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Burmese
(redirected from Burmese cats)

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Burmese, language belonging to the Tibeto-Burman subfamily of the Sino-Tibetan family of languages (see Sino-Tibetan languages Sino-Tibetan languages, family of languages spoken by over a billion people in central and SE Asia. This linguistic family is second only to the Indo-European stock in the number of its speakers.
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). It is spoken by about 30 million people in Myanmar, where it is both the principal and the official language. Burmese can be described as monosyllabic because root words generally consist of a single syllable. Context, word order, and the use of musical pitch or tones, of which Burmese has three, help to differentiate the meanings of the many homonyms. Syllables are often used in combination, thereby increasing the number of ideas that can be expressed. Burmese has its own alphabet, which is ultimately descended from an old script from S India. There is a great difference between the spoken and written forms of the language.

Bibliography

See J. Okell, Reference Grammar of Colloquial Burmese (1969); W. S. Cornyn, Spoken Burmese (1971).


Burmese
the official language of Burma (Myanmar), belonging to the Sino-Tibetan family


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We do not read Eliot's "Growltiger's Last Stand" because in it he refers to Siamese and Burmese cats as "chinks"; I do not read poems in "Negro dialect"; nor do I resurrect poems like "The Japanese Lovers," by Horace Russell and William Greene, a whimsical little number about "Fanny Foo-Foo" Felleman finds worthy of inclusion in her book.
 
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