INTRODUCTION
The following study is an analysis of the speech of one speaker, Maung Shwe Waing (máun šwéi wâin) of Taw Wi village (tó wì ywá) in Lower Burma some one hundred miles north of Rangoon. Mr. Shwe Waing was born August 15, 1902 (gôzá θagayiɁ tatháun hnayà chausshè ŋâgù hniɁ, wágáun làzân shè tayeɁ, tanînlá nèi nyà shè tanáyí Ɂachéin ‘in the year 1265, eleventh day of the waxing moon, Monday[1] at eleven o’clock in the evening’). For seven years, from his seventh to his fourteenth year, he attended the local monastery school. At the age of eighteen he left Taw Wi for Rangoon. In 1921 he shipped aboard a steamer as fireman. The next twenty years he spent aboard ship, until he came to the United States in 1940. From June 1943 to the present he has served as tutor for Burmese in the Army Specialized Training Program at Yale University.
Since this is a study of the subject’s colloquial speech, it has been necessary to make a sharp and arbitrary distinction between his colloquial speech and his knowledge of the literary language. This task was made easier by two conditions: the literary language is in general quite distinct from the colloquial; the needs of the soldiers who were learning the language put the emphasis on everyday speech. The selection of examples in the following pages was made almost entirely from the material which was prepared for class work or which developed out of drill session activities.
Mr. Shwe Waing is an excellent informant. His knowledge of English is limited and his dislike of speaking it is marked. He has no tendency toward philosophizing about language in either Burmese or English, and his ability to explain in Burmese the meaning of a Burmese locution is phenomenal. His patience and co-operation are unlimited.
The first activity in Burmese at Yale began in the Fall of 1942 with Dr. Raven Ioor McDavid Jr. working under the general direction of Professor Leonard Bloomfield. The work was done under the auspices of the American Council of Learned Societies through fellowships from the National School of Modern Oriental Languages and Civilizations. Dr. McDavid was forced by ill health to retire from the project in the Spring of 1943. Up to that time we had had the opportunity of observing the speech of three Burmans, Mg. Thein Tin of Amyin, U Po Thoung Allamon of Moulmein, and, for a few hours, U Hpu of Mogok. The phonemic analysis of Burmese was completed by Dr. McDavid, and I am indebted to him for his permission to use in this study the results of his work. He is not, however, to be considered responsible for the presentation that follows.
Some time after the preliminary analysis of the syntax had been made it was my good fortune to obtain from England a copy of Stewart, An Introduction to Colloquial Burmese, Rangoon 1936. Stewart’s analysis of the parts of speech of Burmese confirmed my own analysis. Beyond our agreement as to the two parts of speech in the language, an examination of the two studies will show that they have little in common.
Some help in breaking into the language was afforded by Grant Brown, Half the Battle in Burmese, London 1910. This little book is charmingly written
- ↑ August 15, 1902, was actually a Friday.
