Burmese Alphabet

The Burmese abugida ( used in Myanmar for writing Burmese , Mon , Shan and Kayin (Karen). The characters are rounded in appearance, because the traditional Palm leaves used for writing would have been ripped by straight lines. Like English , it is written from left to right. There are no spaces between words.

The script has undergone considerable changes from the original script to suit the phonology of Burmese, and to fit its word order of Subject - Object - Verb . The script is altered from language to language (e.g. Shan, Mon, etc.)

ALPHABET

There are 33 consonants က (pronounced ''ka'') to အ (pronounced ''a'') and 23 unique sounds. Consonants are separated into groups of 5, with the exception of the last three letters. The first two letters of each group, except for the ''ya''-group are the aspirated and unaspirated sounds. Six letters are designated for , the sounds of these are modified by diacritics put above, below or beside the character.

The following names are transliterated in contemporary Burmese.

DIACRITICS

There are several diactric marks that alter the vowel sound of a character. Two diacritics are used exlusively for Pali.

One or more of these accents can be added to a consonant to change its sound. In addition, other modifiying symbols are used to differentiate tone and sound, but are not considered diacritics.

Ligatures

Specific consanants (a final and the following consonant), when placed next to one another, may be stacked, with the final placed underneath the consonant. They are considered Ligature s, and are typically used to abbreviate, but are not necessary.

DIGITS

A Decimal numbering system is used, and numbers are written in the same order as Hindu-Arabic Numeral s.

The numerals from zero to nine are: ( Unicode 1040 to 1049). The number 1945 would be written as . Delimiters (such as commas) to separate numbers are not used.

PUNCTUATION

There are two primary break characters in Burmese, drawn as one or two downward strokes (၊ or ။), which respectively act as a Comma and a Full Stop . ၏။ is used as a full stop if the sentence immediately ends with a verb. ၍ is roughly the equivalent of a comma and is used to connect two trains of thought.

BURMESE IN UNICODE

The Unicode range for Burmese (Myanmar) is U+1000 ... U+109F.

INTERNET WEBSITES WITH MYANMAR UNICODE

Until 2005, most of the Burmese language website use to display dynamically generated method (GIF, JPG ..display), see at Burmese Wikipedia End of 2005, Myanmar NLP Research Lab [http://www.mcf.org.mm/unicode/opentype.html announced Myanmar Open Type font that Named Myanmar1. This Font contains not only Unicode code points and glyphs but also the OTLs logics and rules. Their research center news is based in Myanmar ICT Park, Yangon.

Many Myanmar font makers created Unicode fonts such as Win Myanmar, Win Innwa, CE Font, Myasedi Myanmar Bible Society lunched Burmese Unicode Website [http://www.myanmarbible.com/bible/Judson/html/ with Firefox web browser & Padauk font from ThanLwinSoft.org's [http://www.thanlwinsoft.org/] Myanmar Unicode technology.

Oversea Myanmar websites such as Burma Information Technology Team (BIT) {Link without Title} also started full Unicode website. Beginning of 2006, more Unicode internet websites appeared but browser like IE Internet Explore does not support the Burmese Unicode yet. Therefore, big websites are still using GIF, JPG display method.

Yangon based Myanmar Times website can display beautiful Myanmar fonts but oversea Myanmar website are still using GIF, JPG format eg. Khitpyaing.org [http://khitpyaing.org/ , Moemaka.net [http://moemaka.net/].

FONTS SUPPORTING BURMESE CHARACTERS

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Burmese Alphabet

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