M.A. Theses in Linguistics at the University of North Dakota (Abstracts)

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Davis, Heidi A. 2014
Consonant correspondences of Burmese, Rakhine and Marma with initial implications for historical relationships

This thesis provides a consonantal comparison of the Burmese, Rakhine and Marma
languages of Myanmar and Bangladesh, with primary focus on initial and medial
consonants. Its main purposes are to provide new data from the Rakhine and Marma
languages of Bangladesh and to make some initial observations about the historical
relationship between the three languages based on compiled consonant correspondences.

Although much literature is available on the Burmese language as the primary
representative of the Southern Burmish languages, little information is available on
Rakhine and Marma. This thesis thus extends previous work on the family tree to these
two close relatives. It compares new Rakhine and Marma wordlist data from Bangladesh
to previously-collected Burmese and Rakhine data from Myanmar. It identifies cognate
forms and regular sound correspondences, as well as exceptions, with reference to
previously documented Burmese sound changes.

Marma is more conservative than Burmese or Rakhine in retaining the pronunciation
indicated by Written Burmese orthography; in some cases, this is a direct reflex of
reconstructed Proto-Tibeto-Burman. Burmese and Rakhine share two innovations that are
not found in Marma ([ʧ] < PTB *kj; [s] < PTB *ʧ/*ʦ). These innovations may indicate
that modern Burmese and Rakhine are a subgroup of the branch containing Marma,
although some similarities of Rakhine and Burmese may instead be due to geographic
and sociolinguistic factors, or borrowings from Burmese into Rakhine. The Rakhine
variety of Bangladesh differs somewhat from the Rakhine of Myanmar, which bears a
few more superficial similarities to Spoken Burmese.

Download thesis from:
http://arts-sciences.und.edu/summer-institute-of-linguistics/theses/_files/docs/2014-davis-heidi-a.pdf