The fear of a female tiger, and other language lessons.

The last two weeks passed in a blur of confusion and panic, as I pitted my wits against a somewhat-too-advanced Burmese course and won lost survived. It was very good for my Burmese and I learned an overwhelmingly large amount, although my biggest realisation is just how much I still have to learn. There has been a big shift from my “unknown unknowns” into my “known unknowns”.

And now I shall regale you with some things that I have learnt. Mostly in the “humorous literal translation” category.

But the first is less that, and more a moderately amusing anecdote that takes a reasonable amount of explanatory context and which may not be worth it for the payoff.

Toilets in Myanmar are often marked, as they are in many places, with ‘male’ and ‘female’ signs. In Burmese that looks like this:

As is the way with all things, signwriters the world over being lazy shiftless types, this is abbreviated to ‘ja’ and ‘ma’.

With the necessary context out of the way, the story goes thusly:

A rustic, what they would call a potato in Tasmania, or in the rest of Australia, a Queenslander, comes into the big city for the first time, and sees written on the side of a building

at which point he runs away in fright, screaming “a female tiger!”.

The other bit of context you perhaps need is that ‘ja’ also means tiger.

And now with that hilarity out of the way, I leave you with this short list:

• there is a specific verb meaning “to wear in one’s hair”. It is very similar to the word for flower, so you can say “pan pan”, with each word having a different tone, and mean “to wear a flower in one’s hair” (this is very appropriate for the current non-president, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi)
• one of the words for ‘assistant’ literally translates to “half person”
• you have to pronounce the comma* in a list – i.e. “[thing 1] yaw [thing 2] yaw [thing 3] yaw” and so on.
• to say someone is your cousin you say that they are your “brother/sister/etc. separated by one womb”
• apparently to say “hello brother-in-law” to someone who is not your brother-in-law is an offensive way of saying you have designs on their sister
• the word for ‘wife’ that I have been using to refer to Esther was described as “casual, bordering on disrespectful”
• there are no Burmese words for ‘no one’, ‘nothing’, or ‘nowhere’. Apparently this was quite a problem when translating King Lear.

And finally, I will leave you with a wonderful quote from my script teacher, in response to a question about a particularly complicated grammatical form

If you know everything, you will know how to use it.

Quite.