Burmese
Type:	Abugida
Languages:	Burmese language
Time period:
ISO 15924 code:	Mymr
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. See IPA chart for English for an English-​based pronunciation key.

The Burmese abugida (Burmese: မ္ရန္‌မာစာ; IPA: [mjànmá sá]) is a script in the Brahmic family used in Myanmar 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. An abugida or alphasyllabary is a writing system composed of signs (graphemes) denoting consonants with an inherent following vowel, which are consistently modified to indicate other vowels (or, in some cases, the lack of a vowel). ... The Burmese language is the official language of Myanmar. ... Image File history File links Mranmacaka. ... For information on how to read IPA transcriptions of English words see here. ... Phonetics (from the Greek word φωνή, phone meaning sound, voice) is the study of sounds and the human voice. ... Because of technical limitations, some web browsers may not display some special characters in this article. ... This is a concise version of the International Phonetic Alphabet for English sounds. ... The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. ... Myazedi (Yazakuma) Stone Instription The oldest surviving Burmese inscription, written in Burmese, Pyu, Mon, and Pali, it is the story of Prince Yazakuma. ... Graphite is a programmable Unicode-compliant smart-font rendering system developed by SIL International. ... For information on how to read IPA transcriptions of English words see here. ... The Brahmic family is a family of abugidas (writing systems) used in South Asia, Southeast Asia, Tibet, Mongolia, Manchuria. ... The Mon language is an Austroasiatic language spoken in Myanmar and Thailand. ... The Shan language is related to the Thai language and is commonly called Tai Shan. ... Kayin can refer to: Kayin State, an administrative division of Myanmar (Burma) Kayin or Karen people, a minority ethnic group in Myanmar alternative spelling for Cain A character in the Battle Arena Toshinden series Category: ... Genera Many; see list of Arecaceae genera Arecaceae (also known as Palmae or Palmaceae), the palm family, is a family of flowering plants, belonging to the monocot order Arecales. ... The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. ...

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.) In linguistic typology, Subject Object Verb (SOV) is the type of languages in which the subject, object, and verb of a sentence appear (usually) in that order. ...

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 for 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. Pāli is a Middle Indo-Aryan dialect or prakrit. ... The Brahmic family is a family of abugidas (writing systems) used in South Asia, Southeast Asia, Tibet, Mongolia, Manchuria. ...

The following names are transliterated in contemporary Burmese.

The Rakhine people (Burmese: ; formerly Arakanese) are a sub-ethnic group of the Bamar. ... The Burmese language is the official language of Myanmar. ...

Diacritics

There are several diactric marks that alter the vowel sound of a letter. Two diacritics are used exlusively 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. Anunaasika is a dot on top of a breve above a letter ( मँ ), used as a diacritic in Sanskrit written in devanagari script to represent vowel nasalization. ... Anusvaara (or anusvaaram) appears in the alphabet of Indian languages like Sanskrit which use the Devanagari script, and in the Dravidian languages. ...

Ligatures

Specific consanants (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. In writing and typography, a ligature occurs where two or more letterforms are written or printed as a unit. ...

Digits

The thirty-three consonants of the Burmese abugida, without diacritics.

A decimal numbering system is used, and numbers are written in the same order as Hindu-Arabic numerals. Image File history File links Download high-resolution version (447x628, 13 KB) The 33 consonants of the w:Burmese alphabet, without diacritics. ... Image File history File links Download high-resolution version (447x628, 13 KB) The 33 consonants of the w:Burmese alphabet, without diacritics. ... The decimal (base ten or occasionally denary) numeral system has ten as its base. ... The Hindu-Arabic numeral system (also called Algorism) is a positional decimal numeral system documented from the 9th century. ...

The numerals from zero to nine are: (Unicode 1040 to 1049). The number 1945 would be written as . Delimiters (such as commas) to separate numbers are not used. Image File history File links Burmese_numerals. ... Because of technical limitations, some web browsers may not display some special characters in this article. ... Image File history File links Burmese_1945. ...

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. The term comma has various uses; comma is the name used for one of the punctuation symbols: , The term comma is also used in music theory for various small intervals that arise as differences between approximately equal intervals. ... A full stop or period (sometimes stop, full point or dot), is the punctuation mark commonly placed at the end of several different types of sentences in English and several other languages. ...

Burmese in Unicode

The Unicode range for Burmese (Myanmar) is U+1000 ... U+109F. Because of technical limitations, some web browsers may not display some special characters in this article. ...

Websites Using Myanmar Unicode

Until 2005, most Burmese language websites used an image-based dynamically-generated method of displaying text (often in GIF or JPEG). At the end of 2005, the Myanmar NLP Research Lab [1] 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-complaint, but requires a Graphite engine. As of yet, there is only one truly-compliant Unicode font for Burmese in existence and that is Padauk Gr font. 2005 (MMV) was a common year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar. ... The Burmese language is the official language of Myanmar. ... A website, Web site or WWW site (often shortened to just site) is a collection of webpages, that is, HTML/XHTML documents accessible via HTTP on the Internet; all publicly accessible websites in existence comprise the World Wide Web. ... The term text has multiple meanings depending on the context of its use: In language, text is a broad term for something that contains words to express something. ... An example of a GIF image. ... In computing, JPEG (pronounced JAY-peg; IPA: ) is a commonly used standard method of compression for photographic images. ... A font can mean: A member of a typeface family; or digital font - file format that encapsulates a typeface family in a database. ... Because of technical limitations, some web browsers may not display some special characters in this article. ... A glyph is a carved figure or character, incised or in relief; a carved pictograph; hence, a pictograph representing a form originally adopted for sculpture, whether carved or painted. ... Yangon (Burmese: , population 4,082,000 (2005 census), formerly Rangoon, and still known by that name in many circles, see below under History), is the largest city of Myanmar (formerly Burma) and its capital. ... SIL International is a worldwide non-profit organization whose main purpose is to study, develop and document lesser-known languages in order to expand linguistic knowledge, promote literacy and aid minority language development. ... Graphite is a programmable Unicode-compliant smart-font rendering system developed by SIL International. ...

Now new Padauk font which is Open Type but also has graphite tables as well.PadaukOT font meets the proposed changes to Unicode Consortium for expansion to Sagaw Karen, etc which is in the pipeline for approval.Myanmar2 ttf font from NLP research also meets the proposed changes.But the users prefer to use PadaukOT as it renders smartly and displays correctly, appears beautifully and graphite technology is far superior than Uniscribe from Microsoft in handling complex scripts like Burmese. Mozilla's browsers- Firefox (ver 3)[2] and suite Seamonkey[3] -not yet released -now integrated with Graphite engine, thus displays wonderfully all time

Many font makers have created Myanmar fonts such as Win Myanmar, Win Innwa, CE Font, and Myazedi [4]. It is important to note that those Unicode Myanmar fonts are not Unicode-compliant, because they use unallocated codepoints in the Myanmar block to manually deal with shaping that would normally be done by the Uniscribe engine and are not yet supported by Microsoft and major software vendors. The Myanmar Bible Society upgraded its website with PadaukOT font [5] with Mozilla Firefox & PadaukOT font from ThanLwinSoft.org's [6] Myanmar Unicode technology.Similarly, Australian Government website also uses PadaukOT font for its website[7]. Microsoft Corporation, (NASDAQ: MSFT, HKSE: 4338) is a multinational computer technology corporation with global annual revenue of US$44. ... Computer software (or simply software) refers to one or more computer programs and data held in the storage of a computer for some purpose. ... Firefox redirects here. ...

Overseas Myanmar websites such as Burma Information Technology Team (BIT)[8] also started incomplete Unicode websites. Beginning in 2006, more Unicode internet websites have appeared, but browsers like Internet Explorer do not support the Burmese Unicode yet. Therefore, many big websites are still using a GIF/JPG display method. Windows Internet Explorer, previously Microsoft Internet Explorer, abbreviated IE, or MSIE,[1] is a graphical web browser developed by Microsoft and included as part of the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems. ...

Yangon-based Myanmar Times website and Myanmar Web Directory display Burmese text using embedded fonts via their websites, which do not requires installation. However, they fail to work on Mozilla-based browsers. Many overseas Myanmar websites are still using GIF and JPEG format (e.g., Khitpyaing.org [9], Moemaka.net [10]).

Fonts supporting Burmese characters

• Myanmar Wikipedia:Font page
• Win Myanmar Systems
• Myanmar Unicode & NLP Research Centre

See also

• Brahmic family
• Burmese language
• Burmese Wikipedia
• Myanmar Unicode picker- use Search [11]