Old Burmese
| Old Burmese | |
|---|---|
Detail of the Myazedi inscription
|
|
| Region | Pagan |
| Era | 12th–16th centuries |
|
Sino-Tibetan
|
|
| Burmese script | |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | |
|
Linguist list
|
obr |
| Glottolog | oldb1235 |
Old Burmese was an early form of the Burmese language, as attested in the stone inscriptions of Pagan, and is the oldest phase of Burmese linguistic history. The transition to Middle Burmese occurred in the 16th century. The transition to Middle Burmese included phonological changes (e.g. mergers of sound pairs that were distinct in Old Burmese) as well as accompanying changes in the underlying orthography.Word order, grammatical structure and vocabulary have remained markedly comparable, well into Modern Burmese, with the exception of lexical content (e.g. function words).
Unlike most Tibeto-Burman languages, Burmese has a phonological system with two-way aspiration: preaspiration (e.g. မှ hma. vs. မ ma.) and postaspiration (e.g. ခ kha. vs. က ka.). In Burmese, this distinction serves to differentiate causative and non-causative verbs of Sino-Tibetan etymology.
In Old Burmese, postaspiration can be reconstructed to the proto-Burmese language, whereas preaspiration is comparatively newer, having derived from proto-prefixes. The merging of proto-prefixes (i.e., ဟ as an independent consonant used as a prefix) to preaspirated consonants was nearly complete by the 12th century.
Old Burmese maintains a number of distinctions which are no longer present in the orthography of standard Burmese.
Whereas Modern Standard Burmese uses 3 written medials (/-y-/, /-w-/, and /-r-/), Old Burmese had a fourth written medial /-l-/, which was typically written as a stacked consonant ္လ underneath the letter being modified.
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