Burmese script

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The Burmese abugida (Burmese: မ္ရန္‌မာစာ; IPA: [mjànmà sá]) is a script in the Brahmic family used in Burma for writing Burmese, Mon, Shan and several Kayin (Karen) dialects. The characters are rounded in appearance, because the traditional palm leaves used for writing would have been ripped by straight lines. Like English, it is written from left to right. There are no spaces between words, although informal writing often contains spaces after each clause.

The script, originally adapted from the Mon script, has undergone considerable modifications to suit the phonology of Burmese, and to fit its word order of Subject Object Verb. The script is altered from language to language (e.g. Shan, Mon, etc.)

[edit] Alphabet

There are 33 consonants က (ka. [ka̰]) to အ (a. [a̰]) and 23 unique sounds. Consonants are separated into groups of 5, with the exception of the last three letters. The first two letters of each group, except for the ya-group are the aspirated and unaspirated sounds. Six letters are designated specifically for Pāli. The last letter in the alphabet, အ (a. [a̰]), although recognized as a consonant, is actually a vowel. Since အ is the only lettered vowel, when used with diacritics, is used to create other vowels. Like other members of the Brahmic family, the sounds of these are modified by diacritics put above, below or beside the character.

The following names are transliterated in contemporary Burmese.

[edit] Diacritics

There are several diactric marks that alter the vowel sound of a letter. Two diacritics are used exclusively for Pali and are rarely seen elsewhere.

One or more of these accents can be added to a consonant to change its sound. In addition, other modifiying symbols are used to differentiate tone and sound, but are not considered diacritics.

[edit] Ligatures

Specific consonants (a final and the following consonant), when placed next to one another, may be stacked, with the final placed underneath the consonant. They are considered ligatures, and are typically used to abbreviate, but are not necessary and are primarily used to denote Pali or Sanskrit origin.

[edit] Digits

A decimal numbering system is used, and numbers are written in the same order as Hindu-Arabic numerals.

The numerals from zero to nine are: Image:Burmese numerals.svg (Unicode 1040 to 1049). The number 1945 would be written as Image:Burmese 1945.png. Delimiters (such as commas) to separate numbers are not used.

[edit] Punctuation

There are two primary break characters in Burmese, drawn as one or two downward strokes (၊ or ။), which respectively act as a comma and a full stop . ၏ is used as a full stop if the sentence immediately ends with a verb. ၍ is roughly the equivalent of a comma and is used to connect two trains of thought.

[edit] Burmese in Unicode

The Unicode range for Burmese (Myanmar) is U+1000 ... U+109F.

[edit] Websites using Burmese Unicode

Until 2005, most Burmese language websites used an image-based dynamically generated method of displaying characters (often in GIF or JPEG). At the end of 2005, the Burmese NLP Research Lab announced a Myanmar Open Type font named Myanmar1. This font contains not only Unicode code points and glyphs but also the OTLs logic and rules. Their research center is based in Myanmar ICT Park, Yangon. Padauk, which was produced by SIL International, is Unicode compliant, but requires a Graphite engine. As of yet, there is only one fully compliant Unicode font for Burmese in existence, i.e. the Padauk Graphite font. It will soon become obsolete as an extension for proposed changes has been in the pipeline for long and is awaiting approval by Unicode Consortium. Padauk OT and Myanmar2.ttf meet these changes, but Padauk OT has a Graphite table as well.

Many Burmese font makers have created Burmese fonts such as, Win Innwa, CE Font, Myazedi, Zawgyi, Ponnya, Mandalay etc. It is important to note that those Unicode Burmese fonts are not Unicode compliant, because they use unallocated codepoints in the Burmese block to manually deal with shaping that would normally be done by the Uniscribe engine and they are not yet supported by Microsoft and other major software vendors. The Myanmar Bible Society launched a Burmese Unicode website, [1] using Mozilla Firefox & Padauk Open Type ver 2.1 font from ThanLwinSoft [2], and here Burmese characters are displayed correctly. The Australian Government website followed, using the Padauk OT font ([3]).

Browsers like Internet Explorer do not support the Burmese Unicode yet. Therefore, many big websites are still using a GIF/JPG display method.

[edit] Fonts supporting Burmese characters

• Burmese Wikipedia:Font page
• Burmese Unicode & NLP Research Centre

[edit] See also

• Brahmic family
• Burmese language
• Burmese Wikipedia
• Myanmar Unicode Character Picker

de:Birmanische Schrift it:Alfabeto birmano ja:ビルマ文字 nn:Burmesisk skrift th:อักษรพม่า tr:Burma alfabesi