မ…ပါ / မ…ပေ
Negatives in Writing
ပါ fits notices, letters and news; ပေ adds weight in essays and stories: မလွယ်ကူပေ (it is not easy).
How It Works
Speech wraps a negative in မ…ဘူး. Writing keeps မ before the verb and ends the sentence with ပါ or ပေ.
| Spoken | Written | English |
|---|---|---|
| ရုံးမဖွင့်ဘူး | ရုံးမဖွင့်ပါ | the office is closed |
| မသိဘူး | မသိပေ | does not know |
| မလွယ်ဘူး | မလွယ်ကူပေ | is not easy |
| ကားရပ်လို့မရဘူး | ကားရပ်ခွင့် မရှိပါ | no parking |
ပါ fits notices, letters and news. ပေ adds weight and suits essays and stories: ထိုပြဿနာကို ဖြေရှင်းရန် မလွယ်ကူပေ (that problem is not easy to solve).
A written negative never takes သည်: write မဖွင့်ပါ, never မဖွင့်သည်. The positive ending ပေသည် is a different form, which adds weight to a statement.
Signs use မ…ရ for "not allowed": ဖိနပ် မစီးရ (no shoes), which you see at pagoda entrances. Before ကြောင်း in a news report, the negative verb stands with မ alone: မရှိကြောင်း (that there is not).
For "not yet" and "no longer", writing keeps သေး and တော့ before the ending: မရောက်သေးပါ (has not arrived yet).
Keep spoken ဘူး out of a written sentence, and keep ပေ out of conversation.
Examples (5)
- တနင်္ဂနွေနေ့တွင် ဆိုင်မဖွင့်ပါ။
The shop is closed on Sundays.
A notice: မ before the verb, ပါ at the end.
- ဘုရားဝင်းအတွင်း ဖိနပ်စီး၍ မဝင်ရပါ။
Do not enter the pagoda grounds wearing shoes.
မ…ရပါ is a polite "not allowed" on a sign.
- ထိုပြဿနာကို ဖြေရှင်းရန် မလွယ်ကူပေ။
That problem is not easy to solve.
ပေ gives the negative weight in an essay.
- ကျောင်းသားအများစုသည် ထိုသတင်းကို မသိကြပေ။
Most of the students did not know that news.
ကြ shows many people; ပေ closes the negative.
- ဤလမ်းတွင် ကားရပ်ခွင့် မရှိပါ။
There is no parking on this road.
မရှိပါ is the written "there is not".
Common Mistakes
Using spoken ဘူး with written words.
ယနေ့ ရုံးမဖွင့်ဘူး။ယနေ့ ရုံးမဖွင့်ပါ။ယနေ့ is a written word, so the negative ends with ပါ.
Adding သည် to a negative.
ယနေ့ ရုံးမဖွင့်သည်။ယနေ့ ရုံးမဖွင့်ပါ။A written negative ends with ပါ or ပေ, never သည်.
How It Connects
Learn This First
Written negatives end with ပါ or ပေ in place of ဘူး.
Related Patterns
Learn Next
Patterns that build on this one.
Words in This Pattern
Practice မ…ပါ / မ…ပေ in Bubblegum
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