Burmese

မြန်မာအက္ခရာ

Abugida · 33 letters

Each consonant carries an implied vowel — ka, not k — and marks hung above, below or around it change that vowel. You learn the consonants, then the vowel marks, then the combinations: three steps instead of one. Every script of India, plus Thai and Khmer.

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What pays off on the road

• Circles everywhere: Burmese, used only in Myanmar — recognising the texture is enough.
• မြို့ ends most town names, တိုင်း those of the regions, ပြည်နယ် those of the states.
• Reading a name: the nine vowels first — ု and ိ are among the four commonest signs of our names.

How it works

Circles, and the palm leaf is to blame

Almost every Burmese letter is a circle or an arc. This is no aesthete's choice: writing was done with a stylus on palm leaves, which a straight stroke splits along the grain.

That is the first useful thing: a Burmese text is recognised from afar, before a single sign can be made out, and the script serves Myanmar alone. Recognising it places the photo at once.

Another script rounded itself for the same reason, at the other end of the Bay of Bengal: Odisha's. The two resemble each other from a distance and are not confused close up.

India's order, with medials on top

The thirty-three consonants are those of Sanskrit grammar, in the same order: velars, palatals, retroflexes, dentals, labials, then semivowels and sibilants. Burmese descends from Brahmi as the scripts of India do.

But it adds something they lack: medials. These are consonants slipped inside the syllable, drawn as an arc around the letter or hooked beneath it, and they are everywhere — မြို့, "town", carries one.

That is why Burmese does not sit with this section's eight Indian scripts: it shares their table and not their machinery.

A thousand years between writing and speech

ရန်ကုန် is written "ran-kun" and said "Yangon". ရ was an "r" in the eleventh century and is pronounced "y" today: the spelling did not follow, as French still writes consonants it no longer says.

On top of that, the implied vowel is written nowhere, and a sign — the asat — silences it: ရန် carries an "r", an "n" and nothing in between.

Measured over the sixty-seven Burmese names in our packs, a mechanical transliteration gets three per cent right. It is the lowest figure in the whole section, and so there is no place name quiz here.

What pays off anyway

မြို့ ends most city names, တိုင်း the names of the seven regions, ပြည်နယ် those of the seven states. Three words, and the country's administrative structure can be read off a sign.

With ဘုရား, "pagoda", which is met everywhere, and the four cardinal points, that makes a dozen signs which pay off more than the thirty-three consonants together.

Cheat sheet

The thirty-three consonants

Sorted by point of articulation, from the back of the throat to the lips, as in the scripts of India: the Sanskrit grammarians' classification, two and a half thousand years old.

The vowels

Set around the consonant — above, below, before, after. They replace the "a" the consonant carries on its own. Those drawn to the left are still read after it: a matter of stroke, not of order.

The medials

What Burmese has and the scripts of India do not: consonants slipped inside the syllable. They are among the commonest signs in the script.

The asat and the tones

The asat closes syllables and decides the reading; the next two note tones, which are not transliterated. The last stacks one consonant under another.

The words on signs

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