The Pyu language (Pyu: Pyu_pyx

; my, ပျူ ဘာသာ, ; also Tircul language) is an extinct

Sino-Tibetan language Sino-Tibetan, also cited as Trans-Himalayan in a few sources, is a family of more than 400 languages, second only to Indo-European in number of native speakers. The vast majority of these are the 1.3 billion native speakers of Chinese languages. ...

that was mainly spoken in what is now

Myanmar Myanmar, ; UK pronunciations: US pronunciations incl. . Note: Wikipedia's IPA conventions require indicating /r/ even in British English although only some British English speakers pronounce r at the end of syllables. As John C. Wells, Joh ...

in the first millennium CE. It was the

vernacular A vernacular or vernacular language is in contrast with a "standard language". It refers to the language or dialect that is spoken by people that are inhabiting a particular country or region. The vernacular is typically the native language, n ...

of the

Pyu city-states , conventional_long_name = Pyu city-states , common_name = Pyu City States , era = Classical antiquity , status = City , event_start = Earliest Pyu presence in Upper Burma , year_start = c. 2nd century BCE , date_start = , event_en ...

, which thrived between the second century

BCE Common Era (CE) and Before the Common Era (BCE) are year notations for the Gregorian calendar (and its predecessor, the Julian calendar), the world's most widely used calendar era. Common Era and Before the Common Era are alternatives to the or ...

and the ninth century CE. Its usage declined starting in the late ninth century when the

Bamar people The Bamar (, ; also known as the Burmans) are a Sino-Tibetan languages, Sino-Tibetan ethnic group native to Myanmar (formerly Burma) in Southeast Asia. With approximately 35 million people, the Bamar make up the largest ethnic group in Myanmar ...

Nanzhao Nanzhao (, also spelled Nanchao, ) was a dynastic kingdom that flourished in what is now southern China and northern Southeast Asia during the 8th and 9th centuries. It was centered on present-day Yunnan in China. History Origins Nanzh ...

began to overtake the Pyu city-states. The language was still in use, at least in royal inscriptions of the

Pagan Kingdom The Kingdom of Pagan ( my, ပုဂံခေတ်, , ; also known as the Pagan Dynasty and the Pagan Empire; also the Bagan Dynasty or Bagan Empire) was the first Burmese kingdom to unify the regions that would later constitute modern-da ...

if not in popular vernacular, until the late twelfth century. It became extinct in the thirteenth century, completing the rise of the

Burmese language Burmese ( my, မြန်မာဘာသာ, MLCTS: ''mranmabhasa'', IPA: ) is a Sino-Tibetan language spoken in Myanmar (also known as Burma), where it is an official language, lingua franca, and the native language of the Burmans, the count ...

, the language of the Pagan Kingdom, in Upper Burma, the former Pyu realm. The language is principally known from inscriptions on four stone urns (7th and 8th centuries) found near the Payagyi pagoda (in the modern

Bago Township Bago Township or Pegu Township is a township in Bago District in the Bago Region of Burma.

) and the multi-lingual

Myazedi inscription Myazedi inscription ( my, မြစေတီ ကျောက်စာ ; also Yazakumar Inscription or the Gubyaukgyi Inscription), inscribed in 1113, is the oldest surviving stone inscription of the Burmese language. "Myazedi" means "emerald stupa" ...

(early 12th century). These were first deciphered by Charles Otto Blagden in the early 1910s. The

Pyu script The Pyu script is a writing system used to write the Pyu language, an extinct Sino-Tibetan language that was mainly spoken in present-day central Burma. It was based on the Brahmi-based scripts of both north and south India. The best available ...

was a

Brahmic script The Brahmic scripts, also known as Indic scripts, are a family of abugida writing systems. They are used throughout the Indian subcontinent, Southeast Asia and parts of East Asia. They are descended from the Brahmi script of ancient India ...

. The most recent scholarship suggests the Pyu script may have been the source of the Burmese script.

Classification

Blagden (1911: 382) was the first scholar to recognize Pyu as an independent branch of Sino-Tibetan. Miyake (2021, 2022) argues that Pyu forms a branch of its own within the Sino-Tibetan language phylum due to its divergent phonological and lexical characteristics. Pyu is not a particularly conservative Sino-Tibetan language, as it displays many phonological and lexical innovations as has lost much of the original Proto-Sino-Tibetan morphology.
Miyake (2022) suggests that this may be due to a possible creoloid origin of Pyu. Pyu was tentatively classified within the

Lolo-Burmese languages The Lolo-Burmese languages (also Burmic languages) of Burma and Southern China form a coherent branch of the Sino-Tibetan family. Names Until ca. 1950, the endonym ''Lolo'' was written with derogatory characters in Chinese, and for this reas ...

by Matisoff and thought to most likely be Luish by

Bradley Bradley is an English surname derived from a place name meaning "broad wood" or "broad meadow" in Old English. Like many English surnames Bradley can also be used as a given name and as such has become popular. It is also an Anglicisation of t ...

, although Miyake later showed that neither of these hypotheses are plausible. Van Driem also tentatively classified Pyu as an independent branch of Sino-Tibetan.

Phonology

Marc Miyake is an American linguist who specializes in historical linguistics, particularly the study of Old Japanese and Tangut. Biography Miyake was born in Aiea, Hawaii in 1971, and attended Punahou School in Honolulu, graduating in 1989. He studied ...

reconstructs the

syllable A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds typically made up of a syllable nucleus (most often a vowel) with optional initial and final margins (typically, consonants). Syllables are often considered the phonological "bu ...

structure of Pyu as: :(C.)CV(C)(H) :(preinitial) + syllable 7 vowels are reconstructed. Miyake reconstructs 43-44 onsets, depending on whether or not the initial

glottal stop The glottal plosive or stop is a type of consonantal sound used in many spoken languages, produced by obstructing airflow in the vocal tract or, more precisely, the glottis. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents thi ...

is included. Innovative onsets are: *fricatives: /h ɣ ç ʝ ð v/ *liquids: /R̥ R L̥ L/ *implosive: /ɓ/ 10 codas are reconstructed, which are -k, -t, -p, -m, -n, -ŋ, -j, -r, -l, -w. Pyu is apparently isolating, with no inflection morphology observed.

List of Pyu inscriptions

Vocabulary

Below are selected Pyu basic vocabulary items from

Gordon Luce Gordon Hannington Luce was a colonial scholar in Burma. He was born on 20 January 1889 and died on 3 May 1979. His outstanding library containing books, manuscripts, maps and photographs – The Luce Collection – was acquired by the National ...

and

Sound changes

Pyu displays the following sound changes from

Proto-Tibeto-Burman Proto-Tibeto-Burman (commonly abbreviated PTB) is the reconstructed ancestor of the Tibeto-Burman languages, that is, the Sino-Tibetan languages, except for Chinese. An initial reconstruction was produced by Paul K. Benedict and since refined by ...

. *

sibilant Sibilants are fricative consonants of higher amplitude and pitch, made by directing a stream of air with the tongue towards the teeth. Examples of sibilants are the consonants at the beginning of the English words ''sip'', ''zip'', ''ship'', and ...

chain shift In historical linguistics, a chain shift is a set of sound changes in which the change in pronunciation of one speech sound (typically, a phoneme) is linked to, and presumably causes, a change in pronunciation of other sounds as well. The soun ...

: *c > *s > /h/ *

denasalization In phonetics, denasalization is the loss of nasal airflow in a nasal sound, such as a nasal consonant or a nasal vowel. That may be due to speech pathology but also occurs when the paranasal sinus, sinuses are blocked from a common cold, when it i ...

: *m > /ɓ/ and possibly *ŋ > /g/ * *e-lowering: *e > /ä/ * *sC-cluster compression: *sk, *st, *sp > /kʰ, tʰ, pʰ/

Usage

The language was the vernacular of the Pyu states. But

Sanskrit Sanskrit (; attributively , ; nominally , , ) is a classical language belonging to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages. It arose in South Asia after its predecessor languages had diffused there from the northwest in the late ...

and

Pali Pali () is a Middle Indo-Aryan liturgical language native to the Indian subcontinent. It is widely studied because it is the language of the Buddhist ''Pāli Canon'' or ''Tipiṭaka'' as well as the sacred language of ''Theravāda'' Buddhism ...

appeared to have co-existed alongside Pyu as the court language. The Chinese records state that the 35 musicians that accompanied the Pyu embassy to the Tang court in 800–802 played music and sang in the ''Fàn'' ( "Sanskrit") language.

Notes

References

* * * *

External links

The Pre-History of Pyu, Marc Miyake

Datasets for Pyu inscriptions
photographed by James Miles {{Sino-Tibetan branches Unclassified Sino-Tibetan languages Languages of Myanmar Languages attested from the 7th century Languages extinct in the 13th century