New Words       

k’ǎlè  ကလေး  child   

-yauq  -ယောက်  countword for people: see note   

-de or sometimes -dwe  -တွေ  plural suffix: see note   

Variant       

Meìn-k’ǎlè-là? Y auq-cà-lè-là?  မိန်းကလေးလား၊ ယောကျ်ားလေးလား။  Is it a girl or a boy?   

You will find a list of words for other relatives in the Topical Vocabulary for kin terms.       

  Sentences     

S1  K’ǎlè shí-là?  ကလေး ရှိလား။  Do you have any children? 

S2  Houq-kéh, shí-ba-deh.  ဟုတ်ကဲ့။ ရှိပါတယ်။  Yes, I have. 

or  Mǎshí-ba-bù.  မရှိပါဘူး။  No, I haven’t. 

or  Mǎshí-dhè-ba-bù.  မရှိသေးပါဘူး။  No, I haven’t any yet. 

S1  K’ǎlè beh-hnǎyauq shí-dhǎlèh?  ကလေး ဘယ်နှစ်ယောက် ရှိသလဲ။  How many children do you have? 

S2  Tǎyauq shí-ba-deh.  တစ်ယောက် ရှိပါတယ်။  I have one. 

S1  Thà-là? Thǎmì-là?  သားလား၊ သမီးလား။  Is it a son or a daughter? 

S2  Thà-ba.  သားပါ။  It’s a son. 

  or     

S2  Ngà-yauq shí-ba-deh.  ငါးယောက် ရှိပါတယ်။  I have five. 

S1  Thà-de-là? Thǎmì-de-là?  သားတွေလား၊ သမီးတွေလား။  Are they sons or daughters? 

S2  Thà thoùn-yauq, thǎmì hnǎyauq.  သား သုံးယောက်။ သမီး နှစ်ယောက်။  Three sons and two daughters. 

  Notes     

  K’ǎlè beh-hnǎyauq shí-dhǎlèh? “How many children do you have?” The word -yauq is a countword for people. Examples:     

  meiq-s’we lè-yauq  မိတ်ဆွေ လေးယောက်  four friends 

  s’ǎya-wun hnǎyauq  ဆရာဝန် နှစ်ယောက်  two doctors 

  ǎko thoùn-yauq  အကို သုံးယောက်  three brothers 

  thǎmì tǎyauq  သမီး တစ်ယောက်  one daughter 

  tù-riq beh-hnǎyauq  တူးရစ် ဘယ်နှစ်ယောက်  how many tourists 

  Compare other countwords in 6.5.     

  Thà-là? Thǎmì-là? “Is it a son or a daughter?” This is the standard pattern for questions taking the form “A or B?”. Examples:     

  Kaw-p’i-là? Lǎp’eq-ye-là?  ကော်ဖီလား၊ လက်ဖက်ရည်လား။  Tea or coffee? 

  Di-hma-là? Èh-di- hma-là?  ဒီမှာလား၊ အဲဒီမှာလား။  Here or there? 

  Thà-dwe thǎmì-dwe “sons, daughters”. The suffix -de (sometimes pronounced -dwe) attached to a noun marks it as plural:     

  meiq-s’we “friend”  meiq-s’we-de “friends”   

  sa-eiq “envelope”  sa-eiq-de “envelopes”   

  èh-da “that”  èh-da-de “those things”   

  Note that Burmese does not use -de/-dwe in all the contexts where English uses a plural; e.g. where English uses “any” or “some”:     

  Sa-eiq shí-là?  “Do you have any envelopes?”   

  And where the Burmese has a number and a countword:     

  P’ǎlin hnǎleiq pè-ba.  “Give me two rolls of film.”   

  Mǎshì-dhè-ba-bù “I haven’t any yet.” For -thè/-dhè with a negated verb meaning “not yet” compare the examples in 9.4, 11.3, 12.1.