their nouns ; but အများ, from များ to be many, follows the general rule, as အများသောဆရာ, or ဆရာအများ, many teachers.
§93. The imperfect degree of comparison is sometimes made by shortening and reduplicating the verbal root, as ချို့ချို့, sweetish, from ချို, to be sweet, ခခ, bitterish, from ခါး, to be bitter; sometimes, by affixing ခပ်, to the root reduplicated, or reduplicated and shortened, as ခပ်ဆိုးဆိုး, rather bad; and sometimes by affixing reduplicated chiming increments, having တ for an initial to the root in its natural state or shortened, to express a slight degree of the quality, as ချိုတိုတို, or ချို့တို့တို့, slightly sweetish.
§94. The comparative degree is made, by means of the secondary noun အထက်, or အောက်, and verb, as အိမ်ထက်ကြီးသည်, to be greater than the house, or by a circumlocution of verbs, as သာ၍ကြီးသည်, to exceed in greatness, or be greater.
§95. The superlative degree is made, by prefixing အ, and affixing ဆုံး to the verbal root, as အမြတ်ဆုံး, most excellent; and is joined to nouns according to the general rule, as အမြတ်ဆုံးသာလူ, or လူအမြတ်ဆုံး, the most excellent man.
numeral adjectives.
§96. Numerals are generally combined with a word descriptive of some quality in the noun to which they belong, and in that state are joined to nouns according to the general rule.
§97. If the numeral is less than ten, the auxiliary word is affixed to it (the formative အ, whenever it occurs, being dropped), as ခွက်နှစ်လုံး, or နှစ်လုံးသောခွက်, two cups, from ခွက်, a cup, နှစ်, two, and အလုံး, round; if it is a capital number, as ten, twenty, thirty, two hundred, three hundred, &c., the auxiliary is prefixed to it, as ခွက်အလုံးနှစ်ဆယ်, or အလုံးနှစ်ဆယ်သောခွက်, twenty cups; and if it is a numeral, intervening between the capitals, the auxiliary is both prefixed and affixed, as ခွက်အလုံးနှစ်ဆယ်နှစ်လုံး, or အလုံးနှစ်ဆယ်နှစ်လုံးသောခွက်, twenty-two cups. But in any case in which the auxiliary is prefixed, it may be omitted, as ဆရာအပါးနှစ်ဆယ်, or အပါးနှစ်ဆယ်သောဆရာ, twenty teachers, may be written ဆရာနှစ်ဆယ်, or နှစ်ဆယ်သောဆရာ, and ဆရာအပါးနှစ်ဆယ်နှစ်ပါး, or အပါးနှစ်ဆယ်နှင့်ပါးသောဆရာ, twenty-two
