Shan alphabet

The Shan script is a Brahmic abugida, used for writing the Shan language, which was derived from the Burmese script. Due to its recent reforms, the Shan alphabet is more phonetic than other Burmese-derived scripts.

History

Around the 15th or 16th centuries, the Mon–Burmese script was borrowed and adapted to write a Tai language of northern Burma. This adaptation eventually resulted in the Shan alphabet, as well as the Tai Le script, Ahom script and Khamti script. This group of scripts has been called the "Lik Tai" scripts or "Lik" scripts, and are used by various Tai peoples in northeastern India, northern Myanmar, southwestern Yunnan, and northwestern Laos.According to the scholar Warthon, evidence suggests that the ancestral Lik-Tai script was borrowed from the Mon–Burmese script in the fifteenth century, most probably in the polity of Mong Mao. The scholar Daniels describes a Lik Tai script featured on a 1407 Ming dynasty scroll, which shows greater similarity to the Ahom script than to the Lik Tho Ngok (Tai Le) script. It is believed that the Ahom people had already adopted their script before migrating to the Brahmaputra Valley in the 13th century. However, modern linguistic and epigraphic research suggests that the development of the Ahom script likely occurred later than the 13th century. The earliest surviving Ahom inscription, the Snake Pillar inscription, dates only to the late 15th–early 16th century, and scholars generally agree that the script was adapted from a proto-Shan script derived from Burmese between the late 14th and 16th centuries.

Until the 1960s, Shan alphabet utilised vowel symbols and tone marks used in the Burmese script, which did not sufficiently distinguish all the phonemic distinctions in Shan.