One of the nice things about learning Burmese is discovering that words you have known for a long time* have other meanings. In this case, the (as of last week**) former president U Thein Sein’s name, which literally translates as Mr One Hundred Thousand Diamonds. Which is a pretty strong leader-of-the-country type name. Also probably a good rap name.
Other fun Burmese language facts:
- There are specific words for thousand, ten thousand and hundred thousand – htaun, thaun:, thein: (the colon denotes high tone). The first two are quite close in pronunciation and easily confused (especially to a western ear), and because of the massive devaluing of the currency, everything costs some multiple of thousands or ten thousands. As you can imagine, hilarity ensues.
- Relatedly, because there are separate words, you can’t say “sixteen thousand” (or any of the teens), you have to say “ten thousand, six thousand”, although, if something is 15,000, you can say “ten thousand and a half”. I get this wrong all the time.
- Just to add to the confusion, the word for million is than. Because why wouldn’t you have really similar words for wildly differing numerical values. There is absolutely no way that could ever cause problems ever.
- There are also a bunch of fun literal translations, today I will share three:
- envelope – sa eiq’ (writing bag)
- restaurant – hte-min: hsain (cooked rice shop, or sa: thauq’ hsain – eat, drink shop)
- purse – ngwei eiq’ (money bag)
*For a given value of “long time”.
**I’m sure you all were watching with me, the hours of ballot counting last Tuesday that resulted in the not-at-all-surprising election of U Htin Kyaw as new president of Union of the Republic of Myanmar.