![]() ![]() It evolved at a time when letters were etched on palm leaves with a stylus, and. The Burmese alphabet consists almost entirely of circles or portions of circles used in various combinations, as can be seen in the sample below. Spaces are used to separate phrases, not words: a single vertical bar marks a small break, a double vertical bar marks the end of a sentence. Although Burmese is a tonal language, tones are usually not marked but implied by the vowels. The combinations of consonants and diacritic vowels are often represented by special ligatures. Symbols for vowels may be written before, above, below, or to the right of the letter representing an initial consonant. It is written horizontally from left to right and its basic set of symbols consists of 33 consonants and 14 vowels. Its basic unit is a consonant-based syllable with an inherent /a/ vowel which is suppressed by a circular stroke above the character. Thus, there are serious discrepancies between the orthography and pronunciation.īurmese is written with a syllabic script. Because this script was designed to represent the sound system of an Indo-Aryan language, it is not ideally suited to represent the sounds of Burmese, a Sino-Tibetan one. Burmese script is an adaptation of the Mon script, which in turn, derived from Pali, the language of Theravada Buddhism, and ultimately from the Brahmi script of India. The influence of Hinduism and Buddhism is evident in the orthography still in use today. ![]() The verb and its modifiers occupy a final position in a sentence, while all other elements are ordered somewhat freely before it. The normal word order in Burmese is Subject-Object-Verb. Their use depends on who is speaking to whom, for instance, women use shin ‘sir or madam’ at the end of a sentence to show respect to the listener, while men use khâmja for that purpose. They play an extremely important role in the language. Burmese verbs are not conjugated, i.e., they remain unchanged, regardless of person, number, or tense.Most Burmese verbs consist of a root plus separate particles that represent mood, aspect, tense, positive/negative, and politeness. ![]() Numerals and classifiers follow the quantified nouns, e.g., θwà-lè-hcàun, literally ‘tooth four peg’ ‘four teeth’. There are dozens of classifiers, and one has to learn which classifier goes with which noun. ![]() A noun in Burmese can occur with only one classifier.
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