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

1.10. This and that (contd).

3. numbers

Numbers 

Numbers between the round thousands are made in the same way as in English; examples: 

    c’auq-t’aun ngà-ya   ခြောက်ထောင် ငါးရာ   6500 

    shiq-t’aun thoùn-ya   ရှစ်ထောင် သုံးရာ   8300 

    k’un-năt’aun lè-ya   ခုနှစ်ထောင် လေးရာ   7400 

    hnăt’aun tăya   နှစ်ထောင် တစ်ရာ   2100 

    hnăt’aun kò-ya ngà-zeh ngà   နှစ်ထောင့် ကိုးရာ ငါးဆယ့် ငါး   2955 

    tăt’aun hnăya thoùn-zeh lè   တစ်ထောင့် နှစ်ရာ့ သုံးဆယ့် လေး   1234 

Notice that the syllable t’aun “thousand” may be changed to t’aún (low tone changed to creaky) when followed by another number. You may hear either c’auq-t’aun ngà-ya or c’auq-t’aún ngà -ya. The same tone change occurs with s’eh “ten” and ya “a hundred” (Lessons 1.6, 1.8). 

Numbers beginning with one thousand often lose the first syllable. In place of tăt’aún tăya (1100), tăt’aún hnăyá ngà -zeh (1250) etc, you will hear t’aún tăya, t’au´n hnăyá ngà -zeh, etc. There is a similar variation for numbers beginning with tăs’eh (Lesson 1.6). 

Variant. 

In place of c’auq-t’aun ngà -ya etc you may sometimes hear c’auqt’aun- néh ngà -ya, literally “six thousand and five hundred”. More examples: 

    hnăt’aun kò-ya ngà-zeh ngà   နှစ်ထောင့် ကိုးရာ ငါးဆယ့် ငါး   2955 

    hnăt’aun néh kò-ya ngà-zeh ngà   နှစ်ထောင်နဲ့ ကိုးရာ ငါးဆယ့် ငါး   2955 

    tăt’aun hnăya thoùn-zeh lè   တစ်ထောင့် နှစ်ရာ့ သုံးဆယ့် လေး   1234 

    tăt’aun-nék hnăya thoùn-zèh lè   တစ်ထောင်နဲ့ နှစ်ရာ့ သုံးဆယ့် လေး   1234 

There are similar variants for numbers in tens and units and in hundreds and units (Lessons 1.6 and 1.8). 

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