Mon language

The Mon language (Mon: ဘာသာ မန်; Burmese: မွန်ဘာသာ) is an Austroasiatic language spoken by the Mon people, who live in Myanmar and Thailand. Mon, like the related Khmer language but unlike most languages in mainland Southeast Asia, is not tonal. Mon is spoken by more than a million people today.^[4] In recent years, usage of Mon has declined rapidly, especially among the younger generation.^[4] Many ethnic Mon are monolingual in Burmese. In Myanmar, the majority of speakers live in Mon State, followed by Tanintharyi Region and Kayin State.^[5]

The Mon script is ultimately derived from the Indic Brahmi script.

History

Mon is an important language in Burmese history. Up until the 12th century, it was the lingua franca of the Irrawaddy valley—not only in the Mon kingdoms of the lower Irrawaddy but also of the upriver Pagan Kingdom of the Bamar people. 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 Kyansittha (r. 1084–1113) admired Mon culture and the Mon language was patronized. The Mon script was adopted for Burmese 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.^[6]

However, after Kyansittha's death, usage of the Mon language declined among the Bamar and the Burmese language began to replace Mon and Pyu as a lingua franca.^[6]

Mon inscriptions from Dvaravati'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 Empire.

After the fall of Pagan, the Mon language again became the lingua franca of the Mon Hanthawaddy Kingdom (1287–1539) in present-day Lower Burma. The language long continued to be prevalent in Lower Burma until the mid-19th century because the region was still mainly populated by 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. Currently, according to scholars, the number of Mon speakers is relatively very small when compared to the large numbers who identify themselves as Mon people. 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.

In 2013, it was announced that the Mawlamyine-based Thanlwin Times would begin to carry news in the Mon language, becoming Myanmar's first Mon language publication since 1962.^[7]

Dialects

Mon has three primary dialects in Burma, coming from the various regions the Mon inhabit. They are the Central (areas surrounding Mottama and Mawlamyine), Bago, and Ye dialects.^[8] All are mutually intelligible. Thai Mon has some differences from the Burmese dialects of Mon, but they are mutually intelligible.

Ethnologue lists Mon dialects as Martaban-Moulmein (Central Mon, Mon Te), Pegu (Mon Tang, Northern Mon), and Ye (Mon Nya, Southern Mon), with high mutual intelligibility among them.

Alphabet

The Old Mon script, which has been dated to the 6th century,^[9] with the earliest inscriptions found in Nakhon Pathom and Saraburi (in Thailand). It may be the ancestral script of the modern Mon (or Burma Mon) script although no one has shown a linkage between the Old Mon script of Dvaravati and Burma Mon. The extant archaeological evidence shows that Burma Mon was derived from the Burmese alphabet, not the other way around.^[10] The modern Mon alphabet, however, utilizes several letters and diacritics that do not exist in Burmese, such as the stacking diacritic for medial 'l', which is placed underneath the letter.^[11]

There is a great deal of discrepancy between the written and spoken forms of Mon, with a single pronunciation capable of having several spellings.^[12] The Mon script also makes prominent use of consonant stacking, to represent consonant clusters found in the language.

The Mon alphabet contains 35 consonants (including a zero consonant), as follows, with consonants belonging to the breathy register indicated in gray:^[13][14]

In the Mon script, consonants belong to one of two registers: clear and breathy, each of which has different inherent vowels and pronunciations for the same set of diacritics. For instance, က, which belongs to the clear register, is pronounced /kaˀ/, while ဂ is pronounced /kɛ̀ˀ/, to accommodate the vowel complexity of the Mon phonology.^[15] The addition of diacritics makes this obvious. Whereas in Burmese, spellings with the same diacritics are rhyming, in Mon, this depends on the consonant's inherent register. A few examples are listed below:

• က + ဳ → ကဳ, pronounced /kɔe/
• ဂ + ဳ → ဂဳ, pronounced /ɡì/
• က + ူ → ကူ, pronounced /kao/
• ဂ + ူ → ဂူ, pronounced /ɡù/

Mon uses the same diacritics and diacritic combinations as in Burmese to represent vowels, with the addition of a few diacritics unique to the Mon script, including ဴ (/ɛ̀a/), and ဳ (/i/), since the diacritic ိ represents /ìˀ/.^[16] Also, ဨ (/e/) is used instead of ဧ, as in Burmese.

The Mon language has 8 medials, as follows: ္ၚ (/-ŋ-/), ၞ (/-n-/), ၟ (/-m-/), ျ (/-j-/), ြ (/-r-/), ၠ (/-l-/), ွ (/-w-/), and ှ (/-hn-/). Consonantal finals are indicated with a virama (်), as in Burmese. Furthermore, consonant stacking is possible in Mon spellings, particularly for Pali and Sanskrit-derived vocabulary.

Phonology

Consonants

¹/ç/ is only found in Burmese loans.

Vowels

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:

1. Clear (modal) voice, analyzed by various linguists as ranging from ordinary to creaky
2. Breathy voice, vowels have a distinct breathy quality

One study involving speakers of a Mon dialect in Thailand found that in some syllabic environments, words with a breathy voice vowel are significantly lower in pitch than similar words with a clear vowel counterpart.^[17] While difference in pitch in certain environments was found to be significant, there are no minimal pairs that are distinguished solely by pitch. The contrastive mechanism is the vowel phonation.

In the examples below, breathy voice is marked with a grave accent.

Syntax

Verbs and verb phrases

Mon verbs do not inflect for person. Tense is shown through particles.

Some verbs have a morphological causative, which is most frequently a /pə-/ prefix (Pan Hla 1989:29):

Nouns and noun phrases

Singular and Plural

Mon nouns do not inflect for number. That is, they do not have separate forms for singular and plural:

'one apple'

'two apples'

Adjectives

Adjectives follow the noun (Pan Hla p. 24):

'beautiful woman'

Demonstratives

Demonstratives follow the noun:

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.

'one pen'

'one tree'

Prepositions and prepositional phrases

Mon is a prepositional language.

Sentences

The ordinary word order for sentences in Mon is subject–verb–object, as in the following examples

'I bought rice.'

'They taught me English.'

Questions

Yes-no questions are shown with a final particle ha

‘Have you eaten rice?’

‘Will father go?’ (Pan Hla, p. 42)

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:

'What did you wash?'

Notes

Further reading

• Aung-Thwin, Michael (2005). The mists of Rāmañña: The Legend that was Lower Burma (illustrated ed.). Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press. ISBN 9780824828868. 
• 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 974-563-783-1
• 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. 1874. 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 3-9522954-1-8
• 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

External links

Mon language test of Wikipedia at Wikimedia Incubator

• A hypertext grammar of the Mon language
• SEAlang Project: Mon–Khmer languages: The Monic Branch
• Mon-language Swadesh vocabulary list of basic words (from Wiktionary's Swadesh-list appendix)
• Mon Language Project
• Mon Language in Thailand: The endangered heritage
• "Monic". Archived from the original (lecture) on 2007-09-15. Retrieved 2007-09-21.