Overview

This book provides a detailed description and a cross-dialectal comparison of the major dialects of Myanmar. The fieldwork was carried out under very difficult conditions in Myanmar, which makes this material all the more valuable. Chapter 1 provides phonological and grammatical sketches of 8 major Burmese dialects, while Chapter 2 describes in detail the particular features of their repertoire of initial consonants, rhymes, and tones and remarks on their systems of particles. The Appendices are devoted to detailed lexicons of the dialects, largely based on the first author’s personal fieldwork. Each dialect is exemplified with approximately 1800 forms. Comprising by far the largest corpora of such data ever assembled in one place, the research on tonal systems presented in this book contributes significantly to the tone study of the world’s languages. 

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Professor Danian Wang joined Peking University as a teaching assistant in 1960, advancing to a full professor. He retired from the University in 2001. Professor Wang started his study of the language of Myanmar as an undergraduate, and with support from the Embassy of P.R.C. in Myanmar, he was able to travel frequently within Myanmar to undertake linguistic fieldwork. His research focuses include the grammar and the developmental history of Myanmar, as well as comparative studies of Tibeto-Burman languages. His research has been published in numerous monographs on the comparative studies of Myanmar and other Sino-Tibetan languages, all written in Chinese. Professor Xiangyang Cai obtained his Ph.D. degree in Linguistics and Applied Linguistics from the Minzu  University  of China. He is currently a professor at the Luoyang University of Foreign Languages (Henan), where he teaches Burmese/Myanmar. From 2001-2016, he was an associate professor, and in 2016, he advanced to a full professor. His research focuses on Myanmar language and literature, the languages and cultures in Southeast Asia, and comparative studies of Sino-Tibetan languages. He has published 8 books, including the monograph Miandianyuyan Wenti Yanjiu (The Study of the Linguistics Issues of Myanmar) (in Chinese), as well as more than forty academic articles.

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