The Burmese alphabet (Burmese: ????????????; pronounced [mj?mà ???k??jà]) is an abugida used for writing Burmese. It is ultimately a Brahmic script adapted from either the Kadamba or Pallava alphabet of South India, and more immediately an adaptation of Old Mon or Pyu script. The Burmese alphabet is also used for the liturgical languages of Pali and Sanskrit.
In recent decades, other, related alphabets, such as Shan and modern Mon, have been restructured according to the standard of the now-dominant Burmese alphabet. (See Burmese 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 earliest evidence of the Burmese alphabet is dated to 1035, while a casting made in the 18th century of an old stone inscription points to 984. Burmese calligraphy originally followed a square format but the cursive format took hold from the 17th century when popular writing led to the wider use of palm leaves and folded paper known as parabaiks. A stylus would rip these leaves when making straight lines. The alphabet has undergone considerable modification to suit the evolving phonology of the Burmese language.
There are several systems of transliteration into the Latin alphabet; for this article, the MLC Transcription System is used.
Video Burmese alphabet
Alphabet
History
The Burmese alphabet is an adaptation of the Old Mon script or the Pyu script, and it is ultimately of South Indian origin, from either the Kadamba or Pallava alphabet.
Arrangement
As with other Brahmic scripts, the Burmese alphabet is arranged into groups of five letters for stop consonants called wek (???, from Pali vagga) based on articulation. Within each group, the first letter is tenuis ("plain"), the second is the aspirated homologue, the third and fourth are the voiced homologues, and the fifth is the nasal homologue. This is true of the first twenty-five letters in the Burmese alphabet, which are called grouped together as wek byi (????????, from Pali vagga byañjana). The remaining eight letters (???, ???, ???, ???, ???, ???, ???, ???) are grouped together as a wek (????, lit. "without group"), as they are not arranged in any particular pattern.
Letters
A syllable onset is the consonant or consonant cluster that appears before the vowel of a syllable. The Burmese script has 33 letters to indicate the initial consonant of a syllable and four diacritics to indicate additional consonants in the onset. Like other abugidas, including the other members of the Brahmic family, vowels are indicated in Burmese script by diacritics, which are placed above, below, before or after the consonant character. A consonant letter with no vowel diacritic has the inherent vowel [a?] (often reduced to [?] when another syllable follows in the same word).
The following table provides the letter, the syllable onset in IPA, and the way the letter is referred to in Burmese, which may be either a descriptive name or just the sound of the letter, arranged in the traditional order:
- ? (gh), ? (jh), ? (?), ? (?h), ? (?), ? (?h), ? (?), ? (dh), and ? (?) are primarily used in words of P?li origin.
- ? (?) and ? (?) are exclusively used in Sanskrit words, as they have merged to ? in Pali.
- ? has an alternate form ?, used with the vowel diacritic ? as a syllable onset and alone as a final.
- With regard to pronunciation, the corresponding letters of the dentals and alveolars are phonetically equivalent.
- ? is often pronounced [?] in words of Pali or foreign origin.
- ? is nominally treated as a consonant in the Burmese alphabet; it represents an initial glottal stop in syllables with no other consonant.
Consonant letters may be modified by one or more medial diacritics (three at most), indicating an additional consonant before the vowel. These diacritics are:
- Ya pin (?????) - Written ? (MLCTS -y-, indicating /j/ medial or palatalization of a velar consonant)
- Ya yit (????) - Written ? (MLCTS -r-, indicating /j/ medial or palatalization of a velar consonant)
- Wa hswe (????) - Written ? (MLCTS -w-, usually indicating /w/ medial)
- Ha hto (?????) - ? (MLCTS h-, indicating that a sonorant consonant is voiceless)
A few Burmese dialects use an extra diacritic to indicate the /l/ medial, which has merged to /y/ in standard Burmese:
- La hswe (????) - Written ?? (MLCTS -l, indicating /l/ medial
All the possible diacritic combinations are listed below:
Maps Burmese alphabet
Syllable rhymes
Syllable rhymes (i.e. vowels and any consonants that may follow them within the same syllable) are indicated in Burmese by a combination of diacritic marks and consonant letters marked with the virama character ? which suppresses the inherent vowel of the consonant letter. This mark is called Asat in Burmese (Burmese: ????; MLCTS: a.sat, [?a??a?]), which means nonexistence (see Sat (Sanskrit)).
Diacritics and symbols
One or more of these accents can be added to a consonant to change its sound. In addition, other modifying symbols are used to differentiate tone and sound, but are not considered diacritics.
History
La hswe (????) used in old Burmese from the Bagan to Innwa periods (12th century - 16th century), and could be combined with other diacritics (ya pin, ha hto and wa hswe) to form ??? ??? ???. Similarly, until the Innwa period, ya pin was also combined with ya yit. From the early Bagan period to the 19th century, ?? was used instead of ??? for the rhyme /??/ Early Burmese writing also used ??, not the high tone marker ?, which came into being in the 16th century. Moreover, ??, which disappeared by the 16th century, was subscripted to represent creaky tone (now indicated with ?). During the early Bagan period, the rhyme /??/ (now represented with the diacritic ?) was represented with ???). The diacritic combination ???? disappeared in the mid-1750s (typically designated as Middle Burmese), having been replaced with the ?? combination, introduced in 1638. The standard tone markings found in modern Burmese can be traced to the 19th century.
Stacked consonants
Certain sequences of consonants are written one atop the other, or stacked. A pair of stacked consonants indicates that no vowel is pronounced between them, as for example the m-bh in ????? kambha "world". This is equivalent to using a virama ? on the first consonant (in this case, the m); if the m and bh were not stacked, the inherent vowel a would be assumed (*???? kamabha). Stacked consonants are always homorganic (pronounced in the same place in the mouth), which indicated by the traditional arrangement of the Burmese alphabet into five-letter rows of letters called ???. (Consonants not found in a row beginning with k, c, t, or p can only be doubled - that is, stacked with themselves.)
When stacked, the first consonant (the final of the preceding syllable, in this case m) is written as usual, while the second consonant (the onset of the following syllable, in this case bh) is subscripted beneath it.
Stacked consonants are mostly confined to loan words from languages like Pali, Sanskrit, and occasionally English. For instance, the Burmese word for "paper" (a Pali loan) is spelt ?????, not ?????, although both would be read the same. They are not found in native Burmese words except for the purpose of abbreviation. For example, the Burmese word ???? "daughter" is sometimes abbreviated to ?????, even though the stacked consonants do not belong to the same row and a vowel is pronounced between. Similarly, ?????? "tea" is commonly abbreviated to ?????.
Digits
A decimal numbering system is used, and numbers are written in the same order as Hindu-Arabic numerals.
The digits from zero to nine are: ?????????? (Unicode 1040 to 1049). The number 1945 would be written as ????. Separators, such as commas, are not used to group numbers.
Punctuation
There are two primary break characters in Burmese, drawn as one or two downward strokes: ? (called ????????, ????????, ???????, or ??????????????) and ? (called ????????, ?????, or ???????????????), which respectively act as a comma and a full stop. There is a Shan exclamation mark ?. Other abbreviations used in literary Burmese are:
- ?--used as a full stop if the sentence immediately ends with a verb.
- ?--used as a sentence connector to connect two trains of thought.
- ?--locative ('at').
- ????--ditto (used in columns and lists)
See also
- Romanization of Burmese
- Burmese script
- Burmese Braille
Notes
References
- Aung-Thwin, Michael (2005). The mists of R?mañña: The Legend that was Lower Burma (illustrated ed.). Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press. ISBN 978-0-8248-2886-8.
- Harvey, G. E. (1925). History of Burma: From the Earliest Times to 10 March 1824. London: Frank Cass & Co. Ltd.
- Herbert, Patricia M.; Anthony Milner (1989). South-East Asia. University of Hawaii Press. ISBN 978-0-8248-1267-6.
- Lieberman, Victor B. (2003). Strange Parallels: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c. 800-1830, volume 1, Integration on the Mainland. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-80496-7.
- "A History of the Myanmar Alphabet" (PDF). Myanmar Language Commission. 1993. Archived from the original (PDF) on 26 March 2010. Retrieved 30 August 2010.
- "Representing Myanmar in Unicode Details and Examples" (PDF). Martin Hosken. Retrieved 2012-07-24.
External links
- Burmese/Myanmar script and pronunciation at Omniglot
- Myanmar Unicode Character Picker
- Myanmar Unicode Implementation Public Awareness
- Myanmar3 keyboard layout
- myWin2.2
- ALA-LC romanization system for Burmese
- BGN/PCGN romanization system for Burmese
- Myanmar Language SIG
- Myanmar Word Segmentation using Syllable level Longest Matching
- Myanmar-English dictionary
Fonts supporting Burmese characters
- Burmese Wikipedia:Font page
- Burmese Unicode & NLP Research Centre
- Parabaik Myanmar Unicode Project GPLed and OFLed
- Ayar Myanmar online dictionary and download
- Download KaNaungConverter_Window_Build200508.zip from the Kanaung project page and Unzip Ka Naung Converter Engine
- http://unicode-table.com/en/sections/myanmar/
- Padauk - Free Burmese Unicode font distributed by SIL International
Fonts Converter
- A Guide to Using Myanmar Unicode: Convert from old Myanmar fonts to Unicode
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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