ကိုယ်နဲ့ လက်ထပ်မလား
ko ne let htat ma la
To say "will you marry me?" in Burmese, use ကိုယ်နဲ့ လက်ထပ်မလား (ko ne let htat ma la).
This phrase is a question used when asking someone to become one's spouse.
What does it mean word for word?
The phrase is composed of two parts: ကိုယ်နဲ့ (ko ne) which literally means "with me", and လက်ထပ်မလား (let htat ma la) which means "will [you] marry?" using a future tense question particle.
Is there a formal and an informal way to say it?
The default form ကိုယ်နဲ့ လက်ထပ်မလား uses the pronoun ကိုယ် (ko).
How do you pronounce it?
ko ne let htat ma la
Did you know?
- A traditional Burmese wedding often involves a ritual where the couple's hands are tied together with a white thread to symbolize their union.
- While ကိုယ် is used in this phrase, Burmese has dozens of pronouns for 'I' that change based on the speaker's age and status relative to the listener.
- In some traditional contexts, a proposal is not a question asked by the couple but a negotiation handled by the parents of both parties.
Example conversation
A romantic dinner date.
- ခိုင်ခိုင် Khine Khineဇော်ဇော်၊ ကိုယ်နဲ့ လက်ထပ်မလား။Zaw Zaw, ko nae let htat ma lar.Zaw Zaw, will you marry me?
- ဇော်ဇော် Zaw Zawတကယ်လား ခိုင်ခိုင်။ta kal lar Khaing Khaing.Really, Khaing Khaing?
- ခိုင်ခိုင် Khine Khineဟုတ်တယ်၊ ကိုယ် မင်းကို တကယ်ချစ်တယ်။hot tal, ko min ko ta kal chit tal.Yes, I really love you.
- ဇော်ဇော် Zaw Zawလက်ထပ်မယ်၊ ကိုယ့်ကို အရမ်းချစ်တယ်။let htat mal, ko ko ayan chit tal.I will marry you, I love you so much.
