The Language of Love

Lindsey stole part of my main post idea so this one won’t be long and is mainly about language so feel free to stop reading.  A couple of interesting things have come out of my language lessons of late.  The first one was about countries.  I was doing some listening comprehension and the guy said that he was from Korea but then when asked what his nationality was, he says Chinese.  The word ‘Korea’ in Burmese is simply ‘Korea’ but I didn’t get his nationality.  My teacher then went on to explain that in Burmese only three countries have names in Burmese; France, China and Thailand.  For all the others they simply use the English with a Burmese accent.   I guess Myanmar must have been fairly insular before the British came and only really had a connection with China, Thailand and France.  Still it’s odd there is no word for India as they have a border with them too.  Of the three my favourite is Thailand which in Burmese is something like ‘Yo da ya’ which to mind sounds like Yoda land.

The most recent lesson we did was about numbers.  My teacher has a clever way of getting English speakers to be say the number ‘5’ correctly.  She starts out by writing out the words ‘Sing a song’.  She then asks you to repeat those words over and over quite quickly.  Then she crosses out the word ‘song’ so you’re left with ‘Sing a’.  Then she crosses out the letter ’s’ and then finally, the ‘i’.  What you’re left with is ’nga’ which is exactly correct.

After you go through 1 – 10 she then teaches you 100 and 1,000.  You add the words of the numbers together for other numbers so it’s quite easy to say larger numbers.  After I’d mastered the basics she asked me to figure out the word for 1500 which I clumsily did.  Then she says that the number 1500 is also the word for the love shared between a married couple.  I asked her the origin and she said it was something to do with Buddhism but she wasn’t entirely sure.  The really funny thing is that the love that is shared between family members is 528.  When I asked my colleagues about it the next day they knew exactly what I was talking about and one of them knowingly pointed out that the difference between the kinds of love is 972!

I love Lindsey definitely at level 1500.  The difficult thing is that I feel that I love Nell comparatively more than 528.  Seems like a big jump for me…

Finally to the photo for my post.  We just bought that table.  It’s salvaged teak and about 7ft long by about 3ft wide.  It’s from one of those places where you choose something that they fix up but in this case it was already finished.  They have open house on a Saturday complete with free cheese and wine which of course is a cunning plan but at 760 USD, we thought it was a bargain wine or no wine.