On the Word Mingalah for Auspiciousness

Learn Burmese from Natural Talk

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

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