In Burmese, classifiers or

measure word In linguistics, measure words are words (or morphemes) that are used in combination with a numeral to indicate an amount of something represented by some noun. Many languages use measure words, and East Asian languages such as Chinese, Japanese, ...

s, in the form of particles, are used when counting or measuring nouns. They immediately follow the number, unless the number is a

round number A round number is an integer that ends with one or more "0 (number), 0"s (zero-digit) in a given Radix, base. So, 590 is rounder than 592, but 590 is less round than 600. In both technical and informal language, a round number is often interpret ...

(ends in a zero), in which case, the measure word precedes the number. Nouns to which the classifiers refer to can be omitted if the context allows, because many classifiers have implicit meanings. The only exceptions to this rule are measurements of time or age (minutes, hours, days, years, etc.), where a preceding noun is not required, as the time measurement acts as a measure word.

Classifiers

See IPA/Burmese for an explanation of the phonetic symbols used in this section.

Classifiers

See also