Talk:Burmese language/Archive 1

This is an archive of past discussions about Burmese language. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.

Archive 1

Unicode font

Does anyone have a link for a Burmese Unicode font? --Abdull 14:37, 24 July 2005 (UTC)

See my:Wikipedia:Font for some suggestions. --Angr/_{tɔk tə mi} 15:13, 24 July 2005 (UTC)

Pronunciation of "kanesema"

I would very much like to know the correct pronunciation of the Burmese term for second washing: kanesema. I have been studying about gem mining.

Copied from Wikipedia:Reference_desk#Pronunciation_of_.22kanesema.22 - please reply there if you have an answer. ¦ Reisio 01:37, 2005 August 12 (UTC)

Chinese-derived words in Burmese

Some Burmese words seem to come from different Chinese dialects. Could it be possible that the some of the following Burmese words originally come from Chinese dialects, or are these just coincidental?

紅包; red envelope - anhpao (Hokkien) > an pao (Burmese)
包子; buns - baozi (Mandarin) > paosee (Burmese)
哥哥 (or 阿哥); elder brother - gege or a ko (Hokkien) > ko ko or a ko (Burmese)
妹妹 (or 阿妹); elder sister - jiejie (Mandarin) or a ji (Hokkien) > ji ji or a ji (Burmese)
姐姐; younger sister - meimei (Mandarin) > ma ma or a ma (Burmese)
阿爸; dad - a ba (Mandarin), a pei (Hokkien) > a phei (Burmese)

The first two, an pao and pauk si probably come directly from Chinese. As for "elder sister" and "younger sister", they are a ma (/əma̰/) (a-kyi (/əʧí/) is sometimes used, but typically among Burmese Chinese) and nyi ma (/ɲìma̰/) respectively. Elder brother in Burmese is ko ko (/kòkò/) or a-ko (/əkò/), and probably have the same cognates in Chinese. Father (various forms that all contain either 'hpa', 'pa', 'ba', 'hpei') and mother (various forms that all contain either 'ma', 'mei', or 'mi') are of Sino-Tibetan origin. --Hintha 04:17, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

194.60.106.5 12:54, 2 November 2006 (UTC) Can someone tell me whether a Burmese person's name has any meanings? The names I've come across seem to follow the Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese patterns. Are there any explanations for this? Thank you.

A Burmese person's name does have meaning, although Burmese names do not follow typical Sinitic patterns (surname + given name), because Burmese people have no surname. For example, Aung San's name literally means "successful and innovative/extraordinary". Although some parents pass on portions of their names (or relatives' names) to their children, this practise is atypical. --Hintha 03:09, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

194.60.106.5 11:03, 3 November 2006 (UTC) Thank you. You seem to know a lot about the Burmese and Chinese languages. Are there a lot of similarities between the vocabularies and grammer of these languages, and is there an ancestor language between them?

The Chinese dialects and Burmese (along with Tibetan and countless other languages in the Sino-Tibetan language family) are believed to have come from a common ancestral language. Many basic cognates in Chinese are similar to those in Burmese (e.g. you ('ni' in Mandarin, 'nin' in Burmese), I ('ngo' in Cantonese, 'nga' in Burmese), five ('ng' in Cantonese, 'nga' in Burmese). Because Burmese also borrows from Indian languages, and local minority languages, many words are dissimilar to words in Chinese. Grammar-wise, Burmese is "subject-object-verb" (e.g. "I you hurt" instead of "I hurt you"), whereas Chinese dialects follow the subject-verb-object pattern. Also, Burmese has many four-syllable phrases (which consist of rhyming schemes), such as "ga-bya ga-ya" (quickly), or "ka-thaw ga-myaw" (hurriedly), like Chinese languages do. --Hintha 19:17, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

194.60.106.5 13:44, 6 November 2006 (UTC) Thank you. Do you have any idea about the number or percentage of cognates Burmese and Chinese have in common?

I highly doubt that "paosee" and "baozi" go back to Proto-Sino-Tibetan. This is clearly a borrowing straight from Chinese. The numbers and pronouns, however, are more likely to be inherited from the proto-language. --SameerKhan 19:00, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

Term for tofu

Any Burmese speakers or Burmese language experts out there? I've just listed the Burmese name for tofu as "pebya," but I'm not sure if this is the right romanization. Please check the tofu article and see if it's correct. Thanks! Badagnani 22:43, 5 September 2005 (UTC)

Empty boxes

In the red-colored box at the right of the page, three characters (presumably Burmese ones) in parentheses in the heading show up as empty boxes. I have downloaded 4 or 5 Burmese fonts yet I still get the empty boxes. I have a PC with Windows XP. Can someone provide me some assistance so that those characters show up? I'm guessing if I am having this problem, others are having this problem as well. Thank you, Badagnani 08:36, 8 September 2005 (UTC)

Let me guess, you're using Internet Explorer, right? It'll work fine if you switch to another browser, like Mozilla Firefox, Opera, or Netscape. --Angr/_{tɔk tə mi} 10:40, 8 September 2005 (UTC)

Yes, Internet Explorer. Too bad Microsoft (which thinks it is the best) turns out to be the worst of them all... I don't have any other browser so I'll try to download one of them. Thank you for your help. Badagnani 20:13, 8 September 2005 (UTC)

Spelling of name

We have a few different spellings of the name of the language in Burmese. Not being an expert, I don't know which is correct. Can anyone shed some light on these?

ဗမသ bama sa
File:Bscript bamasa.png bamā cā
ဗမာစာ bami ci

--Gareth Hughes 00:07, 30 December 2005 (UTC)

Hmm. The corresponding my: article is at ဗမသ, which AFAIK should be pronounced /bəməθa̰/. It's not in my Burmese-German dictionary, though, which gives ဗမာလို /bəmàlò/, although this might be an adverb meaning "in Burmese" (cf. Latin Anglice). The one phrase of Burmese I learned from my grandmother (who lived in Burma for several years) included the word (phrase?) ဗမာစကား /bəmàzəgá/; my dictionary says စကား means "spoken language". It also gives စာ /sà/ as meaning "text, something written, letter", so I deduce ဗမာစကား means "spoken Burmese" while ဗမာစာ means "written Burmese". The generic word for "language" seems to be ဘာသာ /bàθà/, but I don't know whether anyone ever speaks of ဗမာဘာသာ. Shall I e-mail Justin Watkins at SOAS and ask? --Angr (t·c) 07:13, 30 December 2005 (UTC)

"bamā cā" is the Pali romanisation spelling. The 's' sounds in Burmese are spelt as 'c' in Pali. "Bama sa" is the English spelling based on the pronounciation, but doesn't provide the tone marks. I don't know what "bami ci" is; I think it's incorrect. "bama sa" refers to the script and written language, while "bama zaga" refers to the spoken language.--16 January 2006

I love you

how to use "I love you" in burmese?

I love you in Mynmar

I = NGAR (ငါ) /KO (ကိုယ်) Love = CHIT TAL (ချစ်တယ်) You = MIN KO (မင်းကို)

Direct Translation: NGAR/KO CHIT TAL MIN KO ငါ/ကိုယ် ချစ်တယ် မင်းကို

Myanmar Translation: MIN KO NGAR/KO CHIT TAL မင်းကို ငါ/ကိုယ် ချစ်တယ်

Upside down character in Burmese script?

http://www.languagehat.com/archives/000323.php

He spent much of his time assigned

to the Army's Morale Services Division, at 165 Broadway, which dealt in information and propaganda. There he received his hardest job of the war—a rush request to convert typewriters to twenty-one different languages of Asia and the South Pacific. Many of the languages he had never heard of before.... Morale Services found native speakers and scholars to help with the languages. Martin obtained the type and did the soldering and the keyboards. The implications of the work and its difficulty brought him to near collapse, but he completed it with only one mistake: on the Burmese typewriter he put a letter on upside down. Years later, after he had discovered his error, he told the language professor he had worked with that he would fix that letter on the professor's Burmese typewriter. The professor said not to bother; in the intervening years, as a result of typewriters copied from Martin's original, that upside-down letter had been accepted in Burma as proper typewriter style.

—Hobart 17:34, 25 April 2007 (UTC)

Scouting in Burma

Can someone please render "Be Prepared", the Scout Motto, into Burmese? Thanks! Chris 04:57, 8 August 2007 (UTC)

Can you speak anything else]

I'm sorry to be a bother but my roommate in the hospital here doesn't speak English and I know she speaks Burmese. I want to ask her if she speaks anything else (particularly Mandarin Chinese, seems most likely) because I can speak Mandarin and a few others well enough to communicate... can you help me phrase the question "Do you speak any other languages?" Thank you... kaiti-sicle 05:51, 18 August 2007 (UTC)

Hello, a simple way to ask if she speaks chinese, would be to say "Da-yo Zaga Pyo Det La"? Da-yo is the Burmese word for Chinese. --Jim —Preceding unsigned comment added by 203.109.117.237 (talk) 09:49, 19 October 2007 (UTC)

Burmese

Hi. I want to know is is hard for a East European guy to learn Burmese language? I want to learn some rudimentary phraseology, and looks verry hard :(( Arthasfleo 08:50, 25 September 2007 (UTC)

IPA accurate?

In the following quote, [r] is used to transcribe the second <r> in Amarapura. Is this correct? [r] doesn't occur in the table above listing phonemes.

The approximant /ɹ/ is rare, and is only used in place names that have preserved Sanskrit or Pali pronunciations (e.g. Amarapura, which is pronounced [àməɹa̰pùra̰]) and in English-derived words.

—Felix the Cassowary 01:01, 24 December 2007 (UTC)

I'm sure they're both [ɹ]. —An gr ^{If you've written a quality article...} 06:50, 24 December 2007 (UTC)

Forced display

I forced all the Burmese characters to display correctly with the new {{lang-my-Mymr}} template I created. Now, they will display in all browsers, not just Firefox. Taric25 (talk) 19:05, 23 March 2008 (UTC)

I switched back because {{lang-my-Mymr}} is too inflexible. It forces the font Padauk, which doesn't have the most recent additions to the Burmese character set in Unicode 5.1. by using {{lang|my}}, users can set what font they want to use in their CSS. —An gr 05:17, 15 May 2008 (UTC)

SOAS link

The SOAS link gives a 404 error message. I have tried to fix it twice and got rejected both times even when using the password. Would somebody fix this? Just go to SOAS, search on Burmese, and you'll get the right link. 4.249.198.49 (talk) 21:59, 14 May 2008 (UTC)

Done. Thanks for bringing that to our attention! —An gr 05:14, 15 May 2008 (UTC)

Capital N in IPA

I assume by [N] what is intended is the uvular nasal. The proper symbol for that is the “small capital N” [ɴ], so I have changed all occurrences both here and at MLC Transcription System. MJ (t • c) 16:09, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

No, by /N/ is intended the placeless nasal, which is realized as nasalization of the vowel followed by a sort of nasalized approximant (alveolar after monophthongs, velar after diphthongs). Burmese has no uvular nasal. +An gr 16:21, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for catching me so quickly, Angr. In the process of finding some capital N’s I had missed, I found the explanation of the placeless nasal, so I undid my own edits. MJ (t • c) 16:29, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

Still, you won't be the only person to be thrown off by it. /N/ is an abstract phonological unit and probably shouldn't really be used in phonetic transcription using [brackets]. Perhaps we could use [n̞] and [ŋ˕] instead, though those symbols are also pretty obscure. +An gr 16:50, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

I think it’s all right as it is here with the explanation included. At least it’s not an incorrect symbol in brackets. But at MLC Transcription System the sentence “Nasalised finals, with most pronounced [N], are transcribed differently” seems to want explanation. MJ (t • c) 17:32, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

Burmese language vs Georgian

Why does Burmese language look a lot like Georgian language? - 83.108.194.198 (talk) 07:34, 21 February 2010 (UTC)

Just took a look at Georgian. (I've been told that Burmese looked like Armenian but never Georgian.) I guess there are some similarities, especially in the cursive nature of letters and in some letters. But it's just a coincidence. The Burmese script at its creation 900+ years ago (from the Mon script, ultimately from the Brahmi script) during the early Pagan era (11th/12th century) was very angular. The Burmese script in the Myazedi stone inscription (the earliest record of written Burmese) shows little resemblance to modern Burmese. To a layperson like me, the old script looks very much closer to its Indian origins, and I can't make out most of it. It looks like another Indian script.

The modern look of Burmese script slowly came in later eras. My understanding is that the cursive nature of developed in the Ava period (14-16th centuries) when literacy came to the Burmese village level through Buddhist monasteries. Because they had to write on palm leaves (not stones), they adapted the script to become more cursive, and rounder. This new style was the basis for the Shan and (Lan Na Tai Tham) scripts. What's more, the Mon script, from which most believe the Burmese script was derived, seemed to have been influenced in return by the developments in Burmese, and today looks very much like modern Burmese (not the old Mon of a millennium ago).Hybernator (talk) 21:52, 21 February 2010 (UTC)

Nice, interesting. Good knowledge there. - 83.108.194.198 (talk) 15:17, 23 February 2010 (UTC)

Consonant order

I've corrected the glyph order of Xr clusters in the case of the word ွမနျမာ (it was မွနျမာ throughout), but I notice this problem popping up throughout the article. Somebody who is better at this than I am should go through and correct this and any other related errors. Mrrhum (talk) 23:22, 26 March 2010 (UTC)

And likewise ခေါကျဆှဲ for ခေါကျဆှဲ, which I didn't correct.

Some Burmese person: help! Mrrhum (talk) 23:36, 26 March 2010 (UTC)

Never mind. The whole thing turned out to be a result of incorrect rendering by Padauk. Installing the Myanmar3 fonts fixed that problem. I undid all my changes. (The latest version of Padauk also fixes this problem.) Mrrhum (talk) 23:57, 26 March 2010 (UTC)

grammar error

It is not ကြ ခဲ့ သည်။ It should be ခဲ့ ကြသည်။ —Preceding unsigned comment added by Soewinhan (talk • contribs) 14:24, 10 July 2010

Agreed. It reads better now. Thanks. Hybernator (talk) 14:49, 10 July 2010 (UTC)

IPA for Myanmar

Dear Angr, as a native Burmese speaker born and raised in Yangon, I can tell you that the most common pronunciation is [mjəmà]. No one pronounces [mjàɴmà]. Even TV and radio announcers pronounce it with a schwa. In fact, I can't think of a time when I or anybody else would enunciate the first syllable as it's spelled -- except perhaps in times of extreme emphasis. In Burmese, we have a saying [jé dɔ̰ ʔəm̥àɴ pʰaʔ dɔ̰ ʔəθàɴ]--which as explained in the article means the written Burmese doesn't always correspond to the actual pronunciation. (It doesn't match most of the time.)

I didn't pay attention to the IPA translations anywhere until a few months ago when you put up the IPA for Burmese page with explanations. Thank you. Only recently, have I started paying attention to them. Please do check with your other Burmese sources. Other Burmese speaking editors, please contribute. Thanks. Hybernator (talk) 15:31, 31 July 2010 (UTC)

The only source I have that gives a phonetic transcription is Annemarie Esche's Burmese-German Dictionary, which transcribes it [mjàɴmà] without reduction. I thought that the reduced equivalent of [mjàɴmà] was [bəmà], and I've definitely read that when a syllable is reduced, it can only have one consonant in the onset, not two, e.g. နွားပေါက်, which Esche says can be pronounced [nwábauʔ] or [nəbauʔ but not *[nwəbauʔ. +An gr 15:41, 31 July 2010 (UTC)

She is correct about [nwábauʔ] and [nəbauʔ] but not [mjàɴmà] and [mjəmà]. ([nəbauʔ] is a typical Upper Burmese reduction; in the south we tend to adhere to the spelling a bit more.) A reduced equivalent of [mjàɴmà] is [bəmà], by way of [mjəmà]. In everyday speech, most still (reflexively) pronounce the written "Myanmar" as [bəmà], despite the spelling. When we're more careful to pronounce "Myanmar" in a more formal way, it's [mjəmà], never [mjàɴmà]. Enunciating it the way it's spelled would sound truly awkward, unnatural, and forced. Hybernator (talk) 16:05, 31 July 2010 (UTC)

I'd have to agree with Hybernator. From my experience, frequently used words in Burmese are more likely to have reduced vowels. I can't think of anyone who would pronounce မြန်မာ with a nasalized final, as in [mjàɴmà] . When I pronounce it, it's not a complete schwa (like the French je), but midway between an a vowel and a schwa, but the schwa is definitely the best approximate. --Hintha (talk) 22:10, 1 August 2010 (UTC)

Okay, it's going back in! +An gr 07:33, 2 August 2010 (UTC)

Thank you both! Hybernator (talk) 00:18, 4 August 2010 (UTC)

Displaying Burmese script in Firefox v3.6.13 on Windows XP

I spent significant time trying to get Burmese script to display, and finally seem to have it working as per my comment on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help_talk:Multilingual_support_%28Indic%29#Windows_XP - Hopefully this might save at least one other person the hours I spent trying to get it working. A quick check shows that it seems to now also display in IE8 and Opera 10, which it didn't before. I'm using XP Pro SP3. UnRheal (talk) 13:32, 8 January 2011 (UTC)

IPA transcriptions

Is there any reason that [N] has been systematically changed to [ɴ] in the page? Also why is voiceless [l] written [ɬ]? The benevolent dictator (talk) 11:14, 22 May 2011 (UTC)

I had a misunderstanding about [N] versus [ɴ] 2 years ago (discussion here). Then last year Kwami and Angr came to a different conclusion in a fuller discussion on the latter’s talk page. (This issue seems to come up once a year, always in May.) As for [ɬ], I don’t find any occurrences in the current article. But is the sound not lateral in Burmese? Were you expecting [l̥] as I’ve seen for Tibetan? MJ (t • c) 15:50, 23 May 2011 (UTC)

I was wondering about that as well. So, apparently there are reasons to not simply transcribe this phonetically as [ã] etc; regardless, the numerous instances of [aɴ] that appear even before the phonology section seem confusing. If it were /aɴ/ I would expect a placeless nasal, but explicit phonetic brackets certainly suggest an uvular nasal. So: is there any particular reason why the article uses phonetic rather than phonemic transcription thruout?

(Moreover: is there any particular reason why /ɴ/ has been analyzed as an independant segment, rather than as an archiphoneme or vowel nasalization?) --Trɔpʏliʊm • blah 16:16, 30 June 2011 (UTC)

/ɴ/ is analyzed as an independent segment rather than as an archiphoneme or vowel nasalization because it behaves phonologically like an independent segment. There are at least two ways in which syllables ending in /ʔ/ and syllables ending in /ɴ/ pattern together: (1) diphthongs may occur only in syllables ending in /ʔ/ or /ɴ/; (2) high vowels are laxed in syllables ending in /ʔ/ or /ɴ/. These facts can only be captured as generalizations if /ʔ/ and /ɴ/ are treated as consonant segments that form a syllable coda, entailing that syllables ending in either of these sounds are closed syllables. If [ã] were treated as /ã/ etc., nasal syllables would have to be considered open syllables, and the generalization would be lost. And even at the phonetic level, there does seem to be some sort of tongue movement at the end of nasal syllables: after the monophthongs, the tongue tip approaches (but does not touch) the alveolar ridge, while after the diphthongs the tongue back approaches (but does not touch) the velum. In the latter case, the sound could be transcribed [ɰ̃]. Moreover, before a buccal consonant, /ɴ/ is realized as a real, full nasal consonant (in addition to the nasalization on the preceding vowel). In this article, [ɴ] is used in broad phonetic transcriptions to make the relationship between the surface phonetics and the phonemics more transparent (unless the precise realization of /ɴ/ happens to be the topic of discussion) and to make the transcriptions easier to read (since all nasal syllables carry tone, the vowel sign would have to carry two diacritics, one for nasalization and one for tone: writing [ɴ] makes reading and writing the transcriptions that much easier). Angr (talk) 11:24, 12 September 2011 (UTC)

Initial vowels?

Our description does not permit word-initial vowels in Burmese, but some words written with an initial vowel were transcribed with a glottal stop, and some were not. Just wanted to check that they should all have the stop. — kwami (talk) 02:42, 10 November 2013 (UTC)

Yes, all apparently vowel-initial words in Burmese are actually glottal stop-initial, even if not transcribed that way. Aɴɢʀ (talk) 13:59, 10 November 2013 (UTC)

Vocabulary

At the vocabulary section, it says 'ရုပ်မြင်သံကြား' is direct translation of 'Television'. I don't think it is correct because 'ရုပ်မြင်သံကြား' is 'Vision'+'Audio' but 'Television' sounds 'Distance communication'+'Vision'. I would like to change another accurate sample word. Any objection? 111.84.193.245 (talk) 10:30, 17 April 2016 (UTC)

Adoniram Judson's Burmese English Learning materials

Most of these works are by Adoniram Judson.

English Burmese dictionaries (to help Burmese speaking people learn English)

Burmese english Dictionaries (to help English speaking people learn Burmese)

Grammars of Burmese

A burmese reader

Vocabulary and phrase book in English and Burmese

Elementary hand-book of the Burmese language (1898)

https://archive.org/details/cu31924022058931

Burmese self-taught (in Burmese and Roman characters) with phonetic pronunciation. (Thimm's system.) (1911)

https://archive.org/details/burmeseselftaugh00stjorich

The Anglo-Burmese student's assistant. Consisting of grammatical notes with numerous examples and analysis of sentences (1877)

https://archive.org/details/angloburmesestud00wrigrich

Bible

A catalogue of the Burmese books in the British Museum (1913)

https://archive.org/details/catalogueofburme00brituoft

History of Western Studies of the Burmese language

Rajmaan (talk) 05:26, 26 February 2014 (UTC)

There are also a couple at Wikisource, see s:Portal:Languages and literatures of Eastern Asia#Burmese. Aɴɢʀ (talk) 13:00, 27 February 2014 (UTC)

□□□□□□□

How can I change □□□□ this letter? Although I downloaded padauk font and other letters are seen properly. But many letters still have square figures only. Is there any option users like me can do? ㅠㅠ --Mar del Este (talk) 09:34, 31 March 2014 (UTC)

Those are supposed to be white squares. You've written the Unicode point U+25A1 WHITE SQUARE every time. Angr (talk) 07:34, 19 June 2014 (UTC)

(See the most recent section on his talk page for our discussion of this in April.) MJ (t • c) 01:18, 20 June 2014 (UTC)

Mon

Mon was incorrectly stated to be an Austronesian language. Changed it to Austroasiatic. Goderich (talk) 07:15, 19 June 2014 (UTC)

Good catch! Angr (talk) 07:31, 19 June 2014 (UTC)

Clearing up about register

In § Registers, ¶3 begins

In the mid-1960s, some Burmese writers, who asserted that the vernacular, spoken form ought to be used, spearheaded efforts to abandon the literary form, which was historically the preferred form of written Burmese, as "the spoken style lacks gravity, authority, dignity."

It's easy to misread this long ramble as saying that the quoted sentence was the writers' assertion, rather than the position they were arguing against. I'm splitting it into two sentences in chronological order:

Historically the literary register was preferred for written Burmese on the grounds that "the spoken style lacks gravity, authority, dignity". In the mid-1960s some Burmese writers spearheaded efforts to abandon the literary form, asserting that the spoken vernacular ought to be used for writing as well.

To discuss this, please {{Ping}} me. --Thnidu (talk) 02:45, 4 March 2015 (UTC)

At the Registers topic, the subject of the sample sentences that show the differences between literary and spoken Burmese is so negative. I would like to change something positive. Yarzaryeni (talk) 05:07, 17 April 2016 (UTC)

WilliamThweatt

WilliamThweatt Given recent scholarship has challenged the Mon origin of the Burmese script, let's just leave origins out of the lede, which is a summary. We can talk about different scholarly stances elsewhere. Ogress _smash! 06:33, 16 June 2015 (UTC)

If you're going to say "recent scholarship", you're going to need to provide a source so we can determine weight. Do a quick google scholar search and you'll see the consensus is that Burmese writing is derived from Mon. It will take multiple reliable sources to overturn the existing consensus.--William Thweatt ^Talk^Contribs 06:51, 16 June 2015 (UTC)

WilliamThweatt Actually, the alphabet page says in the lede, "It is an adaptation of the Old Mon script[2] or the Pyu script." The cite for Pyu is missing here but present in the side panel: Aung-Thwin (2005) The Mists of Ramañña: 167–178, 197–200. Google brings me as its first two hits that Burmese and Mon are cousins, once thought to be Mon > Burmese but disputed in recent scholarship in Concise Encyclopedia of Languages of the World. Elsevier. 6 April 2010. p. 170. ISBN 978-0-08-087775-4., an even more strong version of that with a note that Burmese scripts samples have been found before any attested Mon forms in Bernard Comrie (13 January 2009). The World's Major Languages. Routledge. p. 725. ISBN 978-1-134-26156-7..

All we can say for sure right now is that they are closely related and derived from a Pallava script, so perhaps in the lede we don't need undue weight. It's about the Burmese language, it's hardly going to cause harm to just skip immediate origin and given that it's the lede and not the alphabet page, I think it'd be distracting to talk in any detail - like "some scholars think it is derived from Mon" or w/e seems unnecessary. As for the alphabet page, it already lists two possible origins. That cite in the alphabet lede should go elsewhere, as cites in lead are not ideal. I'll take a look at where both cites should go, because I'm sure there's a section in the article where they already belong (cites in the side board like that are also not ideal and are usually just for census info and things like that).

I don't have a strong feeling that one side is right, although admittedly the "new" evidence is always interesting because it's new. Despite the fact that many sources still state "Mon > Burmese", I think three scholarly sources is enough to show that it's no longer lede material to state a clear origin. And anyway what's really useful is that it's a Pallava descendant. Ogress _smash! 07:19, 16 June 2015 (UTC)

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External links modified

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External links modified

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WISIWYG or WYSIWYG?

In the second paragraph of the section "Computer fonts and standard keyboard layout", there is this acronym WISIWYG. Should it be WYSIWYG? 無聲 (talk) 12:50, 10 March 2018 (UTC)

It certainly should. Change made. MJ (t • c) 20:53, 20 March 2018 (UTC)

Unicode characters

I want to ask if this entry has any policy on using Unicode characters. It appears that this edit used non-Unicode characters: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Burmese_language&diff=896604230&oldid=894802900

@1.46.107.56: If it is recommended to consistently use Unicode, the author might want to change it. If the original code is Zawgyi-One, I found this converter (developed by Myanmar Computer Federation) very useful: http://www.mcf.org.mm/myanmar-unicode-converter

Punnani Katabbani (talk) 16:09, 22 May 2019 (UTC)