Hpon

[aka Hpön, Phun, Phön]

Classification: Sino-Tibetan

·

Dormant

guide

The Structure of Hpun Sentences

This paper is one of the main parts of a comprehensive description of the Hpun language. The Hpun language is, without doubt, one of the moribund languages spoken in Myanmar (Yabu, Shiro 2002). Among the ten last remaining Hpun persons, six of those are able to be recognized as the last native speakers of Hpun language. For that reason we can say that there are only six persons who can speak the Hpun language in Myanmar. All of them are aged persons (60 years old and over) and they live in some villages near the first defile of the Irrawaddy River, below Sinbo (Town) in Myitkyina District. Five of those are women and only one is a man. Hpun utterances cannot be necessarily given promptly when they all are asked. They can, therefore, no longer enjoy talking to each other in Hpun. Only if they want to tease youths and children about something, they usually speak Hpun language to make a joke to conceal something intentionally. In this paper I will attempt to provide a general introduction to the syntactic structure of the Hpun language from the descriptive point of view.

Read document

Tun Aung Kyaw

Tun Aung Kyaw

This paper is one of the main parts of a comprehensive description of the Hpun language. The Hpun language is, without doubt, one of the moribund languages spoken in Myanmar (Yabu, Shiro 2002). Among the ten last remaining Hpun persons, six of those are a

2010

Grammar

English

Comments