Saturday, November 24, 2007

Some Place-names in Monland (Lower Burma): Pazundaung (ပုဇြန္ေတာင္=Pujwanthon)

You must have seen, painted on the placards of the omnibuses for Pujwanthon, the picture of a lobster. The picture of the lobster is used, because it is generally thought that the name "Pujwanthon" has some connection with the catching of lobsters. Pujwan (ပုဇြန္) in Burmese means "lobster" and thon (ေထာင္) "to catch". In reality, the name is originally Mon and it is spelt Masum duiw (မသုန္ဒို၀္) and means " a place of five hillocks." (Masun=five; duiw=hillock). In colloquial Mon (မသုန္) "masun" becomes (ပသုန္) "pasun", the better 'm' being changed into 'p'.

Also in the case of (တာေမြ) Tamwe, (ေဘာက္ေထာ္) Bhokthau, (ကမာ႐ြတ္) Kamarwat, (မဂၤလာဒုံ) Mangaladum and (အင္းစိန္) Ancin, we find that Mon names have become Burmanized.

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