Burmese Page @ Omniglot

Burmese Orthography @ World's Writing System

Burmese Script @ Wikipedia

Burmese is one of Scripts in which the Pali Tripitaka is recorded. The Script has expanded itself from the basic brahmic model to include more vowels and tone markers. 

The following Character set is used to write Sanskrit/Pali.

Vowels

   a          ā         i            ī        u       ū      ṛ       ṝ      ḷ      ḹ      e      ai         o             au            aṁ      aḥ

There are also other various vowel combinations used to write the native language. 

Consonants

     ka        kha       ga        gha        ṅa

  ca         cha        ja          jha       ña

   ṭa         ṭha      ḍa       ḍha         ṇa

     ta            tha          da       dha      na

    pa       pha       ba           bha        ma

    ya            ra           la           va 

   śa         ṣa          sa            ha           ḽa(ळ)

  

      ssa               ñña

Consonant-Vowel Combinations  

     ka           kā               ki           kī           ku          kū           kṛ                kṝ

    kḷ             kḹ               ke           kai                ko                 kau               kaṁ         kaḥ

Conjuncts

Burmese follows subjoined model for conjuncts except for /ra/ & /ya/. The second consonant takes a minature form below the first consonant to form the conjuncts cluster.

    sta              tpa           kta           hma          jjha

Clusters with ./r/, /y/, /h/ & /v/ have special forms.

    mra        mya       mha      mva

Pure Consonant ṅ takes a special form above the base consonant, it is called as Kinzi.

gaṅgā -  

Also, Note the change of shape for Vowel Sign aa with /ga/. Vowel Sign aa changes shape with consonants kha ga ṅa da pa va. 

As combination with normal /aa/ could be mistaken for another consonant.

(For more information of Burmese script: see: http://people.w3.org/rishida/scripts/myanmar )

Burmese Unicode

Burmese Unicode has undergone a great number of change from version 5.1. Both versions are nearly incompatible.

Until Version 5.0, The Burmese block nearly followed the Main Land Indic Model. It had a single Virama and Atomic Medial Signs were not encoded. Contextual shape changing for vowel sign aa was in place.

But from 5.1 the following changes were made

• Two Viramas are now encoded. One is a subjoining Virama U+1039 and other is an Explicit Virama U+103A (ASAT)
• Medial Signs were encoded separately  Medial ra, Media ya, Medial va and Media ha respectively. In the previous version, these were formed using Virama similar to other Indic scripts..
  • Kra should now be encoded as /ka/ + Medial ra. (Similarly for the other medial letters )

• Two Vowel Signs for /aa/ are encoded. Previously, The shape was decided by the intelligent rendering of the font. But now the shape has to be decided explicitly.
• Kinzi previously rendered using a simple Virama, now must be rendered as a combination of  U+1004 Nga, U+103A Asat and U+1039 Virama

The converter can render the text in Old Unicode by selecting the corresponding Checkbox  - Old Burmese Unicode. Do note that, that this text would be incompatible with fonts that support the new version.

Font Issues for displaying Sanskrit Text

Burmese has 3 good fonts for displaying Pali/Sanskrit. Padauk, Myanmar 1 & Myanmar 3 (and its variant Myanmar3h)

(See: http://www.myanmarnlp.net.mm/opentype.htm & my.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Font#Unicode_5.1_Myanmar.2FBurmese_fonts)

All these fonts have near full support of Displaying pali text, since Pali doesn't have complex conjuncts and consonant clusters similar to Sanskrit.

The fonts do not support conjuncts with 3 consonants or more (Except for ra, ya, va which have special forms). The subjoining consonants overlap below the base character. In that case,a visible Virama can be used to display the conjuncts properly.

Myanamar3

It doesn't support combinations with Visarga. A dotted circle appears with Visarga, when combined with consonants. The same occurs with Vocalic Signs

However it supports various conjuncts like kṣa, jña etc which Padauk doesn't render properly. It also has problems with Tall aa & Kinzi combinations.

Padauk

A great looking font which supports Visarga and Vocalic Signs. But strangely it doesn't render conjuncts such as  kṣa, jña among others. 

One work-around is to replace the subjoining Virama with the explicit Virama 

Also complex conjuncts with ya like trya are not supported. In which case, one has to switch to Myanmar fonts.

Myanamar1 

This is a font based on the old Encoding. Mimics the Indic model as such. It supports Visarga and Vocalic Signs. Also renders complex combinations /trya/ properly.

However, does not render Media ra with SSA & SHA. The Medial sign is displayed after the consonant instead of the front of consonant. 

It forms a explicit virama over conjuncts such as  kṣa, jña etc automatically, as it doesn't have a base-below rendering for those consonants. 

Recommended Fonts

It is recommended to use Padauk (New Unicode) or Myanmar1 (Old Unicode) for displaying Sanskrit in Burmese.

For displaying for text complex conjuncts, the following technique can be followed:

Myanmar1 and Myanmar3 typefaces are more similar, Intelligent font switching can be used to render the text correctly. In a Myanamar1 text, the unsupported Conjunct text can be changed to Myanamar3, to display them correctly. The font size may also have to be changed to suit the text.

An example for Mixed font selection is shown below:

nirvikalpe namastubhyaṁ prajñāpāramitemite 

yā tvaṁ sarvānavadyāṅgi niravadyairnirīkṣyase 

Sample Sanskrit Text

अनिरोधम् अनुत्पादम् अनुच्छेदम् अशाश्वतम् ।

अनेकार्थम् अनानार्थम् अनागमम् अनिर्गमम् ॥

यः प्रतीत्यसमुत्पादं प्रपञ्चोपशमं शिवम् ।

देशयामास संबुद्धस्तं वन्दे वदतां वरम् ॥

အနိရောဓမ် အနုတ္ပာဒမ် အနုစ္ဆေဒမ် အၑာၑွတမ် ၊ 

အနေကာရ္ထမ် အနာနာရ္ထမ် အနာဂမမ် အနိရ္ဂမမ် ။   

ယး ပြတီတျသမုတ္ပာဒံ ပြပဉ္စောပၑမံ ၑိဝမ် ၊  

ဒေၑယာမာသ သံဗုဒ္ဓသ္တံ ဝန္ဒေ ဝဒတာံ ဝရမ် ။