Learn Burmese from Natural Talk
Hello! Greetings from the Burmese corner! I'm Kenneth Wong, a Burmese language instructor, author, and translator. This is a podcast series for intermediate and advanced Burmese language learners who want to learn Burmese by listening to natural conversation. Every two weeks or so, my cohost Mol Mol from Burmese Language Academy of Yangon (BLAY), some guest speakers, and I record and upload an episode on a specific topic. At the end of each episode, you'll find the keywords and phrases with their meanings. You can reach BLAY from its Facebook page: BurmeseLanguageAcademyofYangon. For more on the podcast series, visit the Learn Burmese from Natural Talk blog: http://burmeselessons.blogspot.com/
Learn Burmese from Natural Talk
On the Word Mingalah for Auspiciousness
You have probably heard the Burmese phrase မင်္ဂလာပါ Mingalah bah--typically used by hotel receptions and restaurant staff to greet you. Derived from Pali, the word roughly means to be auspicious, to have good omen, and to have good tidings -- a general word of positivity. But do you know that you can also spawn other compound words with it, like an auspicious new year, a blessed birthday, an auspicious donation ceremony, and so on? Also, if you must count your blessings, what is the classifier required?
In this episode, my cohost Mol Mol from BLAY (Burmese Language Academy of Yangon) and I discuss how you can use the word မင်္ဂလာ Mingalah as more than a simple "Hello!" Talking about getting married, becoming a novice, or piercing your ears? You’ll need this word for just about every special occasion.
Vocabulary
မင်္ဂလာ (noun) blessings, good tidings, auspiciousness
နှစ်သစ်မင်္ဂလာ auspicious new year
ရှင်ပြုမင်္ဂလာ auspicious novitiation
ဖန်တီးတယ် to create
မွေးနေ့မင်္ဂလာ auspicious birthday
ကင်ပွန်းတတ်မင်္ဂလာ auspicious child-naming ceremony
နားသမင်္ဂလာ / နားထွင်းမင်္ဂလာ auspicious ear-piercing ceremony
မင်္ဂလာဆောင်တယ် to get married
မင်္ဂလာဆောင် wedding
မင်္ဂလာစကားပြောတယ် to speak auspicious words, to gave a wedding speech
စုလျားရစ်ပတ်တယ် to get married (literally, to bind with a towel)
ဘိသိတ်ဆရာ traditional orator, storyteller, speaker
မင်္ဂလာဦး eve of wedding
မင်္ဂလာဆွမ်း alms donated to monks to mark a wedding
မင်္ဂလာရှိတယ် to be auspicious
မင်္ဂလာမရှိဘူး to be inauspicious
အမင်္ဂလာ that which is inauspicious, that which invites bad luck
အကုသိုလ် bad deeds
နိမိတ်မကောင်းဘူး the omen is no good
မင်္ဂလာတစ်ပါး one type of blessing (note the use of ပါး as the counting word)
တံမြတ်စည်း broom
လာဘ်ပိတ်တယ် to invite bad luck
Have a question about a Burmese word or phrase you heard here? Send us a message.
