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Burmese

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Burmese, language belonging to the Tibeto-Burman subfamily of the Sino-Tibetan family of languages (see Sino-Tibetan languages Sino-Tibetan languages, family of languages spoken by over a billion people in central and SE Asia. This linguistic family is second only to the Indo-European stock in the number of its speakers.
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). It is spoken by about 30 million people in Myanmar, where it is both the principal and the official language. Burmese can be described as monosyllabic because root words generally consist of a single syllable. Context, word order, and the use of musical pitch or tones, of which Burmese has three, help to differentiate the meanings of the many homonyms. Syllables are often used in combination, thereby increasing the number of ideas that can be expressed. Burmese has its own alphabet, which is ultimately descended from an old script from S India. There is a great difference between the spoken and written forms of the language.

Bibliography

See J. Okell, Reference Grammar of Colloquial Burmese (1969); W. S. Cornyn, Spoken Burmese (1971).


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He heard from the same source that his boy had been married to a Burmese, and that there was a daughter only a year old.
They have been absent from England fourteen years, having been embarked the year after Waterloo, in which glorious conflict they took an active part, and having subsequently distinguished themselves in the Burmese war.
 
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