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Burmese grammar | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| clumsy Octoglot Senior Member Poland lang-8.com/6715Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5180 days ago 1116 posts - 1367 votes  Speaks: Polish*, English, Japanese, Korean, French, Mandarin, Italian, Vietnamese Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swedish Studies: Danish, Dari, Kirundi | Message 1 of 12 24 February 2012 at 5:33pm | IP Logged | ||
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I have started to play with Burmese, and before I have tried to learn other languages
from the family (Tibeto-Burman) and I am really surprised that the grammar is quite unlike the Chinese grammar (related language), more like Japanese or Korean grammar. They even have something similar to topic particle in Burmese. Sound system is like Mandarin, except that the number of finals is smaller. Quite similar to Japanese. On the other hand Thai grammar seems quite close to Mandarin, I can even see some vocabulary similarities. Why is then Thai classified as different language family belonger than Mandarin？ I have seen some people make theories about Japanese belonging to Sino-Tibetan language family. Could it be possible? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| lingoleng Senior Member Germany Joined 5300 days ago 605 posts - 1290 votes | Message 2 of 12 24 February 2012 at 8:55pm | IP Logged | ||
Language families are based on the idea of a common ancestor, it is a genealogical metaphor, not one based on (synchronous) similarity. Just compare with homology (genetic relation) versus analogy (similarity by convergent development.) It is the linguistic branch of typology which tries to group (genetically unrelated) languages by structural similarities. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6441 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 3 of 12 24 February 2012 at 9:29pm | IP Logged | ||
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To put it another way, language families are drawn up on the basis of where they came from (in terms of parent languages, not geography), and this is reflected more in the roots of their words than in their grammar. Seeing what roots are the same is made more complicated by sound shifts. For instance, the High German consonant sound shift caused changes which make English's "ship" correspond to German's "Schiff". A further complication is loan-words, but to some extent people have figured out how to distinguish these.
Look at the Indo-European languages. On one hand, there are the ones where word order is very important, there aren't many/any cases, and verbs don't change very much for person - like English, (spoken) French, and Persian. On the other hand, there are highly inflected related languages with several cases, like Latin, Sanskrit, and Russian. Despite the similarities in grammar, though, no one who has looked closely at these languages would dream of saying that French is more closely related to Persian than it is to Latin! Large language families often have a large range of grammatical structures in their various languages. And, as these structures aren't independent of each other (look up language universals for some interesting correlations), sometimes a language in one family resembles one in another family quite a lot grammatically. Edited by Volte on 24 February 2012 at 9:30pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Cabaire Senior Member Germany Joined 5601 days ago 725 posts - 1352 votes | Message 4 of 12 24 February 2012 at 11:39pm | IP Logged | ||
This phenomenon is called Sprachbund, which
2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| clumsy Octoglot Senior Member Poland lang-8.com/6715Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5180 days ago 1116 posts - 1367 votes Speaks: Polish*, English, Japanese, Korean, French, Mandarin, Italian, Vietnamese Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swedish Studies: Danish, Dari, Kirundi | Message 5 of 12 15 March 2012 at 7:09pm | IP Logged | ||
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Oh, it' not that Iｗａｎｔ ｔｏ ｑｕｅｓｔｉｏｎ ｔｈ ｓｉｎｏ－ｔｉｂｅｔａｎ ｌａｎｇｕ ｇｅ ｆａｍｉｌｙ， Ｉ ｇｕｅｓｓ ｈｅｙ ｗｅｒｅ ｍａｄｅ ｂｙ ｐｅ ｌｅ ｍｕｃｈ ｍｏｒｅ ｋｎｏｗｌｅ ｇｅａｂｌｅ ｔｈａｎ ｍｅ， ｉｎ ｈｉｓ ｃａｔｅｇｏｒｙ．
ｂｕｔ ｉｆ ｗｅ ｔａｌｋ ａｂｕｔ ｓｐｒａｃｈｂｕｎｄ， ｔｈｅｎ ｗｈｉ ｃｈ ｏｎｅ？ Burma lies in South East Asia. I should add that Tibetan has also similar grammar to Burmese, but I don't know much Tibetan, so I could be wrong. so maybe it's more something like areal influence that tok place very long time ago, when proto Japanese and proto Sino-tibetans lived near each other. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| manish Triglot Groupie Romania Joined 5548 days ago 88 posts - 136 votes Speaks: Romanian*, English, German Studies: Spanish | Message 6 of 12 15 March 2012 at 7:35pm | IP Logged | ||
Most (Mainland) Chinese linguists classify the Tai-Kadai languages (and the Hmong-Mien languages) as part of Sino-Tibetan. From Wikipedia: "The Tai–Kadai languages were formerly considered to be part of the Sino-Tibetan family, but outside China they are now classified as an independent family. They contain large numbers of words that are similar in Sino-Tibetan languages. However, these are seldom found in all branches of the family, and do not include basic vocabulary, indicating that they are old loan words." Edited by manish on 15 March 2012 at 7:36pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| clumsy Octoglot Senior Member Poland lang-8.com/6715Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5180 days ago 1116 posts - 1367 votes Speaks: Polish*, English, Japanese, Korean, French, Mandarin, Italian, Vietnamese Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swedish Studies: Danish, Dari, Kirundi | Message 7 of 12 04 April 2012 at 8:04pm | IP Logged | ||
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hmm, I have some old books in Chinese, and they do write about Thai being Sino_tibetan.
I am learning Tai languages these days. I was surpised how much Zhuang grammar is similar to Chinese, I though that it must be due to contants with Chinese, but it seems Thai and Lao have some similarity too. yiengz a word from Zhuang, in Thai yang, is similar to Mandarin yang 样 and the meaning is the same. another thing is resultative verbs: girl run tired (run to the extent of being tired) or something like this. there is also a qualifier similar to de in Chinese. as in: girl run de very fast Nevertheless the basic vocabulary seems very different: fish = pla, ba, bya not similar at all to yu, nga (Mandarin, Burmese). whereas you can find a lot of similarities between Chinese and Burmese (to come = lai, la etc) Anyway, does anybody know about the mutual intelligibility btween Thai, Shan and Dai? DLI course says these are all dialects of th same language ! Is it truth? Or did they do some mistake? Can Thai understand person from Shan state or from Yunnan, China? Shan = language spoken in Burma, by Tai people Dai = Chinese minority language 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| viedums Hexaglot Senior Member Thailand Joined 4668 days ago 327 posts - 528 votes Speaks: Latvian, English*, German, Mandarin, Thai, French Studies: Vietnamese | Message 8 of 12 05 April 2012 at 10:55am | IP Logged | ||
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Tai languages are fairly similar, but not necessarily mutually intelligible. Thai and Lao are very close, and the Lao watch Thai TV, so using Thai in Laos is not a problem, everyone will understand you. Zhuang has many obvious cognates with Thai, and is generally similar, except it has adjective-noun word order like Mandarin and unlike Thai.
There are very few obvious similarities in vocabulary (or otherwise) between Mandarin and Burmese. One of the only grammatical similarities is the use of 'de'/'de' creaky tone to mark adjectives, relative clauses etc. As I have written elsewhere, Burmese is quite difficult and knowing other Southeast Asian languages doesn't help that much. On serial verb constructions in Tai languages, check the work of Nick Enfield. Edited by viedums on 05 April 2012 at 10:56am 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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