By way of the Digital Traveler, here’s a picture of a storefront in Rangoon, Myanmar. The name Myanmar suggests that the picture was taken after June 18, 1989, when the ruling junta changed the name of the country from Burma to Myanmar. The striking circular letterforms are Burmese characters. (Let’s hope they will never be designated “Myanmarian.”)
Here’s what I just learned about the Burmese alphabet at Wikipedia:
It is properly called the Burmese abugida, and the characters are round because straight lines would have ripped the palm leaves on which it was traditionally written. There are 33 consonants, but the last letter in this alphabet—although recognized as a consonant, is actually a vowel,—and this secret vowel can furthermore be used to indicate other vowels.
This alphabet reads from left to right, just as English does. There are no spaces between words, but when casually written there are sometimes spaces between phrases. The puctuation is limited to two characters, one or two downward strokes, which serve as a comma and a period, respectively. (This is perhaps not so strange when you consider that in Roman times, Latin was written without worspaces and without punctuation of any kind.)
The Burmese abugida evolved from the Mon script, which has its roots in the Brahmi script of ancient India, which many academics now believe “had indigenous origins, probably from the Indus Valley (Harrapan) script.” Which is a way of saying that it probably does not share a common ancestor of European scripts, as had long been believed.