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18-585: Kyethi ( Shan : ဝဵင်းၵေႇသီႇ ; Burmese : ကျေးသီးမြို့ )(Kyethi or Kehsi) is the main town of Kyethi Township , Loilem District , in the Shan State of Burma . The main town is Kesi (Kyethi or Kehsi). Highway 442 passes through Kyethi town. Kehsi, located by the Nam Heng River , was the capital of Kehsi Mansam , one of the Shan States . It had a population of 618 in 1901. This Shan State location article

36-564: A fortis–lenis and a palatalization contrast: /N, n, Nʲ, nʲ, R, r, Rʲ, rʲ, L, l, Lʲ, lʲ/ . There were also /ŋ, ŋʲ, m/ and /mʲ/ , making 16 sonorant phonemes in total. Voiceless sonorants have a strong tendency to either revoice or undergo fortition , for example to form a fricative like /ç/ or /ɬ/ . In connected, continuous speech in North American English , /t/ and /d/ are usually flapped to [ ɾ ] following sonorants, including vowels, when followed by

54-659: A glottal stop [ʔ] and obstruent sounds such as [p], [t], and [k]. The syllable structure of Shan is C(G)V((V)/(C)), which is to say the onset consists of a consonant optionally followed by a glide , and the rhyme consists of a monophthong alone, a monophthong with a consonant, or a diphthong alone. (Only in some dialects, a diphthong may also be followed by a consonant.) The glides are: -w-, -y- and -r-. There are seven possible final consonants: /ŋ/ , /n/ , /m/ , /k/ , /t/ , /p/ , and /ʔ/ . Some representative words are: Typical Shan words are monosyllabic. Multisyllabic words are mostly Pali loanwords, or Burmese words with

72-612: A Shan-English dictionary. Aside from this, the language is almost completely undescribed in English. Sonorant In phonetics and phonology , a sonorant or resonant is a speech sound that is produced with continuous, non-turbulent airflow in the vocal tract ; these are the manners of articulation that are most often voiced in the world's languages. Vowels are sonorants, as are semivowels like [j] and [w] , nasal consonants like [m] and [n] , and liquid consonants like [l] and [r] . This set of sounds contrasts with

90-431: A voiced fricative is so blurred that no language is known to contrast them. Thus, uvular , pharyngeal , and glottal fricatives never contrast with approximants. Voiceless sonorants are rare; they occur as phonemes in only about 5% of the world's languages. They tend to be extremely quiet and difficult to recognise, even for those people whose language has them. In every case of a voiceless sonorant occurring, there

108-437: Is Welsh . Its phonology contains a phonemic voiceless alveolar trill /r̥/ , along with three voiceless nasals: velar, alveolar and labial. Another European language with voiceless sonorants is Icelandic , with [l̥ r̥ n̥ m̥ ɲ̊ ŋ̊] for the corresponding voiced sonorants [l r n m ɲ ŋ]. Voiceless [r̥ l̥ ʍ] and possibly [m̥ n̥] are hypothesized to have occurred in various dialects of Ancient Greek . The Attic dialect of

126-588: Is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Shan language The number of Shan speakers is not known in part because the Shan population is unknown. Estimates of Shan people range from four million to 30 million, with about half speaking the Shan language. Ethnologue estimates that there are 4.6 million Shan speakers in Myanmar; the Mahidol University Institute for Language and Culture gave

144-551: Is a contrasting voiced sonorant. In other words, whenever a language contains a phoneme such as /ʍ/ , it also contains a corresponding voiced phoneme such as /w/ . Voiceless sonorants are most common around the Pacific Ocean (in Oceania , East Asia , and North and South America ) and in certain language families (such as Austronesian , Sino-Tibetan , Na-Dene and Eskimo–Aleut ). One European language with voiceless sonorants

162-585: The Classical period likely had [r̥] as the regular allophone of /r/ at the beginning of words and possibly when it was doubled inside words. Hence, many English words from Ancient Greek roots have rh initially and rrh medially: rhetoric , diarrhea . English has the following sonorant consonantal phonemes: /l/, /m/, /n/, /ŋ/, /ɹ/, /w/, /j/ . Old Irish had one of the most complex sonorant systems recorded in linguistics, with 12 coronal sonorants alone. Coronal laterals , nasals , and rhotics had

180-416: The nucleus of a syllable in languages that place that distinction at that level of sonority; see Syllable for details. Sonorants contrast with obstruents , which do stop or cause turbulence in the airflow. The latter group includes fricatives and stops (for example, /s/ and /t/ ). Among consonants pronounced in the back of the mouth or in the throat, the distinction between an approximant and

198-461: The obstruents ( stops , affricates and fricatives ). For some authors, only the term resonant is used with this broader meaning, while sonorant is restricted to the consonantal subset—that is, nasals and liquids only, not vocoids (vowels and semivowels). Whereas obstruents are frequently voiceless , sonorants are almost always voiced. In the sonority hierarchy , all sounds higher than fricatives are sonorants. They can therefore form

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216-574: The tones of syllables. There are five to six tonemes in Shan, depending on the dialect. The sixth tone is only spoken in the north; in other parts it is only used for emphasis. The table below presents six phonemic tones in unchecked syllables, i.e. closed syllables ending in sonorant sounds such as [m], [n], [ŋ], [w], and [j] and open syllables. The following table shows an example of the phonemic tones: The Shan tones correspond to Thai tones as follows: The table below presents four phonemic tones in checked syllables, i.e. closed syllables ending in

234-902: The Northern Shan State dialect, and the dialect spoken in Laos . There are also dialects still spoken by a small number of people in Kachin State , such as Tai Laing , and Khamti spoken in northern Sagaing Region . Shan has 19 consonants. Unlike Thai and Lao ( Isan ) there are no voiced plosives /d/ and /b/. Shan has ten vowels and 13 diphthongs: [iw], [ew], [ɛw]; [uj], [oj], [ɯj], [ɔj], [ɤj]; [aj], [aɯ], [aw]; [aːj], [aːw] Shan has less vowel complexity than Thai, and Shan people learning Thai have difficulties with sounds such as "ia," "ua," and "uea" [ɯa] . Triphthongs are absent. Shan has no systematic distinction between long and short vowels characteristic of Thai. Shan has phonemic contrasts among

252-511: The initial weak syllable /ə/ . Given the present instabilities in Burma, one choice for scholars is to study the Shan people and their language in Thailand, where estimates of Shan refugees run as high as two million, and Mae Hong Son Province is home to a Shan majority. The major source for information about the Shan language in English is Dunwoody Press's Shan for English Speakers . They also publish

270-463: The north, initial /k/, /kʰ/ and /m/ , when combined with certain vowels and final consonants, are pronounced /tʃ/ (written ky ), /tʃʰ/ (written khy ) and /mj/ (written my ). In Chinese Shan, initial /n/ becomes /l/ . In southwestern regions /m/ is often pronounced as /w/ . Initial /f/ only appears in the east, while in the other two dialects it merges with /pʰ/ . J. Marvin Brown divides

288-527: The northern, southern, and eastern dialects. Dialects differ to a certain extent in vocabulary and pronunciation, but are generally mutually intelligible. While the southern dialect has borrowed more Burmese words, eastern Shan is somewhat closer to Northern Thai language and Lao in vocabulary and pronunciation, and the northern so-called " Chinese Shan " is much influenced by the Yunnan-Chinese dialect. A number of words differ in initial consonants. In

306-459: The number of Shan speakers in Thailand as 95,000 in 2006, though including refugees from Burma they now total about one million. Many Shan speak local dialects as well as the language of their trading partners. The Shan language has a number of names in different Tai languages and Burmese . The Shan dialects spoken in Shan State can be divided into three groups, roughly coinciding with geographical and modern administrative boundaries, namely

324-628: The three dialects of Shan State as follows: Prominent divergent dialects are considered separate languages, such as Khün (called Kon Shan by the Burmese), which is spoken in Kengtung valley. Chinese Shan is also called Tai Mao, referring to the old Shan State of Mong Mao . Tai Long is used to refer to the Southern Shan State dialect spoken in southern and central regions west of the Salween River ,

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