Shan

Ian James
© November 2009

The Shan script is used in Myanmar for the language of Tai Yai, a Tai language related to Thai and Lao. Across the border in China, a different script is used for the very similar Dehong Dai (Tai Le) language.

Notable Features

Some letters are the same as Burmese, and others are stylistically similar. So circular shapes feature in the script.
The vowels are printed as diacritics above, below, after or before their consonant, in the Indic manner.
The vowel system is simpler than Thai, and there are consonant clusters usually only in Pali words.
Words are syllabic, and end in a vowel, or vowel+nasal, or vowel+stop.
Each consonant has an inherent short /a/.

Consonants

The font used here is a slightly compressed, modern style. The letters in blue are used only for dialects and foreign words.

Some common marks affect consonants: the final marker, the palatizer, and the wrap-around /r/. These last two appear in imported words. Here they are shown used with consonants /t/, /s/ and /ph/ in red:

Vowels

Before a final consonant, we can see the simplest form of vowel. Here and below, an initial /m/ in red is used to hold the vowel mark:

Final vowels are slightly more complicated:

Tone marks & punctuation

Tone marks come at the end of a syllable. Here are shown the marks following the syllable /kha:/ in red, with the voice contour in green; unmarked syllables are rising (24):

Numerals

In Myanmar, two sets of numerals are used, a form of Burmese (top) and the Shan (bottom):

Example

This is the first two verses of the gospel of John (missionary bible). A common, circular style font is used here:

For the third verse, the font outlined above is used: