က

See also: ကို, ကဲ့, ᨠ, and က္

က	U+1000, က MYANMAR LETTER KA

[unassigned: U+0FDB–U+0FFF]

← ࿚
[U+0FDA]

Myanmar

ခ →
[U+1001]

Pronunciation

Phonetic respellings: က, ဂ

IPA^(key): /ka̰/, /ɡa̰/

Romanization: MLCTS: ka. • ALA-LC: ka • BGN/PCGN: ka./ga. • Okell: ká/ká
Audio: (file)

Usage notes

The voiced pronunciation /ɡa̰/ occurs in the conjunction, particle, and postposition only, and only after a vowel or /ɴ/.
When followed by ျ and ြ, forms digraphs ကျ and ကြ, pronounced /t͡ɕ/ (in unvoiced positions) or /d͡ʑ/ when voiced.

Etymology 1

Letter

က • (ka.)

Ka, the first letter of the Burmese alphabet, called ကကြီး (ka.kri:) in Burmese.

Derived terms

ကကြီး (ka.kri:)
ကကြီးထွန် (ka.kri:htwan)
ကတိကဝတ် (ka.ti.ka.wat)
ကဖျက်ယဖျက် (ka.hpyak-ya.hpyak)
ကလိမ်ကလည်လုပ် (ka.limka.lanylup)
ကလေးကလား (ka.le:ka.la:)
ကသီကရီ (ka.sika.ri)
ကောက်ကစင်း (kaukka.cang:)
ခွေးကတက် (hkwe:ka.tak)
တက်ကစီး (takka.ci:)
ထင်းကလား (htang:ka.la:)
ထိကပါးရိကပါး (hti.ka.pa:ri.ka.pa:)
ထိကပေါက် (hti.ka.pauk)
ဒုံးကလား (dum:ka.la:)
နှိပ်စက်ကလူပြု (hnipcakka.lu-pru.)
နားကလော (na:ka.lau:)
ပျာကလတ် (pyaka.lat)
ပြန်ကဟပ် (pranka.hap)
ပြူးကလူးပြာကလာ (pru:ka.lu:praka.la)
ပေကလတ်ပေကလတ် (peka.latpeka.lat)
ပေကလတ်ပေကလတ်လုပ် (peka.latpeka.latlup)
ပေါက်ကရ (paukka.ra.)
ပေါက်တတ်ကရ (pauktatka.ra.)
ဖြစ်ကတတ်ဆန်း (hpracka.tathcan:)
ဗွတ်ကလုံ (bwatka.lum)
ဘာကလိုတိုတို (bhaka.luituitui)
မပီကလာပီကလာ (ma.pika.lapika.la)
မျက်ကလူးဆန်ပျာ (myakka.lu:hcanpya)
မျက်ကလဲဆန်ပျာ (myakka.lai:hcanpya)
မြက်ကလုံး (mrakka.lum:)
မဟုတ်ကဟုတ်က (ma.hutka.hutka.)
လက်ကတီး (lakka.ti:)
လက်ကသုံး (lakka.sum:)
လက်ကသုံးတောင်ဝှေး (lakka.sum:taunghwe:)
ဝင်ကစွပ် (wangka.cwap)
ဝေဖန်တိကပြု (wehpanti.ka.pru.)
သနားကမား (sa.na:ka.ma:)
သို့ကတည်း (sui.ka.tany:)
အထင်ကရ (a.htangka.ra.)
အာဂန္တုကဘတ် (agantu.ka.bhat)

Etymology 2

From Proto-Lolo-Burmese *ga³ ~ ʔga² (“to sing, dance, play”), from Proto-Sino-Tibetan *ga (“to dance, leap, stride”); cognate with Old Chinese 歌 (OC *kaːl, “to sing”) and Tibetan གར (gar, “to dance”) (STEDT).

Verb

က • (ka.)

More information Verb, Noun ...

Burmese word set
Verb	က (ka.)
Noun	အက (a.ka.)

Close

to dance

Synonyms

ကခုန် (ka.hkun)

Noun

က • (ka.)

a dance

Derived terms

ကကြိုး (ka.krui:)
ကကွက် (ka.kwak)
ကချေသည် (ka.hkyesany)
ကဇာတ် (ka.jat)
ကပွဲ (ka.pwai:)
ကပွဲရုံ (ka.pwai:rum)
ကာက (kaka.)
ခုနစ်ထွေက (hku.nachtweka.)
ဇာတ်က (jatka.)
ပဒေသာကပွဲ (pa.desaka.pwai:)
မီးစဉ်ကြည့်က (mi:canykrany.ka.)
အက (a.ka.)

Etymology 3

According to Hill (2019) (p. 32), cognate with Tibetan ཁལ (khal, “burden, load”), Old Chinese 荷 (OC *qʰaːls, *ɡaːl, *ɡaːlʔ, “to carry; load”).

Verb

က • (ka.)

to harness a horse or any draught animal for work

Noun

က • (ka.)

howdah; saddle

Derived terms

ကကြိုး (ka.krui:)
ကတင် (ka.tang)
ကြိုးဝက (krui:wa.ka.)
ရဲက (rai:ka.)

Etymology 4

This etymology is missing or incomplete. Please add to it, or discuss it at the Etymology scriptorium.
Particularly: “Doesn't seem to be mentioned by STEDT or Luce 1981. That said, its usage is strikingly similar to that of Korean 가 (-ga, “subject marker”) and Japanese が (ga, “idem”), which is interesting as Burmese appears to be the only MSEA language that uses subject marker particles as such.”

Particle

က • (ka.)

indicates the subject of the sentence, a topic marker, a nominative marker
သူက ဒီလို ပြောခဲ့တယ်
suka. dilui prau:hkai.tai
He said like this.

Derived terms

ခုတင်က (hku.tangka.)
တစ်ခါက (tachkaka.)
တစ်နေ့က (tacne.ka.)
ထဲက (htai:ka.)
နောက်နောက်က (nauknaukka.)
ဘယ်တုန်းက (bhaitun:ka.)
ရှစ်စပ်ကလည် (hraccapka.lany)
ရှေ့ကပေါက် (hre.ka.pauk)
သေးကလူချေးကလူ (se:ka.luhkye:ka.lu)
အသီးသီးအသကအသက (a.si:si:a.sa.ka.a.sa.ka.)

Etymology 5

This etymology is missing or incomplete. Please add to it, or discuss it at the Etymology scriptorium.
Particularly: “Seems connected to the "topic marker" usage of Etymology 4. The "in (a location or time)" usage is in fact grouped with the "topic marker" sense by MED, though there's another "place postpositional marker" sense which MED separates out.”

Postposition

က • (ka.)

in, on (in reference to a point in time in the past)
ပြီးခဲ့တဲ့နှစ်က ― pri:hkai.tai.hnacka. ― (in the) last year
from (in reference to a place)
တောင်ဘက်က ― taungbhakka. ― from the south

ရန်ကုန်က ― rankunka. ― from Rangoon

Etymology 6

This etymology is missing or incomplete. Please add to it, or discuss it at the Etymology scriptorium.
Particularly: “Doesn't seem to be mentioned by STEDT or Luce 1981. Could this be related to the "if, assuming" sense of Old Chinese 假 (OC *kraːʔ, *kraːs)?”

Conjunction

က • (ka.)

if
မိုးရွာက ― mui:rwaka. ― if it rains

Synonyms

ရင် (rang)
လျှင် (hlyang) (literary)
အကယ်၍ (a.kairwe)

Derived terms

ထိကရုံး (hti.ka.rum:)
ပြီးကပစ် (pri:ka.pac)
ရကစု (ra.ka.cu.)
ဟူက (huka.)

Etymology 7

Borrowed from Mon က (“fish”).

Noun

က • (ka.)

(only used in compounds) fish

Derived terms

ကကတစ် (ka.ka.tac)
ကကတိုး (ka.ka.tui:)
ကကူရံ (ka.kuram)
ကဘီလူး (ka.bhilu:)
ကသပေါင်း (ka.sa.paung:)
ကသဖိုး (ka.sa.hpui:)

Etymology 8

This etymology is missing or incomplete. Please add to it, or discuss it at the Etymology scriptorium.
Particularly: “Doesn't seem to be mentioned by STEDT or Luce 1981. Related to the "harness, saddle" sense ("harness" > "control" > "match and fit" > "be at least equal")?”

Verb

က • (ka.)

(usually used in the negative form မက (ma.ka.)) to be at least equal to

Derived terms

မက (ma.ka.)
မကောမက (ma.kau:ma.ka.)
မရမက (ma.ra.ma.ka.)
ရုံမက (rumma.ka.)
သည့်ကလောက် (sany.ka.lauk)
သို့ကလို (sui.ka.lui)
သို့ကလောက် (sui.ka.lauk)

Pronunciation

IPA^(key): /kaʔ/
Audio: (file)

Etymology 1

An instance of Translingual က, ultimately descending from Brahmi 𑀓.

Letter

က (ka)

Ka, the first consonant of the Mon alphabet.

Etymology 2

From Proto-Mon-Khmer *kaʔ (“fish”).

Noun

က (ka)

fish^[1]^[2]
ကအရံၚ် (kaʼaraṃṅ)

Etymology 3

Noun

က (ka)

howdah harness saddle.
fulcrum, short prop^[2]

Etymology 4

Verb

က (ka)

to be lacking.
to fail.
ရုံဟွံကပဵုသှာတ်အာဣရ။
ruṃhwaṃkapeushātʼāʼira.
There is enough and to spare.

သြန်မသုန်စှော်ဟွံက။
sranmasunchokhwaṃka.
There is fifty rupees and more.

Etymology 5

Verb

က (transliteration needed)

to harness a horse or any draught animal.

References

[1]
(Can we verify⁽⁺⁾ this quotation?)พวน รามัญวงศ์ [Phuan Ramanyawong] (2005) พจนานุกรมมอญ-ไทย ฉบับมอญสยาม [Mon-Thai (Siamese) Dictionary], กรุงเทพฯ [Bangkok]: มติชน [Matichon], →ISBN
[2]
R. Halliday (1922) A Mon-English Dictionary‎, Bangkok: Siam Society, page 28

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Alternative forms

Alternative scripts

ka (Latin script)
𑀓 (Brahmi script)
क (Devanagari script)
ক (Bengali script)
ක (Sinhalese script)
ၵ (Burmese script)
ก or กะ (Thai script)
ᨠ (Tai Tham script)
ກ or ກະ (Lao script)
ក (Khmer script)
𑄇 (Chakma script)

Pronoun

က m

Burmese script form of ka (“who (m.)”)

Declension

More information Case \ Number, Singular ...

Case \ Number	Singular	Plural
Nominative (first)	ကော (ko)	ကေ (ke)
Accusative (second)	ကံ (kaṃ)	ကေ (ke)
Instrumental (third)	ကေန (kena)	ကေဟိ (kehi) or ကေဘိ (kebhi)
Dative (fourth)	ကဿ (kassa) or ကိဿ (kissa)	ကေသံ (kesaṃ) or ကေသာနံ (kesānaṃ)
Ablative (fifth)	ကသ္မာ (kasmā) or ကိသ္မာ (kismā)	ကေဟိ (kehi) or ကေဘိ (kebhi)
Genitive (sixth)	ကဿ (kassa) or ကိဿ (kissa)	ကေသံ (kesaṃ) or ကေသာနံ (kesānaṃ)
Locative (seventh)	ကသ္မိံ (kasmiṃ) or ကမှိ (kamhi) or ကိသ္မိံ (kismiṃ) or ကိမှိ (kimhi)	ကေသု (kesu)

Close

Declension table of "က" (masculine)

Pronoun

က n

Burmese script form of ka (“what”)

Declension

More information Case \ Number, Singular ...

Case \ Number	Singular	Plural
Nominative (first)	ကိံ (kiṃ)	ကာနိ (kāni)
Accusative (second)	ကိံ (kiṃ)	ကာနိ (kāni)
Instrumental (third)	ကေန (kena)	ကေဟိ (kehi) or ကေဘိ (kebhi)
Dative (fourth)	ကဿ (kassa) or ကိဿ (kissa)	ကေသံ (kesaṃ) or ကေသာနံ (kesānaṃ)
Ablative (fifth)	ကသ္မာ (kasmā) or ကိသ္မာ (kismā)	ကေဟိ (kehi) or ကေဘိ (kebhi)
Genitive (sixth)	ကဿ (kassa) or ကိဿ (kissa)	ကေသံ (kesaṃ) or ကေသာနံ (kesānaṃ)
Locative (seventh)	ကသ္မိံ (kasmiṃ) or ကမှိ (kamhi) or ကိသ္မိံ (kismiṃ) or ကိမှိ (kimhi)	ကေသု (kesu)

Close

Declension table of "က" (neuter)

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[MS-1] [1]
(Can we verify⁽⁺⁾ this quotation?)พวน รามัญวงศ์ [Phuan Ramanyawong] (2005) พจนานุกรมมอญ-ไทย ฉบับมอญสยาม [Mon-Thai (Siamese) Dictionary], กรุงเทพฯ [Bangkok]: มติชน [Matichon], →ISBN

[Halliday-2] [2]
R. Halliday (1922) A Mon-English Dictionary‎, Bangkok: Siam Society, page 28

[1]

[2]

Pronunciation

Usage notes

Etymology 1

Letter

Derived terms

Etymology 2

Verb

Synonyms

Noun

Derived terms

Etymology 3

Verb

Noun

Derived terms

Etymology 4

Particle

Derived terms

Etymology 5

Postposition

Etymology 6

Conjunction

Synonyms

Derived terms

Etymology 7

Noun

Derived terms

Etymology 8

Verb

Derived terms

Further reading

Pronunciation

Etymology 1

Letter

Etymology 2

Noun

Etymology 3

Noun

Etymology 4

Verb

Etymology 5

Verb

References

Alternative forms

Pronoun

Declension

Pronoun

Declension

Burmese

Mon

Pali