‘swing; miss, be in error’ = ‘wrongly’ or ‘a wrong’.
2
Whatever is countable must be a kind of object or “thing” in some sense. By simple juxtaposition of the numeral one, the semantic
specification of the head of a numeral phrase or compound is reified.
3.2.1 Morphemes and Language Contact
Burmese words are predominantly monosyllabic but a few disyllabic forms exist, some of which are loanwords from contact languages. In these cases the one-morpheme, one-syllable,
one-word generalization does not hold true. Pali, an Indo-Aryan language of northern India and the language of the Buddhist canon, is the source of many Burmese polysyllabic forms in
a wide variety of domains such as statecraft and kingship, religion, science, art, literature and language, and social relations. Mon, a Mon-Khmer language of southern Myanmar in which
the disyllabic word predominates, was the donor source of the Burmese script. It is also the source of common geographical terms for lower Myanmar, for flora and fauna, and terms for
government and transportation.
The loanwords can be for rare contexts or they can be commonly used—from Pali
mud-da-za.
rkZ
‘alveolar’ phonetic term Pali mud-da-za.
rkZ
‘alveolar’; ra-si
|moD
‘any one of the twelve signs of the zodiac Pali ra-si.
|mod
‘a sign of the zodiac’;
t ă-ră-htat
w|ywf
‘fan made of palm fronds’ Pali; from Mon bi.nap
bdeyf
‘slipper,
shoe’ Mon hka-nap
ceyf
, ga-nap
eyf
, da-nap
eyf
‘shoe’ Hla Pe 1967:84;
from English di-zuing:
wDZdkif:
‘design’; even from Thai ‘stuffed omelette’ hka-num htup
cekHxkyf
Thai kanom
dto
‘snack’ + Burmese htup
xkyf
‘pack’. Other very common words represent phonologically Burmanized syllables but not
morphemes with transparency in function or compositionality in meaning. Such words as place names, for example, are often polysyllabic, and may have been borrowed in part or
whole from other languages in which the syllables have their own function, e.g., ‘Insein’ town north of Rangoon ang:sin
tif:pdef
Mon ang-sing
tifpdif
‘natural pond’ ang
tif
+ ‘elephant’ sing
pdif
= ‘a pond frequented by elephants’; Mingaladun ‘the area of the
Rangoon airport’ Pali mang-ga-la
rFv
‘blessed’ + Mon dung
ÉKif
‘town’ U E Maung 1956:188.
Although loan words are unanalyzable and opaque from the point of view of Burmese grammar, there is historical precedent for prestige borrowing from Pali and the subsequent
integration and grammaticalization of foreign features into classical Burmese in order to accommodate not only high status vocabulary but also prestigious grammatical order and
constructions Okell 1965, 1967. The nissaya style of producing a Pali text with Burmese glosses literal, free, ornate or with added explanatory material intermixed into the text is one
of the oldest types of preserved, written Burmese text. It reads like a horizontal interlinear glossed text. One word in Pali is followed by an immediate translation in Burmese.
Okell discusses how the need to develop a translation of an Indo-Aryan language with tense, aspect, and case into Burmese which has no tense or case and a very different type of
aspectual system has resulted in a written style that is unlikely to reflect an ancient spoken language counterpart. That is, parts of Formal Burmese may not necessarily indicate an older
2
The reason for translating this as an adverb is that these types of nominals are used in what are adverbial meanings in English.
form of Burmese spoken during the eleventh to sixteenth centuries. Comparative linguists use Formal Burmese as one baseline for comparison with modern-day Tibeto-Burman dialects
since it clearly retains in the written form such characteristics as distinct final stops, differentiation of syllable onset clusters, differentiation of final nasals, and so forth. What
Okell suggests is that the grammar of Formal Burmese may have changed under the prestige influence of Pali grammar in the nissaya tradition, particularly the development of
postpositional particles to represent systematically such Indo-Aryan functions as number, case, tense, and mood. While there may be some danger of imposing meaning onto Burmese
of such contact-induced structures, presumably what eventually results is assimilation into the Burmese “system” of semantics and of grammar.
One such foreign structure in Formal Burmese is reported to be the indirect object
particle a:
tm:
for the Pali, Indo-Aryan dative case, Okell 1965, 1967. The issue of what is original Burmese of the twelfth century is not resolvable from Burmese itself, but rather
from grammatical study of Burmese dialects. Even here, the lack of influence from Pali cannot be assumed since contact with Pali is almost universal in Myanmar, particularly
among males, who in Buddhist Myanmar reside for a period of time in a monastery where they are taught to read Burmese script and to recite Pali texts in nissaya Burmese. Pali has to
some extent affected the very fabric, not just the color, of the Burmese languages. For centuries all education, mass communications, and linguistic tokens of Burmese culture were
in forms which identified closely with nissaya Burmese. Even today, the news, when read on the radio, is in Formal Burmese. However, news read on television, which was introduced
into Myanmar as late as 1980, is in Colloquial Burmese. Modern-day accommodations to the spoken Burmese are increasingly being made in print and non-print media.
Pali morphemes are identifiable within their own grammatical traditions, e.g.,
takkasuil
wUodkvf
‘university’ Taxila home of ancient scholarship in what is
modern-day Pakistan, as are those of English, e.g., kau:-lip
aumvdyf
‘college’. The morpheme in Burmese cannot be identified absolutely with the syllable because of these
exceptional polysyllabic word forms.
3.2.2 Vestiges of Proto-Tibeto-Burman Prefixes
