Syllable Segmentation

Syllable segmentation is the process of determination of syllable boundaries in a piece of text. Since Burmese is the tonal and analytic language and Burmese writing system is a syllabic writing system, the fundamental building blocks of a language are the syllables. In determination of syllable boundaries in Burmese Script, there can be of two types; 1) phonological boundary of a syllable, and 2) orthographic boundary of a syllable. Since Burmese script is a phonetic script, the phonological segmentation of a syllable is the basic segmentation. The phonological boundary of a syllable is defined, as the name goes, according to the phonological manner whereas the orthographic boundary of a syllable is defined according to the orthography. The orthographic syllable need not correspond exactly with a phonological syllable. The orthographic syllable is just the combination of phonological syllables and the non-breaking rules. Example: In a မႏၱေလး word, it has 3 phonological syllables, မန္, တ and ေလး. But, for orthographic syllable, it has just 2 syllables, မႏၱ and ေလး .