We’ve discussed Ryan Starkey before, but I recently took a look at his website, Starkey Comics (“Colourful images about culture and language”), and was astonished at the breadth of his coverage. Check out Etymologies of Endonyms and Exonyms, which currently includes The etymologies of Georgia, Georgia, and Sakartvelo; The Etymology of Croatia and Hrvatska; The Etymology of Myanmar and Burma; and The Etymology of Japan and Nippon — I’m sure holes can be picked in details here and there, but it’s so nice to see etymologies laid out in such pleasing graphic form, and his discussion of Burma/Myanmar is exemplary:
Burma was the earlier exonym for this southeast Asian nation in English, and is derived from the informal, spoken form of the endonym “Bama”.
“Bama” evolved from the more formal/literary form of the endonym, “Mranma”.
In 1989 the official English name of the country changed to “Myanmar”, a Latinised form of Mranma”, although “Burma” remains in use in many places, including the adjective form and name of the main language (Burmese).
Both “Burma” and “Myanmar” contain the letter “r”, despite being borrowed from Burmese words without an “r” in those positions. This is because Burma was a British colony, and majority of the accents of England are non-rhotic: the letter “r” is always silent when not before a vowel, and is simply there to modify the preceding vowel.
So an “r” was added to the spelling of both simply to show that the preceding vowel was long, not because it was ever intended to be pronounced.
There’s Austronesian words for ‘two’, Indo-European Words for Ten, The Etymology of Every Toki Pona Word, and much, much more. Enjoy!
I am confused by “Myanmar”, a Latinised form of Mranma,” because as best as I can tell Myanmar and Mranma are alternative romanizations of the same word spelled the same way in the local alphabet. The Y/R alternation is the same as in Yangon/Rangoon, I suspect.
Nice!
I am confused by “Myanmar”, a Latinised form of Mranma,” because as best as I can tell Myanmar and Mranma are alternative romanizations of the same word spelled the same way in the local alphabet.
Did you click through and look at the actual chart? Because he’s clearly referring to the local-alphabet version of the name labeled Mranma.
The Y/R alternation is the same as in Yangon/Rangoon, I suspect.
Yup.
Yes but AFAIK “Myanmar” is just a different romanization of that exact same local-alphabet spelling of the name, so I am confused by why “Myanmar” is presented as “Latinised” while “Mranma” (which is also a romanization!) isn’t.
The r-forms are in the Rakhine variety of Burmese, on which the British orthography was based; the y-forms are Standard Burmese.
Though I may not have the linguistic street-cred to say so, I think that’s a good website.
I occasionally wonder whether one or two commenters who often dis this and dis that have websites or publications where they show how it is done properly.
I’m sure they mean well, but they confuse their yers a lot. Also the details of some other writing systems. They get most of them right enough, though, most of the time. Read maybe 30-ish posts, not all related to linguistics, maybe half of them.