မ…ရဘူး
Not Allowed
You will also hear verb plus လို့မရဘူး with the same meaning: ဆေးလိပ်သောက်လို့မရဘူး။
How It Works
Use this pattern for rules: what people may not do in a place, at school or at home.
| Form | Example | English |
|---|---|---|
| plain | မဝင်ရဘူး။ | You can't go in. |
| polite | မဝင်ရပါဘူး။ | You're not allowed to go in. |
| also heard | ဝင်လို့မရဘူး။ | You can't go in. |
မ…ရဘူး means "not allowed". For "you don't have to", use မ…လည်းရတယ်: မနက်ဖြန် မလာလည်းရတယ် (You don't have to come tomorrow).
To tell someone "don't", use မ…နဲ့: ဒီမှာ မထိုင်နဲ့ (Don't sit here). မ…ရဘူး states a rule for everyone.
Signs are written in the literary style and end with ရ alone: ဆေးလိပ်မသောက်ရ.
Teachers and parents use this pattern to set rules: ညဘက် အပြင်မထွက်ရဘူး (You can't go out at night). When you ask permission with လို့ရလား, a "no" is often just မရဘူး.
Examples (5)
- ဒီမှာ ဆေးလိပ်မသောက်ရဘူး။
You can't smoke here.
မ comes before သောက်, and ရဘူး ends the rule.
- ဘုရားပေါ်မှာ ဖိနပ်မစီးရဘူး။
You can't wear shoes on the pagoda grounds.
ဖိနပ်စီး means "wear shoes"; this is a rule.
- ကလေးတွေ ဒီကို မဝင်ရဘူး။
Children aren't allowed in here.
မဝင်ရဘူး means "may not enter".
- ဓာတ်ပုံ မရိုက်ရပါဘူး။
Photos are not allowed.
ပါ makes the rule polite.
- စာမေးပွဲမှာ ဖုန်းမသုံးရဘူး။
You can't use your phone in the exam.
မသုံးရဘူး means "may not use".
Common Mistakes
Putting မ before ရ.
ဆေးလိပ်သောက်မရဘူး။ဆေးလိပ်မသောက်ရဘူး။မ goes right before the main verb, here သောက်.
Using မ…ရဘူး for "don't have to".
မနက်ဖြန် မလာရဘူး။မနက်ဖြန် မလာလည်းရတယ်။မလာရဘူး means "you may not come". For "you don't have to come", say မလာလည်းရတယ်.
How It Connects
Learn This First
Not allowed is the negative of ရ, so ရ and the negative wrap come first.