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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.
The Burmese alphabet (Burmese: မြန်မာအက္ခရာ myanma akkha.ya, pronounced [mjəmà ʔɛʔkʰəjà]) is an abugida used for writing Burmese. It is ultimately adapted from a Brahmic script, either the Kadamba or Pallava alphabet of South India. The Burmese alphabet is also used for the liturgical languages of Pali and Sanskrit.
This is the pronunciation key for IPA transcriptions of Burmese on Wikipedia. It provides a set of symbols to represent the pronunciation of Burmese in Wikipedia articles, and example words that illustrate the sounds that correspond to them.
The Constitution of Myanmar officially refers to it as the Myanmar language in English, [3] though most English speakers continue to refer to the language as Burmese, after Burma—a name with co-official status until 1989 (see Names of Myanmar). Burmese is the most widely-spoken language in the country, where it serves as the lingua franca. [4]
In the Burmese script, the anusvara (အောက်မြစ် auk myit (့) IPA: [aʊʔ mjɪʔ]) is represented as a dot under a nasalised final to indicate a creaky tone (with a shortened vowel). Burmese also uses a dot above a letter to indicate the /-ɴ/ nasalized ending (called "Myanmar Sign Anusvara" in Unicode), called ...
The Mon alphabet (Mon: အက္ခရ်မန် listen ⓘ;, Burmese: မွန်အက္ခရာ listen ⓘ;, Thai: อักษรมอญ listen ⓘ) is a Brahmic abugida used for writing the Mon language. It is an example of the Mon-Burmese script, which derives from the Pallava Grantha script of southern India. [2]
In 2007, Burmese was spoken by 33 million people as a first language. [5] Burmese is spoken as a second language by another 10 million people, particularly ethnic minorities in Burma and those in neighbouring countries. [6] Burmese is a Sino-Tibetan language belonging to the Southern Burmish branch of the Tibeto-Burman languages.
Each consonant has an inherent vowel which is usually a short ‘ə’ (in Bengali, Assamese and Odia, the phoneme is /ɔ/ due to sound shifts). Other vowels are written by adding to the character. A mark, known in Sanskrit as a virama/halanta/hasanta, can be used to indicate the absence of an inherent vowel, although it is rarely used.