The Pyu language (Pyu: Pyu_pyx

; , ; also Tircul language) is an extinct Sino-Tibetan language that was mainly spoken in what is now

Myanmar Myanmar, officially the Republic of the Union of Myanmar; and also referred to as Burma (the official English name until 1989), is a country in northwest Southeast Asia. It is the largest country by area in Mainland Southeast Asia and has ...

in the first millennium CE. It was the

vernacular Vernacular is the ordinary, informal, spoken language, spoken form of language, particularly when perceptual dialectology, perceived as having lower social status or less Prestige (sociolinguistics), prestige than standard language, which is mor ...

of the

Pyu city-states The Pyu city-states ( ) were a group of city-states that existed from about the 2nd century BCE to the mid-11th century in present-day Upper Myanmar. The city-states were founded as part of the southward migration by the Tibeto-Burman languages, ...

, which thrived between the second century BCE and the ninth century CE. Its usage declined starting in the late ninth century when the

Bamar people The Bamar people ( Burmese: ဗမာလူမျိုး, ''ba. ma lu myui:'' ) (formerly known as Burmese people or Burmans) are a Sino-Tibetan-speaking ethnic group native to Myanmar (formerly known as Burma). With an estimated population ...

Nanzhao Nanzhao ( zh, t=南詔, s=南诏, p=Nánzhào), also spelled Nanchao, , Yi language: ꂷꏂꌅ, ''Mashynzy'') was a dynastic kingdom that flourished in what is now southwestern China and northern Southeast Asia during the 8th and 9th centuri ...

began to overtake the Pyu city-states. The language was still in use, at least in royal inscriptions of the Pagan Kingdom 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 (; ) is a Tibeto-Burman languages, Tibeto-Burman language spoken in Myanmar, where it is the official language, lingua franca, and the native language of the Bamar people, Bamar, the country's largest ethnic group. Burmese dialects are a ...

, 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) and the multi-lingual Myazedi inscription (early 12th century). These were first deciphered by Charles Otto Blagden in the early 1910s. The Pyu script was a Brahmic script. 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 languages, Sino-Tibetan family. Names Until ca. 1950, the endonym ''Lolo'' was written with Graphic pejoratives in written C ...

by Matisoff and thought to most likely be Luish by Bradley, 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 Linguistics, linguist who specializes in historical linguistics, particularly the study of Old Japanese and Tangut language, Tangut. Biography Miyake was born in Aiea, Hawaii, in 1971, and attended Punahou School in Honolulu, g ...

reconstructs the

syllable A syllable is a basic unit of organization within a sequence of speech sounds, such as within a word, typically defined by linguists as a ''nucleus'' (most often a vowel) with optional sounds before or after that nucleus (''margins'', which are ...

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

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 (20 January 1889 – 3 May 1979) was a colonial scholar in Burma. His outstanding library containing books, manuscripts, maps and photographs – The Luce Collection – was acquired by the National Library of Australia ...

and

Sound changes

Pyu displays the following sound changes from Proto-Tibeto-Burman. *

sibilant Sibilants (from 'hissing') are fricative and affricate 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 w ...

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. The sounds invo ...

: *c > *s > /h/ * denasalization: *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. However,

Sanskrit Sanskrit (; stem form ; nominal singular , ,) is a classical language belonging to the Indo-Aryan languages, Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages. It arose in northwest South Asia after its predecessor languages had Trans-cultural ...

and

Pali Pāli (, IAST: pāl̤i) is a Classical languages of India, classical Middle Indo-Aryan languages, Middle Indo-Aryan language of the Indian subcontinent. It is widely studied because it is the language of the Buddhist ''Pali Canon, Pāli Can ...

appear to have co-existed alongside Pyu as the court language. The Chinese records state that the 35 musicians who 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