Mon language
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Mon | ||
|---|---|---|
| မဩန | ||
| Pronunciation | /pʰesa mɑn/ | |
| Spoken in | Burma, Thailand, United States (California) | |
| Region | Southeast Asia | |
| Total speakers | Myanmar: 742,900, Total: 850,530[1] | |
| Language family | Austro-Asiatic | |
| Writing system | Burmese alphabet (itself derived from the Old Mon Indic-based script) | |
| Official status | ||
| Official language in | none, recognised as a minority language in Burma and Thailand | |
| Regulated by | No official regulation | |
| Language codes | ||
| ISO 639-1 | None | |
| ISO 639-2 | – | |
| ISO 639-3 | mnw | |
| Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. | ||
The Mon language is an Austroasiatic language spoken by the Mon, who live in Burma and Thailand. Mon, unlike most languages in the Southeast Asian region, is not tonal. Mon is spoken by less than a million people today.[1] In recent years, usage of Mon has declined rapidly, especially among the younger generation.[1] Many ethnic Mon are monolingual in Burmese. In Burma, the majority of speakers live in Mon State, followed by Tanintharyi Division and Kayin State.[2]
The Mon script is derived from Indian Brahmi script and is the source of the Burmese script.
Contents |
[edit] History
Mon is an important language in Burmese history. Up until the 12th century AD, it was the lingua franca of the Irrawaddy valley--not only in the Mon kingdoms of the lower Irrawaddy valley but also of upriver Burman kingdom of Pagan (Bagan). Mon, especially written Mon, continued to be the primary language even after the fall of the Mon kingdom of Thaton to Pagan in 1057. Pagan king Kyanzittha (1084-1112) admired the Mon culture, and the Mon language was patronized. The Mon script was the source of the Burmese script created during his reign. Kyanzittha left many inscriptions in Mon. During this period, the Myazedi inscription, which contains identical inscriptions of a story in Pali, Pyu, Mon, and Burmese on the four sides was carved.[3] However, after Kyanzittha's death, usage of the Mon language declined among the Burmans. Old Burmese began to replace Mon and Pyu as lingua franca[3].
Mon inscriptions from the Dvaravati kingdom's ruins also litter Thailand. However it is not clear if the inhabitants were Mon, a mix of Mon and Malay, or Khmer. Later inscriptions and kingdoms like Lavo were subservient to the Khmer.
After the fall of Pagan, the Mon language again became the lingua franca of independent Mon kingdom of Hanthawaddy Bago (1287-1539) in the present day Lower Burma. The language long continued to be prevalent in Lower Burma until the mid-19th century for the region was still mainly populated by the Mon. This changed after the British captured Lower Burma in 1852, and encouraged immigration to develop Irrawaddy delta for farming. The ensuing mass migration of peoples into the region from other areas of Burma as well as India and China relegated the Mon language to a tertiary status.
The language languished during British colonial rule, and has experienced a rapid decline in the number of speakers since the Burmese independence in 1948. With little or no support from successive Burmese governments, the Mon language (especially written Mon) continues to be propagated mostly by Mon monks. The Mon language instruction survives in the Thai-Burmese border inside the Mon rebel controlled areas.
[edit] Dialects
Mon has three primary dialects in Burma, coming from the various regions the Mon inhabit. They are the Central (areas surrounding Mottama and Mawlamyaing), Bago, and Ye dialects.[4] All are mutually intelligible. Thai Mon has some differences from the Burmese dialects of Mon, but is almost mutually intelligible.
[edit] Script
The Mon script is ancestral to the Burmese script, but utilises several different letters and diacritics that represent phonemes that do not exist in Burmese, such as the diacritic of the medial 'l', which is placed underneath the letter.[5]
[edit] Phonology
[edit] Consonants
| Bilabial | Dental | Palatal | Velar | Glottal | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Stops | p pʰ ɓ | t tʰ ɗ | c cʰ | k kʰ | ʔ |
| Fricatives | s | ç 1 | h | ||
| Nasals | m | n | ɲ | ŋ | |
| Sonorants | w | l, r | j |
1/ç/ is only found in Burmese loans.
[edit] Vowels
| Front | Central | Back | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Close | i | u | |
| Close-mid | e | ə | o |
| Open-mid | ɛ | ɒ | ɔ |
| Open | a |
[edit] Vocalic register
Unlike the surrounding Burmese and Thai languages, Mon is not a tonal language. As in many Mon-Khmer languages, Mon uses a vowel-phonation or vowel-register system in which the quality of voice in pronouncing the vowel is phonemic. There are two registers in Mon:
- Clear (modal) voice, analyzed by various linguists as ranging from ordinary to creaky
- Breathy voice, vowels have a distinct breathy quality
In the examples below, breathy voice is marked with a grave accent.
[edit] Nouns and noun phrases
[edit] Singular and Plural
Mon nouns do not inflect for number. That is, they do not have separate forms for singular and plural:
| sɔt pakaw | mòa | mèa |
| apple | one | classifier |
'one apple'
| sɔt pakaw | ɓa | mèa |
| apple | two | classifier |
'two apples'
[edit] Classifiers
Like many other Southeast Asian languages, Mon has classifiers which are used when a noun appears with a numeral. The choice of classifier depends on the semantics of the noun involved.
| kaneh | mòa | tanəng |
| pen | one | classifier |
'one pen'
| chup | mòa | tanɒm |
| tree | one | classifier |
'one tree'
[edit] Sentences
[edit] Affirmative sentences
The ordinary word order for sentences in Mon is Subject-Verb-Object, as in the following examples
| ʔoa | ran | hau | toa | ya. |
| I | buy | rice | completive | affirmative |
'I bought rice.'
| Nyeh | tɔʔ | paton | kɒ | ʔua | pàsa | ʔengloit |
| 3rd | plur | teach | to | 1st | language | English |
'They taught me English.'
[edit] Questions
Yes-no questions are shown with a final particle ha
| ɓè | ʃìa | pəng | toa | ya | ha? |
| you | eat | rice | com | aff | q |
‘Have you eaten rice?’
Wh-questions show a different final particle, rau. The interrogative word does not undergo wh-movement. That is, it does not necessarily move to the front of the sentence:
| Tala Ong | kratkraw | mu | ràu? |
| Tala Ong | wash | what | wh:q |
'What did Tala Ong wash?'
[edit] Notes
- ^ a b c Gordon, Raymond G., Jr. (2005). "Mon: A language of Myanmar". Ethnologue: Languages of the World, Fifteenth edition. SIL International. http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=mnw. Retrieved on 2006-07-09.
- ^ Dr. SM. "The Mon Language (An endangered species)". Monland Restoration Council. http://www.mrc-usa.org/mon__language.htm. Retrieved on 2006-07-12.
- ^ a b Strachan, Paul (1990). Imperial Pagan: Art and Architecture of Burma. University of Hawaii Press. pp. 66. ISBN 0-8248-1325-1.
- ^ South, Ashley (2003). Mon Nationalism and Civil War in Burma: The Golden Sheldrake. Routledge. ISBN 0-7007-1609-2.
- ^ "Proposal for encoding characters for Myanmar minority languages in the UCS" (PDF). International Organization for Standardization. 2006-04-02. http://lwinmoe.friendsofburma.org/doc/myanmar_extension.pdf. Retrieved on 2006-07-09.
[edit] Further reading
- Bauer, Christian. 1982. Morphology and syntax of spoken Mon. Ph.D. thesis, University of London (SOAS).
- Bauer, Christian. 1984. A guide to Mon studies. Working Papers, Monash U.
- Bauer, Christian. 1986. The verb in spoken Mon. Mon-Khmer Studies 15.
- Bauer, Christian. 1986. Questions in Mon: Addenda and Corrigenda. Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area v. 9, no. 1, pp. 22-26.
- Diffloth, Gerard. 1984. The Dvarati Old Mon language and Nyah Kur. Monic Language Studies I, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok. ISBN 9745637831
- Diffloth, Gerard. 1985. The registers of Mon vs. the spectrographist's tones. UCLA Working Papers in Phonetics 60:55-58.
- Ferlus, Michel. 1984. Essai de phonetique historique du môn. Mon-Khmer Studies, 9:1-90.
- Guillon, Emmanuel. 1976. Some aspects of Mon syntax. in Jenner, Thompson, and Starosta, eds. Austroasiatic Studies. Oceanic linguistics special publication no. 13.
- Halliday, Robert. 1922. A Mon-English dictionary. Bangkok: Siam society.
- Haswell, James M. 1901. Grammatical notes and vocabulary of the Peguan language. Rangoon: American Baptist Mission Press.
- Huffman, Franklin. 1987-1988. Burmese Mon, Thai Mon, and Nyah Kur: a synchronic comparison. Mon-Khmer Studies 16-17.
- Jenny, Mathias. 2005. The Verb System of Mon. Arbeiten des Seminars für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft der Universität Zürich, Nr 19. Zürich: Universität Zürich. ISBN 3952295418
- Lee, Thomas. 1983. An acoustical study of the register distinction in Mon. UCLA Working Papers in Phonetics 57:79-96.
- Pan Hla, Nai. 1986. Remnant of a lost nation and their cognate words to Old Mon Epigraph. Journal of the Siam Society 7:122-155
- Pan Hla, Nai. 1989. An introduction to Mon language Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University.
- Pan Hla, Nai. 1992. The Significant Role of the Mon Language and Culture in Southeast Asia. Tokyo, Japan: Institute for the Study of Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa.
- Shorto, H.L. 1962. A dictionary of modern spoken Mon. Oxford University Press.
- Shorto, H.L.; Judith M. Jacob; and E.H.S. Simonds. 1963. Bibliographies of Mon-Khmer and Tai linguistics. Oxford University Press.
- Shorto, H.L. 1966. Mon vowel systems: a problem in phonological statement. in Bazell, Catford, Halliday, and Robins, eds. In memory of J.R. Firth, pp. 398-409.
- Shorto, H.L. 1971. A dictionary of the Mon inscriptions from the sixth to the sixteenth centuries. Oxford University Press.
- Thongkum, Therapan L. 1987. Another look at the register distinction in Mon. UCLA Working Papers in Phonetics. 67:132-165
