Burmese By Ear/Essential Myanmar Introduction to the Burmese Language John Okell

2.2. Going to do.

1. lesson

To make statements or ask questions about future events, you use a different set of verb suffixes. Essentially all you are doing is replacing -teh/-deh with -meh, but the correspondence is a little obscured. Compare the following two sets of sentences. They use the verb thauq-teh “to drink”. 

Present/past 

1   Kaw-p’i thauq-thălà?   ကော်ဖီ သောက်သလား။   Did you (do you) drink coffee? 

2   Măthauq-pa-bù.   မသောက်ပါဘူး။   No, I didn’t (I don’t). 

3   Ba thauq-thălèh?   ဘာ သောက်သလဲ။   What did you (do you) drink? 

4   Ko-kò thauq-pa-deh.   ကိုကိုး သောက်ပါတယ်။   I drank (I drink) cocoa. 

Future 

1   Kaw-p’i thauq-mălà?   ကော်ဖီ သောက်မလား။   Are you going to drink coffee? 

2   Măthauq-pa-bù.   မသောက်ပါဘူး။   No, I’m not. 

3   Ba thauq-mălèh?   ဘာ သောက်မလဲ။   What are you going to drink? 

4   Ko-kò thauq-meh.   ကိုကိုး သောက်မယ်။   I’m going to drink cocoa. 

Note that on line 4 in each set, -teh/-deh corresponds to -meh. You can use the polite suffix -pa/-ba with both -teh/-deh and -meh: 

   thauq-teh = thauq-pa-deh 

   thauq-meh = thauq-pa-meh 

People tend to use -pa/-ba more often with -teh/-deh than with -meh, which is why we use -pa-deh/-ba-deh here but not -pameh/- ba-meh; but in principle you can add or omit -pa/-ba with both -teh/-deh and -meh. 

In questions, before -là orlè weakened to -thă/-dhă in the same environment. For “weakening” see Lesson 1.5. 

In the negative there is no change; so “I didn’t drink”, “I don’t drink”, and “I’m not going to drink” are all Măthauq-pa-bù. 

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