The Role of Sanskrit in The Development of The Myanmar Language

Foreign languages come into contavt with the mother tongue for various reasons. Sanskrit is one of the foreign languages which have infiltrated the Myanmar language. Sanskrit-derived Myanmar vocabulary includes words which depict concrete materials, express abstract ideas, and personal names. There are a considerable number of such kinds of vocabulary. The scope in which such words are used is also wide. In this paper, Sanskrit-derived Myanmar vocabulary is studied and presented according to the fields in which they are used. By observing the number of words used in each field, we can speculate the subjects that Myanmar people have been interested in and studied. As Sanskrit vocabulary has been linguistically modified to adapt to the Myanmar language, we can also learn about the process of change from the sounds of Sanskrit to those of the Myanmar language