ထဘီ

Burmese

ထဘီ

Alternative forms

• ထမိန် (hta.min), ထမီ (hta.mi)

Etymology

From Middle Burmese ထဖီ (hta.hpi).

The first component, ထ (hta.), is a fossil prefix, as can be seen in Burmese ထရံ (hta.ram, “wall”). U Kosalla theorized that it may have come from the obsolete verb ထာ (hta, “to bar, to prevent”), as in the sentence လွားလွားကောင်းကင်၊ ငါပျံချင်လျက်၊ ရှင်တို့အများ၊ မြစ်ထာတားခဲ့ (lwa:lwa:kaung:kang| nga-pyamhkyanglyak| hrangtui.a.mya:| mrachtata:hkai., “Although I want to fly up to the sky, my disciples prevented me from doing so”).

The second component, ဖီ (hpi), means "lower fringe, branch, side, rear" as in အဖီ (a.hpi, “offshoot, penthouse, annex”), "to obtrude, extend, project", or "to prevent, obstruct", as in လိုက်ကြရာတွင် မြစ်ထာဖီတား မနိုင်ငြားမူ (luikkra.ra-twang mrachtahpita: ma.nuingngra:mu, “They followed but cannot stop him”). Hence, U Kosalla defined it as a "garment that is a branch of the main attire and prevents the lower part from nakedness". The nasalized pronunciation in the modern form of the second component, ဘီ (bhi), is not an uncommon colloquial sound change, as can be seen in ဘီး (bhi:).

Pronunciation

• Phonetic respellings: ထ'မီ, ထ'မိန်
• IPA^(key): /tʰəmì/, /tʰəmèɪɴ/
• Romanization: MLCTS: hta.bhi • ALA-LC: thabhī • BGN/PCGN: htămi/htămein • Okell: htămi/htămeiñ

Noun

ထဘီ • (hta.bhi) (classifier ထည်)

1. (clothing) A kind of Burmese sarong for women: htamein

   Hypernym: လုံချည် (lumhkyany)

Coordinate terms

• ပုဆိုး (pu.hcui:)

Derived terms

• ကုံးစပ်ထဘီ (kum:caphta.bhi)
• စပ်ထဘီ (caphta.bhi)
• ထဘီနားခိုစား (hta.bhina:hkuica:)
• ဗလာထဘီ (ba.lahta.bhi)
• ဟကွဲထဘီ (ha.kwai:hta.bhi)

 

Further reading

• “ထဘီ” in Myanmar–English Dictionary (Myanmar Language Commission 1993). Searchable online at SEAlang.net.