New Words       

ǎyweh  အရွယ်  size; age (of children)   

[noun]-ǎcì  [noun]-အကြီး  the older [noun], the larger [noun]   

[noun]-ǎngeh  [noun]-အငယ်  the younger [noun], the smaller [noun]   

[noun]-ǎlaq  [noun]-အလတ်  the middle [noun] (not practised on tape)   

  Sentences     

S1  K’ǎlè beh-ǎyweh shí-bi-lèh?  ကလေး ဘယ်အရွယ် ရှိပြီလဲ။  How old is your child? 

S2  C’auq-hniq shí-bi.  ခြောက်နှစ် ရှိပြီ။  She is six. 

  or, for more than one child     

S1  K’ǎlè-de beh-ǎyweh-de shí-bi-lèh?  ကလေးတွေ ဘယ်အရွယ်တွေ ရှိပြီလဲ။  How old are your children? 

S2  Thà-gá shiq-hniq, thǎmì-gá c’auq-hniq shí-bi.  သားက ရှစ်နှစ်၊ သမီးက ခြောက်နှစ် ရှိပြီ။  My son is eight, and my daughter is six. 

or  Thǎmì-ǎcì-gá s’éh-lè-hniq, thǎmì-ǎngeh-gá s’eh-hniq shí-bi.  သမီးအကြီးက ၁၄-နှစ်။ သမီးအငယ်က ၁၀-နှစ် ရှိပြီ။  My older daughter is 14, and my younger daughter is 10. 

Notes 

Beh-ǎyweh shí-bi-lèh? “What age is he/she?” When asking about children, people more often use beh-ǎyweh “what size” than ǎtheq beh-lauq “how old”. Compare Ă theq beh-lauq shí-bilèh? “How old are you/is s/he?” in 10.6. 

Thà-gá shiq-hniq, thǎmì-gá c’auq-hniq shí-bi “My son is 8 and my daughter is 6.” Notice the contrastive suffix -ká/-gá: see the note in 10.5. Adding the suffix produces an effect similar to “my son on the one hand … and my daughter on the other …”, but not so strong.