Burmese script

Burmese
Type	Abugida
Languages	Burmese, Shan, Mon, Karen, others.
Time period	11th century - present
Parent systems	Proto-Sinaitic alphabet Phoenician alphabet Aramaic alphabet Brahmi script Kadamba or Pallava alphabet Pyu or Mon Burmese
Child systems	Burmese, Mon, Sgaw Karen, Shan
Direction	Left-to-right
ISO 15924	Mymr, 350
Unicode alias	Myanmar
Unicode range	U+1000–U+109F Myanmar U+AA60–U+AA7F Myanmar Extended-A U+A9E0–U+A9FF Myanmar Extended-B

The Burmese script is the basis of the alphabets used for modern Burmese, Mon, Shan and Karen.

Languages

An adaptation of the Old Mon script or the Pyu script, the Burmese script was originally used to write the Mon and Pyu languages, respectively. In modern times, besides being used to write the Burmese language, it has been adapted for use in writing other languages of Burma, most notably Shan, Mon (using a version of the script more similar to that used for Burmese than the original Old Mon script) and the S'gaw Karen language. It is also used for the liturgical languages of Pali and Sanskrit.

Unicode

The Burmese script was added to the Unicode Standard in September, 1999 with the release of version 3.0. Additional characters were added in subsequent releases.

Until 2005, most Burmese language websites used an image-based, dynamically-generated method to display Burmese characters, often in GIF or JPEG. At the end of 2005, the Burmese NLP Research Lab announced a Myanmar OpenType font named Myanmar1. This font contains not only Unicode code points and glyphs but also the OpenType Layout (OTL) logic and rules. Their research center is based in Myanmar ICT Park, Yangon. Padauk, which was produced by SIL International, is Unicode-compliant. Initially, it required a Graphite engine, though now OpenType tables for Windows are in the current version of this font. Since the release of the Unicode 5.1 Standard on 4 April 2008, three Unicode 5.1 compliant fonts have been available under public license, including Myanmar3, Padauk and Parabaik.^[1]

Many Burmese font makers have created Burmese fonts including Win Innwa, CE Font, Myazedi, Zawgyi, Ponnya, Mandalay. It is important to note that these Burmese fonts are not Unicode compliant, because they use unallocated code points (including those for the Latin script) in the Burmese block to manually deal with shaping that would normally be done by the Uniscribe engine and they are not yet supported by Microsoft and other major software vendors. However, there are few Burmese language websites that have switched to Unicode rendering, with many websites continuing to use a pseudo-Unicode font called Zawgyi (which uses codepoints allocated for minority languages and does not intelligently render diacritics, such as the size of ya-yit) or the GIF/JPG display method.

References