Talk:Burmese language

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[edit] 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)

[edit] 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)

[edit] 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)

[edit] 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)

[edit] 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)

[edit] 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?

  1. ဗမသ bama sa
  2. Image:Bscript bamasa.png bamā cā
  3. 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

[edit] I love you

how to use "I love you" in burmese?

I love you in Mynmar

I = NGAR (ငါ) /KO (ကိုယ္) Love = CHIT TAL (ခ်စ္တယ္) You = MIN KO (မင္းကို)

Direct Translation: NGAR/KO CHIT TAL MIN KO ငါ/ကိုယ္ ခ်စ္တယ္ မင္းကို

Myanmar Translation: MIN KO NGAR/KO CHIT TAL မင္းကို ငါ/ကိုယ္ ခ်စ္တယ္

[edit] 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)

[edit] Scouting in Burma

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

[edit] 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)

[edit] 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)

[edit] 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]. —Angr If you've written a quality article... 06:50, 24 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] 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. —Angr 05:17, 15 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] 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)

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