It's supposed to be. Both names, "Burma" and "Myanmar", are formed under the assumption that your English pronunciation is non-rhotic.
The same is true of the common Korean surname "Park", which does not contain any R-like sound. British spellings of foreign words really cause tremendous damage to the pronunciations used by rhotic speakers.
It's such a strange thing to use an 'r' to modify the sound of the preceding vowel, and it's not even as if it's 100% consistent, because all English is a mess.
This expectation also leads to comical situations like the typical British pronunciation of "pasta". I guess the Italians should have spelled it parsta.
Officially, the Queen's English says this is pronounced "drawing". But most Brits feel compelled to insert an R, "drawRing".
It is much like Americans saying "Mel and I", in object context, e.g. "She accused Mel and I", where "Mel and me" would have been right.
Am British, literally no one I know personally puts an extra R in when pronouncing drawing. I have heard it said that way before but you certainly couldn’t say that “most” Brits do it.
I am amused that your sibling comment insists "drawRing" is correct British pronunciation.
They really are compelled to insert an R there. That is one of the phonological rules of their variety of English; it's how you avoid running one vowel into another vowel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linking_and_intrusive_R
Complaining about this is the equivalent of complaining about how Americans "feel" compelled to insert a vowel into the name Gbagbo, pronouncing it guh-bagbo. They don't just feel compelled; that is a genuine requirement of their language.
It is not at all similar to any variation on "Mel and I", which is an artificial rule that English speakers must be taught in school. The form people use naturally is "me and Mel".
> It is not at all similar to any variation on "Mel and I", which is an artificial rule that English speakers must be taught in school. The form people use naturally is "me and Mel".
I think you're misunderstanding here. There's no situation where "she accused (Mel and) I" works. It's not taught in school. It happens because of people "hyper correcting" to match the inverted sentence. "(Mel and) I accused her" which they get corrected to use by the teacher when they say "(Mel and) me accused her".
> There's no situation where "she accused (Mel and) I" works.
That is true.
> It happens because of people "hyper correcting" to match the inverted sentence. "(Mel and) I accused her" which they get corrected to use by the teacher
That is also true. But your own example is telling you that there is also no situation where "Mel and I accused her" works. Sentences in that form do not naturally occur in English; they must be taught in school. The correct form would be "Me and Mel accused her".
Intrusive R isn't like that. It is a feature of the language, not something dictated to speakers by a formal education system.
No it isn't. You'd never say "Me accused her". If you don't like the inversion its perfectly fine to say "I and Mel accused her", but using "me" for the subject is never correct.
Why do you believe this?
- "Me fail English." is considered to be a well formed construction, or that...
- ...adding a conjunction is important in determining whether "I" or "Me" is should be used.
It's just not the case that either of those are true in standard English.
While, in theory, you can have any rule you want within some sub-dialect, that would be a very strange rule indeed.
If you believe otherwise, you are tragically misinformed and miseducated.
Using "me" in subject context is, besides being wrong, a social low-class marker. It does not come naturally to English speakers; it only ever occurs through exposure to the misuse.
There are well-known phenomena like
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attraction_(grammar)
which can become conventionalized and eventually part of native speakers' intuitions even though they can be contrary to a more logically consistent or simpler understanding of agreement.
This is not even a theoretical possibility. There are no low-class markers that don't come naturally, because no one is going to make an effort to present themselves as low-class.
You are getting really disingenuous, now. Who are you performing for?
Compare the article on intrusive R I linked before:
> This is now common enough in parts of England that, by 1997, the linguist John C. Wells considered it objectively part of Received Pronunciation, though he noted that it was still stigmatized as an incorrect pronunciation, as it is or was in some other standardized non-rhotic accents. Wells writes that at least in RP, "linking /r/ and intrusive /r/ are distinct only historically and orthographically".[17]
Where footnote 17 cites a paper from 1982.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercorrection
while thaumasiotes is referring to
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonotactics
There are examples in the hypercorrection article about people adding an /h-/ in a very similar situation, so what you describe clearly can happen. But are you sure that the R example falls into that category?
It seems to be a distinction about how conscious the change is, or at what layer of language it happens. Isn't that an empirical question that could be tested?
Class markers in speech are always a moving target, a sort of low-grade arms race: low stakes for the upper class, high stakes for lower.
So, pronouncing it "drawRing" is a lower-class marker, similar in a way to "aks" for "ask" in American English.
As always, all of these pronunciations are legitimate and produce no misunderstanding.
[*] "er" is pronounced "uh" or "eh", rhotically.
I'm sorry but pretty much everyone who grew up with English as a second language would like to disagree.
Hearing "drawRing" to this day throws me off -- I have to repeat the noise to myself internally to make sure I understood it right.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but their opinion doesn't count.
Foreign speakers have no say in what's legitimate and may be confused by absolutely anything.
That is exactly the opposite of what TillE wrote. If that were how the British already pronounced the word, there would be no need to change the spelling.
> Got a source for your "typical British pronunciation" of "pasta" being non-Italian?
This is just infantile. You can verify the pronunciation yourself in any number of ways.
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/pasta (UK pronunciation: /ˈpæs.tə/)
https://youglish.com/pronounce/pasta/english/uk , if you want audio samples.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pasta#Pronunciation (UK pronunciation: /ˈpæstə/)
Source: expat living in Britain
What do you call a one-eyed dinosaur? A dyathinkhesawus. Without the intrusive 'r' this joke would not work.
> In Burmese, the pronunciation depends on the register used and is either Bama (pronounced [bəmà]) or Myamah (pronounced [mjəmà]).
That is, there is originally no R sound in either word in Burmese, as thaumasiotes clarified.
First, many English-speakers are familiar with -stan, which is used in seven different country names, plus some region names.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/-stan
For most of these, you can get an ethnonym or demonym by removing -stan or -istan.
Second, the -ar in particular has a lot of trouble with non-rhotic English accents, where "Myanmar" might already be pronounced the same as "Myanma"!