Eastern Pwo language
Eastern Pwo or Phlou, is a Karen language spoken by Eastern Pwo people and over a million people in Myanmar and by about 50,000 in Thailand, where it has been called Southern Pwo. It is not intelligible with other varieties of Pwo, with which it shares 63 to 65% lexical similarity. The Eastern Pwo dialects share 91 to 97% lexical similarity.
A script called Leke was developed between 1830 and 1860 and is used by members of the millenarian Leke sect of Buddhism. Otherwise, a variety of Mon-Burmese alphabets are used, and refugees in Thailand have created a Thai alphabet that is in limited use.
Distribution
- Kayin State and Tanintharyi Region: long contiguous area near the Thai border
- Bago Region: Bago and Toungoo townships
Phonology
The following displays the phonological features of two of the eastern Pwo Karen dialects, Pa'an and Tavoy:Consonants
- Post-alveolar affricates //, are realized as fricatives, among some formal dialects.
- // when pronounced slowly is phonetically realized as a dental affricate .
- Voiced plosives // are pronounced as implosives only in the Pa'an dialect.
- // does not exist in the Tavoy dialect.
- // may tend to be slightly fricativized when preceding front vowels.
- // may also be realized as a tap .
Vowels
- // does not occur after a // sound.
- // are merged with // in the Tavoy dialect.
Tones
Four tones are present in Eastern Pwo:Dialects
Alphabet
The alphabet used for Eastern Pwo Karen language is in Mon-Burmese script.Letters
The Eastern Pwo alphabet contains 36 letters, including 3 unique to the language, and one shared with Mon.Numerals
The Eastern Pwo Karen numeric symbols have been in a future Burmese Unicode block.- The number zero, ploh plih, means "of no value".
- The number zero is not used in day-to-day life and mostly exists in writing only. People are taught to use the Burmese numeric system instead, including zero.
- Chi denotes 10, any number from 1 to 9 before chi can be interpreted as "of ten", so 20 would be ne chi. Pong denotes 100, any number from 1 to 9 before pong can be interpreted as "hundred", so 200 would be ne pong. Similarly, the same rule applies to thousand, muh ; ten-thousand, lah ; and hundred-thousand, loud/thein.
- Numbers after the hundred-thousands are prefixed with thay, hundred thousand. For example, one million would be loud/thein luh chi, "hundred thousand of tens"; two million would be loud/thay ne chi , hundred thousand of two tens; ten million would be loud/thay luh pong, "hundred thousand of hundreds"; one billion would be loud/thay luh lah, "hundred thousand of ten thousands".