Although it was never a colony of Western powers, the Thai language has adopted many words from several European languages, including Spanish, German, etc. Many places and their languages adopt new words as a result of cultural encroachment, be that due to a pervasive international influence, cross-border interaction, or for many other reasons. Like most languages in Southeast Asia, Thai has its origin and development within the confines of Thailand however, approximately half of words in the Thai language are borrowed from other languages. Every one of these languages derives from distinct sources and possess unique cultural characteristics.įor example, Thai, spoken in Thailand, is an undeniably unique language. The main languages in Southeast Asia are Lao, Thai, Burmese, Khmer, Vietnamese, Tagalog, Malay, Indonesian and also a peppering of Chinese dialects. On the contrary, languages in Southeast Asia are a good source of study for the diversity of the region, revealing the historical influences and the localization of said influences that make this region particularly interesting.
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Being so diverse in so many respects, but especially with regard to its languages, one cannot point to a “monolithic” Southeast Asia, as some might believe exist. Southeast Asia incorporates many countries from Myanmar to Timor-Leste. This area’s linguistic diversity is no less impressive. It is a part of the Asian continent that boasts of a rich history, made up of distinct cultures, climates, cuisines, and systems of belief. To this end, a new dictionary and an encyclopaedia are being prepared, and thousands of new words are being coined.Southeast Asia amasses a vast geographical area. Our problem now is to give it the technical vocabulary needed to cope with the wide range of modern science. With the printing press and a mass reading public Burmese has again become more simple and colloquial. The language of old Pagan was simple and direct that of succeeding periods of our literature became learned, rigid, and ornate. We have many loan-words that came to us with the Sanskrit of Hinduism and the Pali of Buddhism, from Arab traders, or from contact with our neighbors, the Shans, Thais, Malays, Chinese, Manipuris, and Bengalis. Our grammar is very simple, but its word order is sometimes the reverse of English. These complications make our language difficult but also one of the most musical in the East its subtleties of sound have greatly enriched our poetry.
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As an example, ka, in the abrupt tone, means "to dance" kã, in the level tone, means "to shield" while kã:, in the falling tone, means "to spread wide." Or, if I wanted to say, "I saw a tall horse," it would be "Myin: myin myin thee." For this we use three tones: the abrupt, the level, and the falling tone. So each combination must do heavy duty, the differences in meaning being indicated by the speaker's tone of voice. Being monosyllabic, it has a shortage of basic root-words since the consonants can only be combined in a limited number of ways. In English, for example, you have separate root-terms for "sheep," "ewe," "lamb," and "mutton." To render these distinctions a Burmese will say: "sheep" (tho), "female sheep" (tho-ma), "young sheep" (tho-galay), and "meat of sheep" (tho-tha). To express anything but the very simplest things we must combine words of different meanings. Nouns, adjectives, and verb tenses are formed by the addition of suffixes to the verbal roots -a process of agglutination, as the philologists call it.
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Many inscriptions on stone still survive there.īurmese, as is true of many Oriental languages, is monosyllabic generally speaking, each word has only one syllable. So far as we know, Burmese was first reduced to writing in the eleventh century at Pagan. "Our language comes from North and South" would look like this in Burmese type:īy this I mean that our actual words, and the way we put them together, came to us from the North, with the early migrations from China, while the way we write them came from the South, brought to Burma by Indian traders and missionaries at a slightly later period. That is, it does not have characters which originated as pictures, but an alphabet, of eleven vowels and thirty-two consonants, derived from the Pahlavi script of South India. The Burmese language belongs to the Tibeto-Burman group of the Tibeto-Chinese family of languages, but, unlike Chinese, it is not ideographic.