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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 Mon–Burmese script was added to the Unicode Standard in September, 1999 with the release of version 3.0. Additional characters were added in subsequent releases. Until 2005, most Burmese-language websites used an image-based, dynamically-generated method to display Burmese characters, often in GIF or JPEG.
The script has undergone considerable modification to suit the evolving phonology of the Burmese language, but additional letters and diacritics have been added to adapt it to other languages; the Shan and Karen alphabets, for example, require additional tone markers.
Burmese has readily adopted words of Pali origin; this may be due to phonotactic similarities between the two languages, and the Burmese script's inherent ability to reproduce Pali spellings with complete accuracy. [38] Pali loanwords are often related to religion, government, arts, and science.
The Shan script is a Brahmic abugida, used for writing the Shan language, which was derived from the Burmese script. [2] Due to its recent reforms, the Shan alphabet is more phonetic than other Burmese-derived scripts.
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.
This script is called the Christian Pwo Karen Script or the Mission script. The Christian Pwo Karen Script was created based on the Christian S'gaw Karen Script, which was created by Wade in the 1830s using symbols in the Burmese script. In the early stage of the Christian Pwo Karen Script, there were some novel innovations not seen in the ...
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. However, some linguists consider Burmese a pitch-register language like Shanghainese. [21]