Burmese abounds with honorific expressions. First of all is the ever-recurring ordinary honorific form _daw_, placed after nouns and verbs, to indicate that the thing or action named has to do with some person out of the common order. The first personal pronoun has three distinct forms, so that a speaker is able, by choosing one or other of these three, in a word, as it were, to place himself on an eminence above, on an equality with, or in a position beneath the person he is addressing; a great convenience, surely. What could the framers of our own poor language have been thinking about, to neglect to secure for us such an obvious advantage as that? The second personal pronoun is even richer, for it counts no less than six well-defined gradations of expression, not to mention several more supernumerary forms, that may be employed if the regular forms of the pronoun are not enough. By means of these the person addressed may be treated with veneration, gently flattered, addressed with easy familiarity, made to feel his relative littleness, scolded, or abused, as occasion may require. And all this variety of expression in the mere choice of the pronoun in the second person! What a language it must be in the mouth of a competent person! Again, with regard to “Yes,” our affirmative of assent, the Burmese can vary its form, by means of well-sanctioned idioms in constant use, from something equivalent to the American “That’s so,” through several more and more polite affirmatives, up to “What you say is appropriate, my Lord,” an expression reserved of course for the king, the monks, some respectable European, or Burman of distinction. Where such various expressions would sound very stilted in English, the Burmese idiom can give them as ordinary forms of politeness. Thus again, the ordinary man is said to “eat”; the monk “nourishes his body with the alms of the pious”; but the king tops them all, for he “ascends to the lordly board.” It is asserted of a man when he dies merely that he has “changed the bawâ,” _i.e._, left one state of existence and gone into another; but in the case of a monk we may safely go further and say, as the idiom does, that he has “returned to the blissful seats”; the king, when he dies, is politely said to have “ascended to the village of the _nats_” (beings superior to men). These Oriental peculiarities of language and idiom are interesting and amusing, and the frequent discovery of them, in the course of his studies, does much to compensate the foreigner for the drudgery involved in learning the language thoroughly, provided he is not devoid of the sense of humour, and can appreciate them when he finds them.