakers rarely distinguish formal and colloquial Burmese as separate languages, but rather as two parts of the same language.

Many have contended that a newer system of orthography for Burmese be created (one based on phonology), to accommodate such differences. In addition, some Burmese linguists have proposed to shift away from formal Burmese, as seen in the gradual changes in form on television broadcasts. However, formal Burmese remains well-established in Burmese. Another obstacle in reforming Burmese orthography are conservative Burmese dialects (that retain older pronunciations more similar to formal Burmese), which primarily come from coastal areas.

Romanisation and transcription

There is no official romanisation system for Burmese. There have been attempts to make one, but none have been successful. Replicating Burmese sounds in the Latin script is complicated. There is a Pāli-based transcription system in existence, which was devised by the Myanma Language Commission (MLC). However, it only transcribes sounds in formal Burmese and is based on the orthography rather than the phonology. Several colloquial transcription systems have been proposed, but none is overwhelmingly preferred over others.

Transcription of Burmese is not standardised, as seen in the varying English transcriptions of Burmese place names.

Script

The Burmese script derives from an ancient version of the Mon script (a Brāhmī script), which was prevalent in Lower Burma prior to Bamar migration to the Ayeyarwady valley region. Notable features of the Burmese script are:

It is syllabic, with letters having an inherent vowel (a. or ).
The rounded script came from the usage of palm leaves as primary writing material during ancient times (a straight line cut into the leaf would have caused the leaf to split).
Its tones are indicated by various diacritics and special letters added to the initial consonant.

Phonology

The transcriptions in this section use the International Phonetic Alphabet.

Consonants

The consonants of Burmese are as follows:

	Bilabial	Dental	Alveolar	Postalveolar and palatal	Velar and labiovelar	Glottal	Placeless
Stops and affricates
Nasals
Fricatives
Approximants
Lateral approximants

The approximant is rare, and is only used in place names that have preserved Sanskrit or Pali pronunciations (e.g. Amarapura), and in English-derived words. Likewise, is rare, having disappeared from modern Burmese, except in transcriptions of foreign names. is uncommon, except as a voiced allophone of .

The phones are often pronounced as , as , as , and as in compound words.

The placeless nasal is realized as nasalization of the preceding vowel or as a nasal homorganic to the following consonant; thus "storm" is pronounced .

Vowels

The vowels of Burmese are:

Monophthongs		Diphthongs

The monophthongs , , , and occur only in open syllables (those without a syllable coda); the diphthongs , , , and occur only in closed syllables (those with a syllable coda).

Tones

Burmese is a tonal language, which means phonemic contrasts can be made on the basis of the tone of a vowel. In Burmese, these contrasts involve not only pitch, but also phonation, intensity (loudness), duration, and vowel quality. There are four contrastive tones in Burmese. In the following table the tones are shown marked on the vowel as an example; the phonetic descriptions are from Wheatley (1987)

Tone name	Symbol (shown on a)	Description
Low		Normal phonation, medium duration, low intensity, low (often slightly rising) pitch
High		Sometimes slightly breathy, relatively long, high intensity, high pitch; often with a fall before a pause
Creaky		tense or creaky phonation (sometimes with lax glottal stop), medium duration, high intensity, high (often slightly falling) pitch
Checked		Centralized vowel quality, final glottal stop, short duration, high pitch (in citation; can vary in context)

For example, the following words are distinguished from each other only on the basis of tone:

Low 'shake'
High 'be bitter'
Creaky 'fee'
Checked 'draw off'

In syllables ending with , the Checked tone is excluded:

Low 'undergo'
High 'dry up'
Creaky 'appoint'

Syllable structure

The syllable structure of Burmese is C(G)V((V)C), which is to say the onset consists of a consonant optionally followed by a glide, and the rhyme consists of a monophthong alone, a monophthong with a consonant, or a diphthong with a consonant. The only consonants that can stand in the coda are and . Some representative words are:

CV 'girl'
CVC 'crave'
CGV 'earth'
CGVC 'eye'
CVVC (term of address for young men)
CGVVC 'ditch'

A syllable whose vowel is has some restrictions:

It must be an open syllable (no coda consonant)
It cannot bear tone
It has only a simple (C) onset (no glide after the consonant)
It must not the final syllable of the word

Some examples of words containing -syllables:

'knob'
'flute'
'mock'
'be wanton'
'rice-water'

Grammar

The word order of the Burmese language is subject-object-verb. The only exception to this rule is the verb 'to be', (kà. ), which is placed directly after the subject. Pronouns in Burmese vary according to the gender and status of the audience. Burmese is monosyllabic, that is, every word is a root to which a particle but not another word may be prefixed (Ko, 1924, p viii). Sentence structure determines syntactical relations, and verbs are not conjugated but have particles suffixed to them. For example, the verb 'to eat' is (ca: ), and remains the same.

Adjectives

Adjectives may precede a noun (e.g. hkyau: tai. lu "beautiful" + + "person") or follow a noun (e.g. lu hkyau: "person" + "beautiful"). Superlatives are usually indicated with the prefix (a. ) + adj. + (hcum: ). Numeric adjectives follow the noun.

Verbs

The roots of Burmese verbs are almost always suffixed with at least one particle which conveys such information as tense, intention, politeness, mood etc. In fact, the only time in which no particle is attached to a verb is in commands. However Burmese verbs are not conjugated in the same way as most European languages; the root of the Burmese verb always remains unchanged, and does not have to agree with the subject in person, number or gender.

The most commonly used verb particles and their usage are shown below with the verb root (ca: ) which means "eat".

(ca: tai '') - I eat

The suffix တယ္}} tai can be viewed as a particle marking the present tense and/or a factual statement.

(ca: hkai. tai ) - I ate

The suffix ခဲ့}} (hkai. ) denotes that the action took place in the past. However, this particle is not always necessary to indicate the past tense such that it can convey the same information without it. But to emphasise that the action happened before another event that is also currently being discussed, the particle becomes imperative. Note that the suffix တယ္ (tai ) in this case denotes a factual statement rather than the present tense.

(ca: ne tai ) - I am eating

(ne ) is a particle used to denote that the action is in progression, and is equivalent to the English '-ing'.

((ca.) ca: pri '') - I am eating (now)

This particle or tense has no equivalence in English. It is used when an action which another person or persons expected to be performed by the subject from is finally being performed. So in the above example, if someone had been expecting you to eat and you have finally started eating, the particle (pri ) is used.

(ca: mai ) - I will eat

This particle is used to indicate the future tense or an action which is yet to be performed.

(ca: tau. mai ) - I will eat (straight-away)

The particle (tau. ) is used when the action is about to be performed immediately. Therefore it could be termed as the "immediate future tense particle". The particle (mai ) is still imperative in this case.

Nouns

Nouns in Burmese are pluralised by the addition of the suffix (twe or if the word ends in a glottal stop). The suffix mya (or nè, which means "few") is also used, which by itself means "many". The suffix day, which also pluralises nouns, is only used colloquially and mya is used literally and formally.

(nwa: ) - cow
(nwa: mya: ) - cows
(mrac ) - river
(mrac mya: ) - rivers

The plural suffix however is not used when the noun is quantified by being counted.

(hka.le: nga: yauk ) is in the order "child" + "five" + (classifier), which is equivalent to "five children".

Numerical classifiers

Burmese, just as in neighbouring languages such as Thai, Bengali, and Chinese, uses nominal classifiers when nouns are being counted or quantified. This approximately equates to English expressions such as "two slices of bread" or "a cup of coffee". In the above example, yauk is the classifier used when referring to people. Classifiers are imperative when counting nouns, so (hka.le: nga: literally "children five") is ungrammatical. There are many classifiers in Burmese, and some of the most commonly used ones are shown below.

MLC transcription	Phonetic transcription	Usage	Remarks
pa:		for people	Used exclusively for monks and nuns of the Buddhist order
hli:		for slices	Used in context of food
kaung		for animals
hku.		general classifier	Used with almost all nouns except for animate objects
hkwak		For open containers with liquid
lum:		for round objects
pra:		for flat objects
cang:	or	for vehicles
cu.	or	for groups
u:		for people	Used in formal context and also used for monks and nuns
yauk		for people	Used in informal context

Pronouns

Subject pronouns begin sentences. In the imperative forms, the subject is omitted. There are certain pronouns used for different audiences. Object pronouns must have a -go attached immediately after the pronoun. Proper nouns are often substituted for pronouns. In addition, nga and nein are rarely used. One's status (wa) determines the pronouns used. The basic pronouns are:

|
|| ta. pany. tau
ta. pany. tau ma. ||
|| I/me || Formal, used while speaking to a monk or nun (lit. "disciple") exclusively

MLC transcription	Phonetic transcription	English	Remarks
nga		I/me	Informal, used with family and friends
nga tui.	or	we	Informal
kya. nau kya. ma.		I/me	Formal, used by males Formal, used by females
da. ga da. ga ma.		I/me	Formal, used while speaking to a monk or nun (lit. "donor") exclusively
nang	or	you	Informal
nang tui.		you all	Informal
mang:		you	Informal, used among close friends
a hrang		you	Formal
hkang bya:	or	you	Formal
su		he/she	Informal
su tui.		they	Informal
ai: (da) ha		it/that	Informal, used rudely to refer to animate objects

Reduplication

Reduplication is prevalent in colloquial Burmese, and is used to intensify or weaken adjectives' meanings. For example, (hkyau: ), which means "beautiful" is reduplicated, the intensity of the adjective's meaning increases.

Vocabulary

The majority of Burmese vocabulary is of Tibeto-Burman stock, but a large percentage of learnt and educated words associated with religion (Buddhism), philosophy, government, and the arts are derived from the ancient Indian language Pāli. Many English words, particularly those relating to modern institutions (e.g. business, government) have become a part of the Burmese language. Nearly all of the used measurements are from English, although a Burmese system does exist. Hindi loan words are found in Burmese, many of which are associated to food or cooking.

Bibliography

External links

Languages of Myanmar | Tibeto-Burman languages | Languages of Bangladesh

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