Forming Possessives in Myanmar and English

Forming Possessives in Myanmar and English

In English, you can do it in many ways:

1. can use 'of' as in:  The topic of my paper

Ex. This is a friend of mine.

2. Showing possession in English can also be done by adding an apostrophe and an s after a noun. We can manage to transform most singular nouns into their possessive form:

• the car's front seat
• Bill's car
• Tim's book

3. Use possessive adjectives  such as my ..in my book

His car is under the tree.

Their bicycles are in front of the school.

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In Myanmar, there are 3 ways to show possession:

1. Use ၏  in a pattern N1 + ၏    + N2

ဒါဟာ ဇော်ဇော် ၏ အိပ်ခန်း ဖြစ်သည်။ This is Saw Saw's bedroom.


In Myanmar, you will normally see the use of '၏' /iiet/ which means 'of'

ဤသူ ကား ငါ ၏ မိတ်ဆွေ ဖြစ်ပါတယ်။

ကျွန်ပ်၏ဆန္ဒ My wish

အေးအေး ၏ အဘွားတွင် ဥယျာဥ် တစ်ခုရှိသည်။ Ae Ae's grandmother has one garden.


သူ၏အခန်းထဲတွင် ကုလားထိုင်နှစ်လုံးရှိသည်။ In his room, there are two chairs.



2. Use ရဲ့ in a pattern N1 + ရဲ့ + N2


ကျော်ကျော် သည် ကျွန်တော်ရဲ့ သူငယ်ချင်း သည်။ Kyaw Kyaw is my friend.

ဒီစာအုပ် ဟာ ဘယ်သူရဲ့ စာအုပ်လဲ။ This book, whose book is it? = Whose book is this?

ကလေးတွေဟာ တိုင်းပြည်ရဲ့အနာဂတ် ပါတယ်။
Children are the future of the country.


Please note that the use of ၏     sounds and looks more formal than the use of  ရဲ့ 


3. Omit the ၏  or  ရဲ့ 
you can omit the word ၏ for brevity such as my book  -  ငါ့စာအုပ်
ကျွန်တော့်အမေ my mother (Janoh arme)

When you omit the word ၏  or  ရဲ့ , you need to make the final sound of the first noun shorter to mark the possessive from. You need to use the symbol ့ to mark such the sound as in 
တျွန်တော် in normal usage
တျွန်တော့် in possessive form as in တျွန်တော့်အဖေ my father
ကျွန်တော့်ဦးလေး  My uncle