Burmese Daze

Burma, now renamed Myanmar, is in a sorry state. By rights it should be one of the richest countries in the region. It isn't. The military junta that has ruled it with an iron fist for the last forty odd years doesn't want to give up one iota of power. The tragedy the Burmese people have to live with is the knowledge that opposition leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi legitimately won the last election and has been denied her rightful position by the thugs heading the military. They have her under house arrest and would have her killed if they thought they could get away with it. The Burmese people know the election was stolen from them. One day soon the ubiquitous mutterings on the street will turn into cries for justice once again; I only hope a bloodbath won't ensue.

Yeah. I was deeply touched by Burma and the Burmese people.

Burmese is not the world's easiest language. Syntactically its set up is very similar to Japanese, which is to say that damn near everything is backwards to the way we'd do it in English. Like most of the languages in the region, Burmese is tonal. Apparently tones didn't supply nearly enough difficulty, so the Burmese have seen fit to augment the pronunciation of their language through the use of short vowels, long vowels, glottal stops, final nasals, diphthongs and aspirated and unaspirated consonants. "What is an aspirated consonant?", you may well ask (let alone all those other terms). It's pretty simple; put your hand in front of your mouth and say the word "pot". When you said the "p" a slight burst of air hit your hand. This is the aspirated way of saying the "p". Now, with your hand still in front of your mouth, say "spot". When you said the "p" this time there was no burst of air. If you further examine this second "p" by saying "spot" again, you'll notice that it actually sounds more like a cross between a "b" and a "p". This is the unaspirated variety of the consonant. In Thai, Lao, Shan, Vietnamese, Khmer, Burmese and a slew of other languages this differentiation is really marked; begin a word with the wrong version of the "p" and you give that word an entirely different meaning.

In the next post I'll stop babbling about the structure of Burmese and get down to describing how the Burmese version of the language sheets worked out.