Talk:Burmese phonology

Placeless nasal

Transcriptions here and at Help:IPA/Burmese use ⟨ɴ⟩, the IPA symbol for the uvular nasal, which has caused some confusion about the phonetic realization for what looks like originally was intended as a placeless nasal. Is there any basis for this analysis? The sources I've seen instead refer to nasalized vowels. This isn't the trappings of orthography, is it? — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[lɛts b̥iː pʰəˈlaɪˀt]} 21:07, 31 January 2019 (UTC)

@Aeusoes1: It's more the trappings of phonology: there are a number of ways in which nasal vowels act like closed syllables, so that at the phonemic level it does make sense to treat the nasality as a coda consonant rather than a property of the vowel. Also, there is usually some sort of tongue raising going on at the end of a nasal syllable; we could narrowly transcribe it [ɰ̃], but at the phonemic level I just consider /ɴ/ easier to read. And everyone agrees that there is a full-fledged nasal consonant when a buccal consonant follows, so in fact nasal syllables are only "open" at the end of a breath group or before /h/ or /ʔ/. Chang 2003 and 2008 has unfortunately completely misinterpreted the distribution of monophthongs and diphthongs in Burmese, because he believes that a word like ရေ 'water' [jè] is pronounced with a diphthong, which it isn't. All descriptions of Burmese that I've read clearly state that the close-mid vowels are monophthongal in open, nonnasal syllables, and they're diphthongal only in nasal syllables or syllables closed by ʔ (ယိမ်း [jẽ́ɪ̃] 'to sway', ရိတ် [jeɪʔ] 'to shave') (this is one of the ways that nasal syllables behave like closed syllables). I think he's probably been misled by the fact that yei is the most popular romanization of ရေ—Okell, the Myanmar–English Dictionary, Cornyn, and many others all use it, but if you read carefully they all agree that the difference between ရေ [jè] 'water' and ရယ် [jɛ̀] 'to laugh' is close-mid vowel vs. open-mid vowel, not one of diphthong vs. monophthong, even if they use the transcriptions yei and ye respectively for convenience. I would prefer it if this article didn't mention Chang at all, since he's got completely the wrong end of the stick, but I suppose WP:OWN prevents me from removing all mention of him if other editors want to include him. —Mahāgaja · talk 21:10, 1 February 2019 (UTC)

It seems as though Chang has a corpus of phonetic data, which might be dialect- or even idiolect-specific. If he represents a fringe view then it does make sense to prioritize other sources. I'm sort of stumbling in the dark here on what's a representative source. You seem to know what you're talking about. Do you think you could provide some of this information in the article with inline citations?

IMHO, [ɰ̃] would be a better symbol to use, even at the phonemic level and certainly with Wikipedia's IPA transcriptions. ⟨ɴ⟩ is just too confusing and unnecessarily imprecise. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[lɛts b̥iː pʰəˈlaɪˀt]} 21:33, 1 February 2019 (UTC)

I'll try to add some when I find the time. I do have a published paper on Burmese phonology, already listed in the Bibliography of Burmese language; but I'll try to focus on adding the works that that paper is based on rather than my paper itself, in order to stay on the good side of WP:SELFCITE. —Mahāgaja · talk 21:56, 1 February 2019 (UTC)

Terminology mix up

The article has သက်သံ 'Creaky' and တိုင်သံ 'Checked', but surely these are reversed since the checked tone is also called 'killed' and သက်သံ means 'killed tone'?

--Tibetologist (talk) 11:10, 15 July 2020 (UTC)