God and cod

Slow going with the Burmese language learning. Still moving forward, but certain sounds still elude me. My first teacher braced us for this struggle. When we whimpered that we couldn’t tell the difference between two words he had just pronounced, he answered that “to a Burmese, they’re as different as ‘God’ and ‘cod.’”

Notably, the three kinds of “t” give me fits. One of them sounds just like an English “t,” while another—the aspirated kind—has a breath built into it. The third “t,” explained my teacher, is a bit like an English “th” with a “t” sound out front of it, as in “Henry the Eighth.”

When words containing these three types are rendered in English spellings, the second and third kinds often appear as “ht” and “th.” Not long ago I had two work colleagues whose names to my ear were not at all different. I knew that one of them wrote her name “Htet Htet,” and the other “Thet Thet,” but I never spoke to them both at the same time, and frankly never gave the spellings much thought.

Until of course one of them phoned me. A Burmese man answered, then pointed to the receiver and said, “Thet Thet has a question.”

“Which one?” I asked. He gave me a withering glance that I can still feel, weeks later. A God-cod moment.