Talk:Burmese language

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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)

Contents 1 Pronunciation of "kanesema" 2 Chinese-derived words in Burmese 3 Term for tofu 4 Empty boxes 5 Spelling of name 6 I love you

[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. 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