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East Pwo Karen Basic Sentences and Word Order

As explained in the book, Culture, Customs and Literature of the Eastern Pwo Karen People in Myanmar, by Ashin Pin Nya Tha Mi (2022), the basic word order for Eastern Pwo Karen is Subject-Verb-Object, whereas the basic word order for Burmese is Subject-Object-Verb. We can see the examples shown below.

‘Uncle eats rice.’

Subject (ကတ္တား)Verb (ကြိယာ)Object (ကံ)
မင်စဝ်အင်းမေဝ်
Uncleeatrice
(Pin Nya Tha Mi, 2022, p. 98)

‘ဘကြီးသည် ထမင်းကို စားသည်။’

ကတ္တားကြိယာကံ
မင်စဝ်အင်းမေဝ်
ဘကြီးစားသည်ထမင်း
(Pin Nya Tha Mi, 2022, p. 98)

According to the research from Kato (2019), Karenic languages follow the word order of Subject-Verb-Object, unlike the languages of the Tibeto-Burman language family, most of which are Subject-Object-Verb type.

Kato (2019) also cited that the change of Karenic languages from Object-Verb to Verb-Object could have been the result of contact with Mon in the late first millennium AD (700-999 AD).

Examples are shown below.

‘Thawa struck Thakhlein.’

Subject (ကတ္တား)Verb (ကြိယာ)Object (ကံ)
သာအွာဍောဟ်သာခၠိင်း
ThawastrikeThakhlein
(Kato, 2019, Example 54)

“သာအွာသည် သာခလိင်းကို ရိုက်သည်။”

ကတ္တားကြိယာကံ
သာအွာဍောဟ်သာခၠိင်း
သာအွာရိုက်သည်သာခလိင်း
(Kato, 2019, Example 54) in Burmese translation

In the case of a ditransitive verb, the two objects are arranged in the order of Recipient – Theme.

(Kato, 2019, p. 142)

‘Thawa gave Thakhlein a jackfruit.’

SubjectVerbIndirect ObjectDirect Object
သာအွာဖှ်ေလင့်သာခၠိင်းနွဲာသး။
ThawagiveThakhleinjackfruit
(Kato, 2019, Example 55)

“သာအွာသည် သာခလိုင်းကို ပိန္နဲသီးတစ်လုံး ပေးသည်။”

ကတ္တားကြိယာကံ (Indirect)ကံ (Direct)
SubjectVerbIndirect ObjectDirect Object
သာအွာဖှ်ေလင့်သာခၠိင်းနွဲာသး။
သာအွာပေးသည်သာခလိင်းပိန္နဲသီး
(Kato, 2019, Example 55) in Burmese translation

References:

Kato, A. (2019, June 3). Pwo Karen. The Mainland Southeast Asia Linguistic Area, 131–175. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110401981-004

Pin Nya Tha Mi. (2022). Culture, Customs and Literature of the Eastern Pwo Karen People in Myanmar (1st Edition). Sarpay Beikman.

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