ဖိသၣ်
hpo ther
The word for baby in Karen is ဖိသၣ် (hpo ther).
The term refers to a very young human being.
Meaning: very young human being (noun)
How do you pronounce it?
hpo ther
Did you know?
- Depending on whether you are in a S'gaw or Pwo Karen community, the written form of ဖိသၣ် will change entirely, meaning a book written in one dialect might be unreadable to a speaker of the other.
- When speaking to a baby, Karen speakers may use different tonal inflections than they would when using ဖိသၣ် in a formal adult conversation.
- If you see the word ဖိသၣ် written in a way that resembles Burmese script, it is likely due to the historical influence of Burmese-style orthography on certain Karen writing systems.
Example conversation
Two people are looking at a photograph.
- စောလူး Saw Luဖိသၣ်အံၤကဲးစၢ်ပှၤလဲၣ်phi thaw ee keh sa phu lehIs this baby yours?
- နုနု Nu Nuမ့တမ့ၢ်, အံၤမ့ၢ်ဖိသၣ်တဖိအီၣ်နုနု.meh ta meh, ee meh phi thaw ta phi ee Nu NuNo, this is Nu Nu's baby.
- စောလူး Saw Luဖိသၣ်အံၤကဲးစၢ်တၢ်စဲးနီၢ်တဒိး.phi thaw ee keh sa ta seh nee ta deeThe baby is very cute.
- နုနု Nu Nuအမှ့ၢ်လီၤ, အိၣ်တၢ်စဲးနီၢ်ဒိး.a meh lee, oi ta seh nee deeYes, it is very cute.
