The Mon script (Mon: အက္ခရ်မန်, Burmese: မွန်အက္ခရာ, Thai: อักษรมอญ) is a Brahmic abugida used for writing Mon language which was derived from the Burmese script.^[3]

History

The Old Mon script has been dated to the 6th century,^[4] with the earliest inscriptions found in Nakhon Pathom and Saraburi (in Thailand). It may be the ancestral script of the modern Mon (or Burma Mon) script, although there is no extant evidence linking the Old Dvaravati Mon script and the Burma Mon script.^[5]

The modern Mon alphabet is an adaptation of the Burmese script; it utilizes several letters and diacritics that do not exist in Burmese, such as the stacking diacritic for medial 'l', which is placed underneath the letter.^[6] There is a great deal of discrepancy between the written and spoken forms of Mon, with a single pronunciation capable of having several spellings.^[7] The Mon script also makes prominent use of consonant stacking, to represent consonant clusters found in the language.

Vowels

Mon uses the same diacritics and diacritic combinations as in Burmese to represent vowels, with the addition of a few diacritics unique to the Mon script, including ဴ (/ɛ̀a/), and ဳ (/i/), since the diacritic ိ represents /ìˀ/.^[8] Also, ဨ (/e/) is used instead of ဧ, as in Burmese.

Main vowels and diphthongs

Other vowels and diphthongs

Consonants

The Mon alphabet contains 35 consonants (including a zero consonant), as follows, with consonants belonging to the breathy register indicated in gray:^[9][10]

In the Mon script, consonants belong to one of two registers: clear and breathy, each of which has different inherent vowels and pronunciations for the same set of diacritics. For instance, က, which belongs to the clear register, is pronounced /kaˀ/, while ဂ is pronounced /kɛ̤ˀ/, to accommodate the vowel complexity of the Mon phonology.^[11] The addition of diacritics makes this obvious. Whereas in Burmese spellings with the same diacritics are rhyming, in Mon this depends on the consonant's inherent register. A few examples are listed below:

• က + ဳ → ကဳ, pronounced /ki/
• ဂ + ဳ → ဂဳ, pronounced /ki̤/
• က + ူ → ကူ, pronounced /kao/
• ဂ + ူ → ဂူ, pronounced /kṳ/

The Mon language has 8 medials, as follows: ္ၚ (/-ŋ-/), ၞ (/-n-/), ၟ (/-m-/), ျ (/-j-/), ြ (/-r-/), ၠ (/-l-/), ွ (/-w-/), and ှ (/-h-/).

Consonantal finals are indicated with a virama (်), as in Burmese: however, instead of being pronounced as glottal stops as in Burmese, final plosives usually keep their respective pronunciations. Furthermore, consonant stacking is possible in Mon spellings, particularly for Pali and Sanskrit-derived vocabulary.

Punctuation

Unicode

The Mon script has been encoded as a part of the Myanmar block with the release version of Unicode 3.0.

Four types of Mon writing

Gallery