Burmese Language - Vocabulary

Vocabulary

The majority of Burmese vocabulary is monosyllabic and is of Tibeto-Burman stock, although many words, especially those loaned from other languages, are polysyllabic. Burmese has been influenced greatly by Pali, English, and Mon, and to a lesser extent, by Chinese, Sanskrit and Hindi.

• Pali loan words are often related to religion, government, arts, and science.
• English loan words are often related to technology, measurements and modern institutions.
• Mon has heavily influenced Burmese. Many Mon loan words have become so well incorporated in the Burmese language that they are not distinguished as loan words. Mon loans are often related to flora, fauna, administration, textiles, foods, boats, crafts, architecture, and music.
• Sanskrit (religion), Chinese (games and food), and Hindi (food, administration, and shipping) loan words are also found (albeit to a much lesser degree) in Burmese.
• Various other languages have also contributed vocabulary

Here is a sample of loan words found in Burmese:

• suffering: ဒုက္ခ, from Pāli dukkha
• radio: ရေဒီယို, from English "radio"
• method: စနစ်, from Mon
• eggroll: ကော်ပြန့်, from Hokkien 潤餅 (jūn-piáⁿ)
• wife: ဇနီး, from Hindi jani
• noodle: ခေါက်ဆွဲ, from Shan ၶဝ်ႈသဵၼ်ႈ
• foot (unit of measurement): ပေ, from Portuguese pé
• flag: အလံ, from Arabic علم ʕalam
• storeroom:, from Malay gudang

Some words in Burmese may have many synonyms, each having certain usages, such as formal, literary, colloquial, and poetic. One example is the word "moon", which can be လ (la̰; Tibeto-Burman), စန္ဒာ/စန်း (/); Pali derivatives of chanda), or သော်တာ ( (Sanskrit).

Burmese also has a tendency to 'double-loan' from Pali, where it adopts two different terms based on the same Pali root. An example is the Pali word mana, which has two derivatives in Burmese: မာန ( "arrogance") and မာန် ( "pride").

Furthermore, Burmese loan words, especially from Pali, combine native Burmese words to Pali roots. An example is "airplane" လေယာဉ်ပျံ (, lit. "air machine fly"), made up of လေ (native Burmese word, "air"), ယာဉ် (Pali loan from yana, "vehicle") and ပျံ (native Burmese word, "fly"). A similar trend is seen in English, where native Burmese words are attached to English loans, such as the verb "to sign" ဆိုင်းထိုး (, lit. "sign inscribe"), with ဆိုင်း (English loan "sign") and ထိုး (native Burmese word, "inscribe"). In the case of Mon loans, they are indistinguishable in most cases because they were more often borrowed from speech rather than writing, since Burmese and Mon were used interchangeably for several centuries in modern-day Burma.

At times, the Burmese government has attempted to limit usage of Western loans, especially from English. For example, in Burma, publications containing the word တယ်လီဗီးရှင် (directly transliterated from English "television") must be replaced with a Burmese substitute ရုပ်မြင်သံကြား, literally "see picture, hear sound." Another example is the Burmese word for vehicle, which is officially ယာဉ် ( Pali derivative, "vehicle") but ကား ( English loan, "car") in spoken Burmese. Some common English word loans have fallen out of usage, like ယူနီဗာစတီ, which has been replaced with a recent Pali loan တက္ကသိုလ်, created by the Burmese government and derived from တက္ကသီလ (takkasila) the Pali spelling of Taxila, an ancient university town in modern-day Pakistan.