Bite-Size Burmese: Chinese Shutters, British Drinks, and Gurkha Fruits

When are Venetian blinds not Venetian? In Burmese language, they become Chinese shutters (တရုတ်ကပ်). (Variations of the design are also known as Louvre window or Jalousie window.) The spiky chayote, called Buddha's palm in Chinese (佛手瓜) due to its shape, is called Gurkha fruit (ဂေါ်ရခါးသီး) in Burmese. Cement, even when locally made with Burmese dirt, is still called British dirt (ဘိလပ်မြေ). Today, fizzy, carbonated soft drinks like Coca-Cola or 7-Up are called Canned drinks (သံဗူး), but in the past, they were called British juice (ဘိလပ်ရည်). In this episode of Bite-Size Burmese, I introduce you to the Burmese names of some foreign objects. Who brought them to the country? The clues are in the names themselves. (Illustration by Burmese artist Nyan Kyal Say, NK Artbox; Intro and end music: "When my ukulele plays" by Soundroll, Upbeat.io.)

Vocabulary

တရုတ်ကတ် Venetian blinds, Louvre window, Jalousie window
ဘိလပ်မြေ cement
သံဗူးရည် canned drink, soft drink
ဘိလပ်ရည် carbonated drink, soft drink
ဘိလပ်ပြန် someone who returned from Britain
ဂေါ်ရခါးသီး chayote
ကုလားထိုင် chair
ပရိဘောဂ furniture
ကုလားဝန် minister in charge of foreigners’ affairs (in the royal court)
ဗိုလ် / ဘိုကေ western-style hair
ဗိုလ် / ဘိုလိုပြောတယ် to speak English
လက်အုပ်ချီတယ် to put one’s palms together in homage
အခေါ်အဝေါ် usage, term, vocabulary
အတုခိုးတယ် to mimic, to copy
ကုန်ကူသန်းရောင်းဝယ်ရေး commerce, trade
ယဉ်ကျေးမှုဖလှယ်တယ် to exchange culture
ကောက်ချက်ချတယ် to conclude, to deduce
ယူဆတယ် to think, to believe
တစ်နည်းတစ်ဖုံ in one way or another
ဆက်စပ်တယ် to be connected to, to be associated with
အိန္ဒိယနွယ်ဖွား of Indian descent
ကုန်းဘောင်ခေတ် in the Konbaung Era
မူလအဓိပ္ပာယ် original meaning
ကျယ်ပြန့်တယ် to be broad
သျှောင်ထုံး hairstyle with a bun
စစ်ဗိုလ် army general
နိဂုံးချုပ် to conclude