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 Tazaungdaing Festival and the Night of Mischief
Why are the robes woven on full-moon night of တန်ဆောင်မုန်း , the 8th month in the Burmese lunar calendar, called, မသိုးသင်္ကန်း , literally, unspoiled robes? What is the legend of the origin of the practice called ပံ့သကူ to leave out items that others can take away? And what kind of mischiefs or troubles are you allowed to cause on the night called ကျီးမနိုးပွဲ , the carnival of the sleeping crows, or သူခိုးကြီးည , the night of the thieves? These phrases are associated with တန်ဆောင်တိုင် Tazaungdaing Festival, which marks the end of the rainy season, and ကထိန် Kathina, which marks the end of Lent in many Buddhist countries in Southeast Asia. In this episode, my guest Su, a Burmese teacher in Chiang Mai, and I discuss the history, legends, and stories behind these phrases. (Photo: a girl lighting candles in a temple in Bagan, by f11photo, licensed from Shutterstock; music clips from Uppbeat.io)
Vocabulary
ဝရုန်းသုန်းကား in a messy, chaotic fashion (adverb)
တန်ဆောင်တိုင် Tazaungdaing festival, marks the end of rain
ကထိန် Kathina festival, marks the end of Buddhist Lent
ပဒေသာပင် a frame for attaching donated objects
သင်္ကန်း a monk’s robe
စုပေါင်းမဟာဘုံကထိန် communal donation
မသိုးသင်္ကန်း robes woven in a single day
သင်္ကန်းရက်တယ် to weave robe
သင်္ကန်းကပ်တယ် to offer robe
ပုဂ္ဂိုလ် person (respectful usage)
ကျီးမနိုးပွဲ carnival of the sleeping crows (night for harmless mischief)
သူခိုးကြီးည night of thieves (night of mischief)
အအိပ်ဆတ်တယ် to be easily awakened
ထိုးကွင်းထိုးတယ် to get tattooed
ဆေးအောင်တယ် the tattoo proves magical
ထိပ်တုံးခတ်တယ် to lock up in a pillory
ဆေးမင်ကြောင် tattoo
အင်းကွက် magical diagrams
တုတ်ပြီး ဓားပြီး staff-proof, sword-proof
ပံ့သကူပစ်တယ် / ပံ့သကူစွန့်တယ် to cast away something as a donation
ပံ့သကူကောက်တယ် to pick up cast away items
ဖန်ရည် liquid from boiled tree barks
ဖန်ရည်ဆိုးတယ် to dye with liquid from boiled tree barks
အပေါက်ဆိုးတယ် to be bad-tempered
လူကုံထံ the wealthy, the rich
သင်္ကန်းရုံတယ် to drape a robe
ဒလိန့်ခေါက်ကွေး (to fall) in a roll
နိဗ္ဗာန်ဈေး a general giveaway by raffle (figuratively called Nirvana market)
စတုဒိသာ a feast, an event that serves meals to the general public
အယုတ်အလတ်အမြတ်မရွေး regardless of class or virtue
မီးခိုးတိတ် smokeless (unnecessary to cook)
ထမင်းရည် juice left from cooking rice in a pot
ထမင်းရည်ချောင်းစီး rice juice flows like a river
အဟာရ nutritious
ထန်းလျက် jaggery
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