Pyu language (Sino-Tibetan)

Pyu
Tircul
Burmese: ပျူ ဘာသာ
Pyu alphabet
Region	Pyu city-states, Pagan Kingdom
Extinct	13th century
Language family	Sino-Tibetan Pyu
Writing system	Pyu script
Language codes
ISO 639-3	pyx
Linguist List	pyx
Glottolog	burm1262

The Pyu language (Pyu: ; Burmese: ပျူ ဘာသာ, IPA: [pjù bàðà]; also Tircul language) is an extinct Sino-Tibetan language that was mainly spoken in what is now Myanmar in the first millennium CE. It was the vernacular of the Pyu city-states, 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 of Nanzhao 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, 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. The most 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 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 reconstructs the syllable structure of Pyu as:

(C.)CV(C)(H)

(preinitial) + syllable

7 vowels are reconstructed.

	front	mid	back
high	i		u
mid	e	ə	o
low	æ		a

Miyake reconstructs 43-44 onsets, depending on whether or not the initial glottal stop 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

Location	Inventory number
Halin	01
Śrī Kṣetra	04
Pagan	07
Pagan	08
Śrī Kṣetra	10
Pagan	11
Śrī Kṣetra	12
Śrī Kṣetra	22
Śrī Kṣetra	25
Śrī Kṣetra	28
Śrī Kṣetra	29
Myittha	32
Myittha	39
Śrī Kṣetra	42
Śrī Kṣetra	55
Śrī Kṣetra	56
Śrī Kṣetra	57
Halin	60
Halin	61
???	63
Śrī Kṣetra	105
Śrī Kṣetra	160
???	163
Śrī Kṣetra	164
Śrī Kṣetra	167

Vocabulary

Below are selected Pyu basic vocabulary items from Gordon Luce and Marc Miyake.

Gloss	Luce (1985)	Miyake (2016)	Miyake (2021)
one	tå	ta(k·)ṁ	/tæk/
two	hni°	kni
three	ho:, hau:	hoḥ	/n.homH/ < *n.sumH < *məsumH
four	pḷå	plaṁ
five	pi°ŋa	(piṁ/miṁ) ṅa	/pəŋa/
six	tru	tru(k·?)
seven	kni	hni(t·?)ṁ
eight	hrå	hra(t·)ṁ
nine	tko	tko	/t.ko/
ten	sū, sau	su
twenty	tpū
bone, relic	ru
water	tdu̱-		/t.du/
gold	tha
day	phru̱
month	de
year	sni:
village	o
good; well	ha
to be in pain, ill	hni°:
nearness	mtu
name	mi		/r.miŋ/
I	ga°:
my	gi
wife	maya:
consort, wife	vo̱:
child, son	sa:		/saH/
grandchild	pli, pli°
give			/pæH/

Sound changes

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

• sibilant chain shift: *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. But Sanskrit and Pali appeared to have co-existed alongside Pyu as the court language. The Chinese records state that the 35 musicians that accompanied the Pyu embassy to the Tang court in 800–802 played music and sang in the Fàn (梵 "Sanskrit") language.

Pyu Pali	Burmese Pali	Thai Pali	Translation
(Pyu alphabet AD 500 to 600 Writings)	ဣတိပိ သော ဘဂဝါ အရဟံ သမ္မာသမ္ဗုဒ္ဓော ဝိဇ္ဇာစရဏသမ္ပန္နော	อิติปิ โส ภควา อรหํ สมฺมาสมฺพุทฺโธ วิชฺชาจรณสมฺปนฺโน	Thus, indeed is that Gracious One: The Worthy One, fully enlightened, endowed with clear vision and virtuous conduct,
	သုဂတော လောကဝိဒူ အနုတ္တရော ပုရိသဒမ္မ သာရထိ သတ္ထာ ဒေဝမနုသာနံ ဗုဒ္ဓေါ ဘဂဝါ(တိ)	สุคโต โลกวิทู อนุตฺตโร ปุริสทมฺมสารถิ สตฺถาเทวมนุสฺสานํ พุทฺโธ ภควา(ติ)	sublime, the Knower of the worlds, the unsurpassed guide of those who need taming, the Teacher of gods and men, the Buddha and the Gracious One.

Notes

References

• Aung-Thwin, Michael (2005). The mists of Rāmañña: The Legend that was Lower Burma (illustrated ed.). Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press. ISBN 978-0-8248-2886-8.
• Blagden, C. Otto (1911). "A preliminary study of the fourth text of the Myazedi inscriptions". Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain & Ireland. 43 (2): 365–388. doi:10.1017/S0035869X00041526. S2CID 163623038.
• Htin Aung, Maung (1967). A History of Burma. New York and London: Cambridge University Press.
• Miyake, Marc (2021). The Pyu Language of Ancient Burma. Beyond Boundaries. Vol. 6. De Gruyter. ISBN 9783110656442.

Further reading

• Griffiths, Arlo; Hudson, Bob; Miyake, Marc; Wheatley, Julian K. (2017). "Studies in Pyu Epigraphy, I: State of the Field, Edition and Analysis of the Kan Wet Khaung Mound Inscription, and Inventory of the Corpus". Bulletin de l'École française d'Extrême-Orient. 103: 43–205. doi:10.3406/befeo.2017.6247.
• Griffiths, Arlo, Marc Miyake & Julian K. Wheatley. 2021. Corpus of Pyu inscriptions.
• Harvey, G. E. (1925). History of Burma: From the Earliest Times to 10 March 1824. London: Frank Cass & Co. Ltd.
• Miyake, Marc (2018). "Studies in Pyu Phonology, ii: Rhymes". Bulletin of Chinese Linguistics. 11 (1–2): 37–76. doi:10.1163/2405478X-01101008.
• Miyake, Marc (2019). "A first look at Pyu grammar". Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area. 42 (2): 150–221. doi:10.1075/ltba.18013.miy. S2CID 213553247.
• Shafer, Robert (1943). "Further analysis of the Pyu inscriptions". Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies. 7 (4): 313–366. doi:10.2307/2717831. JSTOR 2717831.

External links

• The Pre-History of Pyu, Marc Miyake
• Searchable corpus of Pyu inscriptions
• Datasets for Pyu inscriptions, photographed by James Miles