“who?” in Sgaw Karen
မတၤလဲၣ်
ma tā lèh
who?
“who?” is written မတၤလဲၣ် in Sgaw Karen, read in a rough way as ma tā lèh. Knyaw helps you read and understand words, not say them out loud. Karen is a tone language, so the English-letter sounds are only a rough help.
This word in a story
တၢ်မဲၥ်ချံကပီၤကွၢ်လီၤထံကူးလၢသ့ၣ်ခံ နမ့ၢ်မတၤလဲၣ် "ထံကူးသံကွၢ်" ယမ့ၢ်ဒိကအိ ယဃုအီၣ်ဆၣ်လၢမုၢ်နၤခါ နအဲၣ်ဒီးကဲယသကိးစ့ၢ်ဧါ "ထံကူးသံကွၢ်" အဲၣ်ဒီး အဲၣ်ဒီး"ဒိကအိစံးဆၢ"
Two shiny eyes looked at him from a tree. "Who are you?" asked Tinku. "I’m an owl," said the owl. "I hunt for food during the night." "Will you be my friend?" asked Tinku. "Yes, I will!" said the owl.
from “Goodnight, Tinku!” →တုၤတၢ်မၤသးဖှံအလီၢ်ကိၢ်ထီၣ် ကနဲဃီးစးထီၣ်လီၤဘှ့း ထီးအနၢၤလီၤဖျု ဆၣ်ဖိကီၢ်ဖိလၢအိၣ်ဒီးအနၢၤတဖၣ်ဖုးဘၣ်အသး တၢ်တဒုလၢအနၢၤတအိၣ်အံၤမ့ၢ်မတၤလဲၣ် ဟဲဖဲအံၤဘၣ်မနုၤလဲၣ် အ၀ဲသ့ၣ်သံကွၢ်တၢ်
Once the sun rose higher and the day grew warmer, Pig's horns fell off. The horned animals were shocked. "Who’s that with no horns? Why did you come here?" they asked. "I am just a pig," the pig said. "I just wanted to come to the party too."
from “No Pigs Allowed” →