Remarks on the vowel system of Old Burmese

Abstract

Benedict's view of early Burmese phonology was crucial for the vocalism of his entire ST system and is still widely accepted among Tibeto-Burmanists and Sino-Tibetanists. The efforts to reconstruct oBrm seen in Benedict/Matisoff 1972 make quite limited use of the Atsi (Zaiwa) and Maru (Longwo, Langsu) material available then, which is a pity since those are the languages mentioned in the Conspectus which are most closely related to Burmese. Ideas for the reconstruction of oBrm are also seen in Pulleyblank 1963 and Gong 1980, but these grand-scale discussions of Sino-Tibetan follow the comparative method even less, making use only of Chinese, Tibetan, and Burmese.