Burmese alphabet
Sign in to saveAlso known as Myanmar alphabet, Myanmar script
abugida used for writing Burmese
Key facts
- Script type
- Abugida
- Period
- c. 984 or 1035 –present
- Direction
- Left-to-right
- Official script
- Myanmar
- Languages
- Burmese , Rakhine , Pali and Sanskrit
- Parent systems
- Egyptian Proto-Sinaitic Phoenician Aramaic Brahmi script Tamil-Brahmi Kadamba or Pallava script Pyu or Old Mon Mon–Burmese script Burmese
- Iso 15924
- Mymr (350) , Myanmar (Burmese)
- Unicode alias
- Myanmar
- Unicode range
- U+1000–U+104F
via Wikipedia infobox
Wikidata facts
- Instance of
- alphabet
- Part of
- Mon–Burmese script
- Country
- Myanmar
- Image
- Mranmacaka.svg
- Has use
- Burmese
Show 2 more facts
- time period
- 984
- inception
- 1050-00-00
Sources (1)
via Wikidata · CC0
~18 min read
Encyclopedic overview
The Burmese alphabet (Burmese: မြန်မာအက္ခရာ, MLCTS: mranma akkhara, pronounced [mjəmà ʔɛʔkʰəjà]) is an abugida used for writing Burmese, based on the Mon–Burmese script. It is ultimately adapted from a Brahmic script, either the Kadamba or Pallava alphabet of South India. The Burmese alphabet is also used for the liturgical languages of Pali and Sanskrit. In recent decades, other, related alphabets, such as Shan and modern Mon, have been restructured according to the standard of the Burmese alphabet (see Mon–Burmese script). Burmese orthography is deep, with an indirect spelling-sound correspondence between graphemes (letters) and phonemes (sounds), due to its long and conservative written history and voicing rules.
Burmese is written from left to right and requires no spaces between words, although modern writing usually contains spaces after each clause to enhance readability and to avoid grammatical complications. There are several systems of transliteration into the Latin alphabet; for this article, the MLC Transcription System is used.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Burmese alphabet” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.