Burmese

Burmese is the national language of Burma or Myanmar. (Since 1989, the official name of the country has been the Union of Myanmar, and that of the language, Myanmar; in English, the language, at least, is still usually called Burmese.) The nation is situated between the Tibetan plateau and the Malay peninsula, sharing borders with Bangladesh and India to the west, with China to the north-east, with Laos to the east and with Thailand to the south-east. Burmese belongs to the Burmish sub-branch of the LoloBurmese (or Burmese-Lolo) branch of the Tibeto-Burman family, and is one of the two languages in that family with an extensive written history (the other being Tibetan). Standard Burmese has evolved from a ‘central’ dialect spoken by the Burman population

of the lower valleys of the Irrawaddy and Chindwin rivers. Although it is now spoken over a large part of the country, regional variation within the standard remains relatively minor; apart from a few localisms, the speech of Mandalay in Upper Burma, for example, is indistinguishable from that of Rangoon, 400 miles to the south. However, a number of regional dialects, showing profound differences in pronunciation and vocabulary, are found in peripheral regions. The best known of these are Arakanese in the south-west, Tavoyan in the south-east and Intha in the east. Despite being heavily influenced in formal registers by the national language, the dialects preserve many features attested in the modern orthography but lost in standard speech. Burma is a multi-national state. About two-thirds of its population are Burmans. The

other third is made up of a variety of ethnic groups, including other Tibeto-Burmanspeaking peoples such as the Chin, Naga and Karen, Mon-Khmer peoples such as the Mon and Padaung, the Shan, whose language is closely related to Thai, and Chinese and Indians, who live mostly in the towns. Most of the population of the country, provisionally put at about 47 million (CIA, 2006), speaks Burmese as either a first or second language. Linguistic evidence suggests that the ancestor of the Burmese language spread south

and southwestwards, diverging from the closely related Loloish group of languages whose

of Chinese cultural sphere to a region profoundly influenced by Indian tradition, and by the time the Burmese emerge on the historical scene, they have already begun to take on the religious and political features of the Indianised kingdoms that flourished in what is now the heart of Burma. In the dry zone of central Burma, Burmese speaking people would have encountered the

literate, urbanised culture of the Pyu, whose language is known only from a few inscriptions, but is thought to be Tibeto-Burman, if not Lolo-Burmese. These linguistic cousins of the Burmese, once dominant in the Irrawaddy basin, gradually lost political power, possibly as a consequence of wars with Nan Chao, a kingdom that flourished in southwest China at that time. By the middle of the ninth century, the Burmese had founded a kingdom at Pagan that eventually absorbed the remnants of the Pyu and came to dominate most of what is now modern Burma. The Burmese were also in close contact with another literate, urbanised culture, the Mon, who spoke a Mon-Khmer language of the same name. The Mon retained considerable political power in Lower Burma, at least, until the middle of the eighteenth century, when the last Mon kingdom was defeated by the Burmese. (To commemorate the end of that war, the town of Dagon in Lower Burma was renamed Yangon – Rangoon in English, meaning ‘fighting is over’.) Mon continues to be spoken, mostly as a second language, in parts of Lower Burma and Thailand. Until recently, the earliest reliable written specimen of Burmese was generally considered

to be the Rajakumar (or Myazedi) inscription, dated to 1111 or 1112 AD, which records the offering of a gold Buddha image in four languages, Pyu, Pali, Burmese and Mon. The Pali, Burmese and Mon faces are all written in the same script – the Burmese-Mon script – based ultimately on a south Indian model; the script of the Pyu face, however, is slightly different from the other three in both its form and its features. Because of the near identity of the Mon and Burmese scripts, because Mon inscriptions in central Burma were thought to antedate Burmese, and because the Mon were associated, historically, with earlier coastal cultures known to have been disseminators of Indian tradition, the Mon have usually been regarded as the source of Burmese writing, as well as the inspiration for features of their early art, architecture, religion and government. However, AungThwin (2005: 183 and passim) reveals specimens of Burmese writing from the eleventh century that may significantly pre-date the earliest Mon inscriptions; he also undermines the case for contemporary Mon hegemony in Lower Burma. Instead, he argues for the Pyu as the main substrate (or amalgam) in early Burmese culture, and Pyu writing as the model for Burmese writing, with the latter ultimately being adapted to write Mon rather than the other way round. While there are probably enough Pyu inscriptions to make a case for or against its

script being the progenitor of the Burmese writing system, there is unlikely to be sufficient linguistic evidence for an early nexus between Pyu and Burmese over and beyond the putative common origin in Tibeto-Burman. Mon, however, being much better attested and having a distinctive lexical stock, has left traces on Burmese in the form of loanwords having to do with the natural and man-made environment as well as some Indic loanwords showing the effects of transmission by way of Mon. In addition, it has been suggested that the iambic word structure of minor syllable followed by major, found in Burmese, but otherwise associated with Mon-Khmer languages rather than Tibeto-Burman, may have developed by way of contact with Mon. Beginning in the thirteenth century, Tai migrations down the major river valleys of

the Southeast Asian mainland also brought Tai speaking peoples, particularly the Shan

Still the Burmese incursions to the east brought them into Thai territory. Twice they conquered the Thai capital of Ayuttaya (once in the mid-sixteenth century, then again in the mid-eighteenth), and Burmese secular drama owes its beginnings to Thai influence following the last of these invasions. But Thai and Shan influence on the Burmese language seems to be limited to a few loanwords for cultural objects (including hkau?hswe`, the name of a popular Burmese noodle dish that is borrowed from Shan). The first notable European presence in Burma was that of the Portuguese in the six-

teenth century, followed in the next by small numbers of British, Dutch and French. The nineteenth century brought Burma into conflict with the British in India, who eventually annexed the country in three stages between 1826 and 1886; from 1886 until 1937, it was administered as a province of British India. Independence was restored in 1948. British rule introduced a large number of words of English origin into Burmese.

Many of these were later replaced by Burmese or Indic forms, but large numbers remain and new ones continue to appear, particularly in the fields of science, technology, business and politics. Loanwords tend to be fully adapted to Burmese segmental phonology, but in many cases they remain identifiable by their polysyllabic morphemes and their resistance to internal sandhi processes. Rather than adapting English or other foreign phonetic material, the Burmese often

form neologisms from their own lexical stock or from the highly esteemed classical languages of India, which are to Burmese (and many South-East Asian languages) what Latin and Greek are to European languages. Thus the word for ‘spaceship’, ?a+ka +háyin (plusses represent phonological boundaries: see pages 729-730) is composed of ?a+ka+há, a learned term meaning ‘space, expanse’, originally from Pali A-KA-SA (transliterations are capitalised) and yin, spelled YA