I don't think I've ever said it here but my area of interest in linguistics is etymology, actually! I love reading about words and how they came to be. Unfortunately, since each and every word has their own little garden path they took in the course of history, it's hard for a person to keep track of them. At least etymology of words in my target languages are well-documented but that's not really the case with Burmese.
Burmese is a Tibeto-Burman language and like most other languages, it is a beautiful entangled mess. Old Burmese is a mix of Mon, Pyu and Pali languages. Modern Burmese is heavily influenced by languages of our neighbouring countries: which if you don't know are China, India, Thai, Bangladesh and Laos. [Side note: I think people have a general idea of where those five countries are but most people have no clue where Myanmar is. We're squarely in the middle of those five.] Anyway, I've been looking for etymology books on Burmese but they're not widely available to the public. The only source you can easily look up is Wikitionary but they're not that credible and also wikipedia is banned in Myanmar. And yes, you should be mad about that. Other than that, I love comparative studies about languages but I've never thought about what languages do I want to compare and study about. It'll come to me one day, I hope? For now, my thing is learn languages and read a lot about etymology.
