Burmese thii

[mathida]

(resend to the whole list)
Hi Pronsiri and Marcel,

  Your topic is most interesting indeed. I'll use your system of
capitalization for the etyma in Burmese or Thai.
The deictic specifier you are asking about is in spoken Burmese (SB) 'this'
(proximate) is DI and in literary Burmese ?I or ?E (depending on how you
wish to transcribe the graphical character into a roman script and whether
you use the modern pronunciation for it or some historical presupposed
variant). So ?I CA?UP 'this book'. Also in literary B(LB) there is another
form for this same function and that is to use the sentence final particle,
which is also the topic marker  - how to transcribe this? I shall use a form
representative of historical Burmese,
SANY, so SANY CA?UP 'this book'.  (S= theta; C=/s/ when pronouncing)

Now, I will help you out a lot, as I am working on something similar. Just
like you can use the Thai THII as deictic specifier of a noun and
functionally as a 'complementizer' (I do think it is that but also much
more), so too in LB the SANY in its various morphophonemic shapes functions
as 'relativizer': PE SANY CA?UP [give - particle - book] 'a book which was
given' or 'book given'.

Hope this speeds you on your way. By the way, modern SANY is pronounced as
an interdental fricative THI derived from an alveolar sibilant, not a stop
as in Thai.

 The distal deictic specifier in SB is HO, so HO SA?OU? 'that book' and in
LB
HTUI (aspirated alveolar stop), HTUI CA?UP.
. This vowel UI is pronounced in modern Burmese as /o/, but the historical
pronunciation has been under some debate. Another view point
was published this week in Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area,
interpreting this vowel as schwa!

You are definitely on to something. I encourage you to keep going. The
system which you are 'touching' in Burmese is more vast and interesting, and
not the same as Thai (in my limited understanding of Thai, that is).
Paulette

----- Original Message -----
From: "Pornsiri Singhapreecha" <pornsiri at alpha.tu.ac.th>
To: <sealang-l at nectec.or.th>
Sent: Wednesday, May 29, 2002 10:53 PM
Subject: Burmese thii


> Dear all,
> We're writing a paper about linker elements in Southeast Asian languages.
> In this paper, we claim that Thai 'thii' (in constructions like khon thii
> keng "person THII smart") is not a complementizer but a copular element
> linking a subject (NP 'person') and its predicate (AP 'smart').  We argue
> that this word order pattern can be analyzed along the same line with
> French nominal constructions where a subject and its predicate are linked
> by a meaningless (but functional) element such as 'de' in "une pizza de
> chaude" 'a hot pizza'.
> Now we're looking at Burmese thii.  Can anyone tell us how how, in
literary
> Burmese, one says "that book" and "this book"?
> Is "thii" used in literary Burmese as a demonstrative, e.g. "thii book"
> meaning "this book"?
> We welcome examples/comments on this (proximity perhaps) perspective of
> Burmese 'thii'.
> Pornsiri Singhapreecha
> Marcel den Dikken
>
>
>

>