9.2. Where are you from? 
1. topic two
New Words
la-deh လာတယ် to come
beh-gá ဘယ်က where from?
nain-ngan နိုင်ငံ country, state
lu-myó လူမျိုး race, nationality (“man + kind, type”)
Sentences
S1 Beh-gá la-dhǎlèh? ဘယ်က လာသလဲ။ Where do you come from?
or Beh nain-ngan-gá la-dhǎlèh? ဘယ်နိုင်ငံက လာသလဲ။ What country do you come from?
S2 In-gǎlan-gá la-ba-deh. အင်္ဂလန်က လာပါတယ်။ I come from England.
Alternative question
S1 Ba lu-myò-lèh? ဘာလူမျိုးလဲ။ What nationality are you?
S2 Dutch lu-myò-ba. ဒတ်ချ်လူမျိုးပါ။ I’m Dutch.
Notes
Take care to distinguish the three basic place suffixes:
-ká/-gá “from”, -hma “in, at”, and no suffix (sometimes -ko/-go) “to”. Examples:
Tha-zi-gá la-ba-deh သာစည်က လာပါတယ်။ He comes from Thazi.
Tha-zi-hma ne-ba-deh သာစည်မှာ နေပါတယ်။ He lives in Thazi.
Tha-zi thwà-ba-deh သာစည် သွားပါတယ်။ He went to Thazi.
Variants.
Beh-gá la-da-lèh? “Where do you come from?” The three sequences [verb]-da-lèh? [verb]-dhǎlèh? [verb]-lèh? are all used in much the same way:
Beh-gá la-da-lèh? ဘယ်က လာတာလဲ။ Where do you come from?
Beh-gá la-dhǎlèh? ဘယ်က လာသလဲ။ Where do you come from?
Beh-gá la-lèh? ဘယ်က လာလဲ။ Where do you come from?
The same is true of questions ending in -là:
In-gǎlan-gá la-da-là? အင်္ဂလန်က လာတာလား။ Do you come from England?
In-gǎ lan-gá la-dhǎlà? အင်္ဂလန်က လာသလား။ Do you come from England?
In-gǎlan-gá la-là? အင်္ဂလန်က လာလား။ Do you come from England?
You will also hear the suffix -ta/-da in statements:
In-gǎlan-gá la-da-ba. အင်္ဂလန်က လာတာပါ။ I come from England.
In-gǎlan-gá la-ba-deh. အင်္ဂလန်က လာပါတယ်။ I come from England.
At this stage it is best to keep with the familiar forms (la-dhǎlà? la-ba-deh etc) for your own speaking, but you need to know the variants so that you can recognise them when others use them.
Names of countries
The Burmese names of the countries of the world are mostly modelled on the English names; for example:
In-gǎlan အင်္ဂလန် England
Ămerí-ká အမေရိက America
Ja-mǎni ဂျာမနီ Germany
I-tǎli အီတလီ Italy
Jǎpan ဂျပန် Japan
In-do-nì-shà အင်ဒိုနီးရှား Indonesia
Àw-sǎtrè-lyá သြစတြေးလျ Australia
Country names that are not based on English versions include the following:
Tǎyouq Nain-ngan တရုတ်နိုင်ငံ China
Pyin-thiq Nain-ngan ပြင်သစ်နိုင်ငံ France
Thi-rí Lin-ga Nain-ngan သီရိလင်္ကာနိုင်ငံ Sri Lanka
Another group of countries have an official name and a colloquial name, comparable to “The Netherlands” (official) and “Holland” (colloquial) in English:
T’aìn Nain-ngan ထိုင်းနိုင်ငံ Thailand (official)
Yò-dǎyà Nain-ngan ယိုးဒယားနိုင်ငံ Thailand (colloquial)
Thi-rí Lin-ga Nain-ngan သီရိလင်္ကာနိုင်ငံ Sri Lanka (official)
Thi-ho Nain-ngan သီဟိုဠ်နိုင်ငံ Sri Lanka (colloquial)
When the Burmese government wishes to express disapproval of Thai policies and actions, as it has done during the military and verbal skirmishes of 2001-2002, the state-run media have used Yò -dǎyà in place of the customary T’aìn Nain-ngan. The collo-quial term has thus been given, in those contexts, a hint of contempt or hostility.
Formerly the Burmese name for Burma itself also had official and colloquial variants:
Myan-ma Nain-ngan မြန်မာနိုင်ငံ Burma (official)
Bǎma Nain-ngan ဗမာနိုင်ငံ Burma (colloquial)
However, in 1989 the military government of Burma ruled that the form Myan-ma should be used for the whole country and matters concerned with it, while the form Bǎma should be limited to the ethnic Burmese. (The combination Bǎma Nainngan was thus to become meaningless, as the ethnic Burmese have no one state of their own.) The new distinction is observed in printed material in Burma, and in spoken public addresses, but in everyday conversation the traditional meanings are still preserved. The same ruling is applied to the English terms “Burma” and “Myanmar”: see About Burmese in the introduction to this booklet.
In many cases, and particularly for the colloquial forms, the word nain-ngan “country” may be replaced by pye (e.g. Yò-dǎyà Pye), which means the same thing; or it may be omitted altogether: people say Jǎpan thwà-meh “I’m going to go to Japan”.