Mid-April is when Burmese people celebrate the end of the old year and the beginning of another one with a water festival, similar to the people of Thailand and several other neighboring countries.

In modern times, young people driving around in open pickup trucks and shooting water through high-pressure tubes and cannons is the standard practice, but in the old days, people dipped laurel leaves into silver goblets of fragrant water and dabbed them on one another-- a practice that seems quaint now.

Also, in Thingyan in bygone times, street performers and dance troupes would come up with call and response routines, called သံချပ် Than Jaat, that celebrate life, welcome the new year, and also take jabs at the authorities’ hypocritical behaviors and corruption.

In this episode of Learn Burmese from Natural Talk, my regular guest Su, a Burmese teacher based on Chiang Mai, and I discuss these and more.

Vocabulary

သင်္ကြန် Burmese water festival

သင်္ကြန်ကျပြီ Thingyan has arrived

ပြက္ခဒိန် calendar

ကျင်းပတယ် to celebrate

နံ့သာရည် aromatic water

ရင်ဖုံး / ရင်စေ့ bosom-covered / bosom-buttoned blouse style

အကြိုနေ့ the pre-arrival, the precursor (to a festival)

အကျနေ့ the day of arrival (of a festival)

အကြတ်နေ့ the in-between day

အတက်နေ့ the day preceding the end (of a festival)

နှစ်ဆန်းတစ်ရက်နေ့ first day of new year

ရေသေနတ် / ရေပြွန် water gun / water canon

ကုသိုလ်လုပ်တယ် to perform good deeds

မဏ္ဍပ် pavilion

အတိုင်အဖေါက် call and response

အတိုင်အဖေါက်ညီတယ် the call and response are in sync

သံချပ် a call-and-response routine

ပူဆာတယ် to pester, to repeatedly request

အာဏာသိမ်းတယ် to stage a coup

သီလယူတယ် to pledge to observe certain precepts

အတာအိုး a well-wishing pot with flowers and leaves

၇ရက်သားသမီးအတွက် for those born on each of the weekday

ခွက်စောင်းခုတ်တယ် to slap a cup of water down with force

ဥပုသ်သည် those observing precepts

ညိုမြမလုပ်နဲ့ do not play coy, do not pretend to be disinterested

မူမနေနဲ့ do not play coy, do not pretend to be disinterested

ဈေးကိုင်တယ် to be holding out

မုန့်လုံးရေပေါ် sweet rice balls, a specialty of Thingyan

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