Learn how to describe a person
Back in lesson 9, we have learned how to describe a person in terms of height, body type, skin color, attitude, and personalities. From lesson 10, we also know how to say color words in Burmese.
What's next? We will now learn to describe a person in terms of clothing items that he or she is wearing, and also learn more words on general descriptions of people such as "pretty lady", "old man", "small girl", and so on.
On top of that, we will learn to combine those words into a sentence about a person right in front of you.
For fun as well as for exercise, I have written a Burmese Phrase Maker / Translator in PHP, so you can construct the combinations on your own, and see the output sentence.
Remember from the previous lesson which says, "the man who is wearing a white shirt"?
အဖြူရောင် | a-pfyu2 youn2
— white color (noun)
အင်္ကျီ | ain3-ji2
— shirt (noun)
ဝတ် | woot
— wear (verb)
ထားတဲ့ | hta3 deare1
— present participle [~ing] (particle)
လူ | lu2
— man (noun)
We will now add the physical description of that person.
အဖြူရောင် | a-pfyu2 youn2 — white (noun)
အင်္ကျီ | ain3-ji2 — shirt (noun)
ဝတ် | woot — wear (verb)
ထားတဲ့ | hta3 deare1 — [~ing] (particle)
လူ | lu2 — man (noun)
ဝ | wa1 — fat (adjective)
ကြီး | ji3 — "big" used as a suffix particle for emphasis
လူဝကြီး | lu2 wa1 ji3
means "big fat man" and it will be taken here as a noun "lu2-wa1 ji3" without breaking it.
"White" is an adjective to describe the shirt. E.g.,
ဖြူသော အင်္ကျီ | pfyu2 dthau3 ain3-ji2 — shirt that is white.
အဖြူရောင် အင်္ကျီ ဝတ်ထားတဲ့ လူဝကြီး
a-pfyu2 youn2 ain3-ji2 woot hta3 deare1 lu2-wa1-ji3
the big fat man who is wearing a white shirt.
The important word you should remember in this lesson is the particle
ထားတဲ့ | hta3 deare1
equivalent to the English present participle [~ing], which converts the verb "wear" to "wearing" the item of clothing. In the literary
form, the word is
ထားသော | hta3 dthau3 (or)
ထားသည့် | hta3 dthi1.
ဝလာတယ် | wa1 la2 deare2 — You have become fat,
which is a compliment. On the other hand, the opposite
ပိန်သွားတယ် | pain2 thwa3 deare2 — You have become skinny
is a show of concern for someone's health.
The General Format
Here's a general formula that will work with other physical descriptions, persons and items of clothing. You just have to substitute the required Burmese words as needed.
xxxx youn2 +
clothing +
wear +
hta3 deare1
ho2 +
person +
physical description of the person
ဟို | ho2 (pronoun)
means "that" in English. You can substitute
xxx ရောင် | xxxx youn2 (adjective)
with the list of colors provided in the previous lesson. Remember,
ထားတဲ့ | hta3 deare1 (particle)
is the present participle which adds [~ing] to the verb.
Here's a list of other words you can substitute in the above phrase:
clothing
ရှပ်အင်္ကျီ | shut ain3-ji2
— shirt
အင်္ကျီလက်တို | ain3-ji2 let-toh2
— short-sleeves shirt (shirt+ hand + short)
အင်္ကျီလက်ရှည် | ain3-ji2 let-shay2
— long-sleeves shirt (shirt+ hand + long)
ပုဆိုး | pa1-hso3
— men's sarong
ထမီ | hta1-main2
— women's sarong
တိုက်ပုံအင်္ကျီ | tite-pone2 ain3-ji2
— Burmese-style jacket
ဂျာကင် | ja2-kin2
— Western-style jacket
စွပ်ကျယ် | soot-kjeare2
— T-shirt
မိုးကာ | mo3-ga2
— rain coat
ထီး | hti3
— umbrella
ဦးထုပ် | oat-htoat
— hat
ဖိနပ် | pfa1-nut
— footwear, usually refers to slippers.
ဘောင်းဘီ | boun3-be2
— trousers, pants
ဂျင်းဘောင်းဘီ | jin3 boun3-be2
— a pair of jeans
ဘောင်းဘီတို | boun3-be2 doh2
— shorts, Bermuda shorts
to wear
ဝတ် | woot
— wear all types of clothings
စီး | si3
— wear shoes, slippers, and all other footwear.
ဆောင်း | hsoun3
— wear hats and use umbrellas
Person
လူ | lu2
— man
မိန်းမ | main3-ma1
— woman
အမျိုးသမီး | a-myo3-dtha1-mi3
— lady
ပုဂ္ဂိုလ် | poat-go2
— gentleman
အဘိုးကြီး | a-pfo3 ji3
— old man
အဘွားကြီး | a-pfwa3 ji3
— old woman
ကလေး | kha1-lay3
— baby; child
ကလေးမလေး | kha1-lay3-ma1 lay3
— small girl
ကောင်လေး | koun2-lay3
— boy
ကောင်မလေး | koun2-ma1 lay3
— girl
ဘဲ | beare3
— dude, guy (slang)
အခြောက် | a-chout
— effeminate man, sissy, unmanly person
ယောက်ျားလျာ | yout-kja1-sha2
— a girl or a woman who behaves like a man; a gay woman; dyke
ကောင် | koun2
— guy (street talk; impolite. "koun2" is also a measure word for animals.)
ဆော် | hsau2
— chick (slang)
Physical description of people (ending words)
ဝဝကြီး | wa1 wa1 ji3
— fat, plump, chubby
ပိန်ပိန်လေး | pain2-pain2-lay3
— thin, slim, skinny
လံဗားကြီး | lun2-ba3 ji3
— tall and big (male)
အရပ်အမြင့်ကြီး | a-yut a-myin1-ji3
— tall (height + tall + to the high degree, level, or class)
ပုပုလေး | pu1-pu1-lay3
— short, shorty
လှလှလေး | hla1-hla1 lay3
— pretty, beautiful (reference to a girl or a woman.)
ချစ်စရာလေး | chit sa1-ya2 lay3
— cute and lovely
ရုပ်ဆိုးဆိုးကြီး | yoat hso3-zo3 ji3
— ugly (can be used for both sexes.)
Example
ပန်းရောင် | pan3 youn2 — pink color
ထီး | hti3 — umbrella
ဆောင်း | hsoun3 — wear hats and use umbrellas.
ထားတဲ့ | hta3 deare1 — present participle [~ing]
ဟို | ho2 — that
ဘဲ | beare3 — dude, guy (slang)
ပိန်ပိန်လေး | pain2-pain2 lay3 — thin, slim, skinny
ပန်းရောင် ထီးဆောင်း ထားတဲ့ ဟိုဘဲ ပိန်ပိန်လေး
pan3 youn2 hti3 hsoun3 hta3 deare1
ho2 beare3 pain2-pain2 lay3
That skinny dude with pink umbrella.
Burmese Phrase Maker / Translator
Please make sure that you get the matching items. For example, if you select "slippers/shoes" for clothing, you must select "footwear" from the pull down menu.
And finally, if you would like to know who is that skinny dude with pink umbrella, just append beare2 dthu2 leare3 to the general formula.
ပန်းရောင် | pan3 youn2
ထီး | hti3
ဆောင်းထားတဲ့ | hsoun3 hta3 deare1
ဟို | ho2
ဘဲ | beare3
ပိန်ပိန်လေး | pain2-pain2 lay3
ဘယ်သူလဲ | beare2 dthu2 leare3
Who is that skinny dude with pink umbrella?
Answer: It's the bird! It's the fly! No, its' Super A-CHOUT JI3!!!