The (, or ''ba.ma ca'' ) 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.
The standard dialect of Burmese comes from
Yangon , but there are several distinctive dialects in Upper Myanmar and Lower Myanmar. Dialects include Merguese, Yaw, and Palaw. The most noticeable feature of the
Mandalay dialect is its use of the pronoun က္ယနော္ (''kya. nau'' ) for both males and females, whereas in Yangon, က္ယမ (''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. 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 က္ယနော္ or က္ယမ) are used. When speaking to a person of the same status or of younger age, ငာ (''nga'' ) is used. When speaking to a
Monk , a person must refer to the monk as ''poun-poun'' and to himself as ဒဂာ (''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 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.
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
Coast al areas.
See Also: MLC Transcription System
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.
See Also: Burmese alphabet
The Burmese script derives from the Mon script, which was prevalent in
Lower Burma . Notable features of the Burmese script are:
#It is syllabic, with letters having an inherent vowel အ (''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 word.
The transcriptions in this section use the
International Phonetic Alphabet .
The consonants of Burmese are as follows:
The approximants and are rare, as is except as a
Voiced Allophone of .
The placeless nasal is realized as
Nasalization of the preceding vowel or as a nasal
Homorganic to the following consonant; thus "storm" is pronounced .
The
Vowel s of Burmese are:
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).
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)
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'
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'
The
Word Order of the Burmese language is
Subject -
Object -
Verb . The only exception to this rule is the verb 'to be', က (''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 စား (''ca:'' ), and remains the same.
s are usually indicated with the prefix အ (''a.'' ) + adj. + ဆုံး (''hcum:'' ). Numeric adjectives follow the noun.
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 စား (''ca:'' ) which means "eat".
- စားတယ္ (''ca: tai'' '') - I eat
The suffix တယ္ ''tai'' can be viewed as a particle marking the present tense and/or a factual statement.
- စားခဲ့တယ္ (''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.
- စားေနတယ္ (''ca: ne tai'' ) - I am eating
ေန (''ne'' ) is a particle used to denote that the action is in progression, and is equivalent to the English '-ing'.
- (စ)စားပ္ရီ (''(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 ပ္ရီ (''pri'' ) is used.
- စားမယ္ (''ca: mai'' ) - I will eat
This particle is used to indicate the future tense or an action which is yet to be performed.
- စားေတာ့မယ္ (''ca: tau. mai'' ) - I will eat (straight-away)
The particle ေတာ့ (''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 မယ္ (''mai'' ) is still imperative in this case.
Noun s in Burmese are pluralised by the addition of the suffix ''dei'' (or ''tei'' if the word ends in a glottal stop). The suffix မ္ယား ''mya'' (or ''nè'', which means "few") is also used, which by itself means "many". However, using ''dei'' is awkward, and ''mya'' is often preferred.
- န္ဝား (''nwa:'' ) - cow
- န္ဝားမ္ယား (''nwa: mya:'' ) - cows
- မ္ရစ္ (''mrac'' ) - river
- မ္ရစ္မ္ယား (''mrac mya:'' ) - rivers
The plural suffix however is not used when the noun is quantified by being counted.
- ခလေး၅ေယာက္ (''hka.le: nga: yauk'' ) is in the order ခလေး "child" + ၅ "five" + ေယာက္ (classifier), which is equivalent to "five children".
Burmese, just as in neighbouring languages such as
Thai ,
Chinese , and
Malay , 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 ခလေး၅ (''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.
Subject
Pronoun s 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:
Reduplication is prevalent in colloquial Burmese, and is used to intensify or weaken adjectives' meanings. For example, ေခ္ယာ (''hkyau:'' ), which means "beautiful" is reduplicated, the intensity of the adjective's meaning increases.
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.
