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Learning the Khmer Language By Antonio Graceffo |
 How do you say "owl" in Khmer? |
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The first five months that I lived in Cambodia, I made a concerted
effort to learn the language by practicing with my Khmer friends, and by
studying a grammar book at night on my own. But the deeper I got into the
language, the weirder it got. Numbers are generally a pretty straight forward thing to learn when
you are learning a foreign language. But of course, with Khmer the numbers
made no sense. The counting system repeated after five, instead of after
ten. That meant Zero through five were unique numbers. Then six was FIVE
and ONE. And SEVEN was FIVE and TWO. When you got into the teens, it was
staggering how long the words were. Eighteen was TEN, FIVE, and THREE. Khmer had a unique word for ten and a word for twenty. But then the
tens, from thirty to one-hundred, were the same as in Thai. Without doing
any research, this tells me the early Khmers weren’t people who needed
large numbers. And large numbers would be defined as larger than
twenty-nine. Once I gave up on learning from my friends and decided to sign up
for school, it got worse. When we started reading decimal numbers I
suspected that my teacher was lying to me. She claimed that .50 would be
read DECIMAL HA SEP, but .5 would be read DECIMAL PRAM. So I asked her.
“Since those two look identical, and since the zero after the decimal
has no value, shouldn’t those be read the same? Her answer was “yes.” But she continued to read them
differently. The “Yes” answer was like coarse sandpaper on my
eardrums. Her insistence on answering very question with “yes,” and
then contradicting herself became another source of confusion and
frustration for me. I would ask her something like “Is the word for
chair DOC?” Ands she would answer “Yes.” Then I would continue with
my sentence in Khmer. “I sit on the Doc.” When I finished she would
say. “Yes, that is incorrect. The Khmer word for CHAIR is GAUAI, not
DOC. DOC is table.” “But I asked you if CHAIR was DOC, and you said yes!” I
protested. “Yes.” She agreed. The first few weeks of lessons I thought either my teacher was
insane, or she was intentionally tripping me up. Maybe it was a
conspiracy. Maybe the government didn’t want foreigners to learn Khmer,
and take away their edge. What I eventually learned was that it was very
common for Khmers, out of politeness, to always answer a question first
with “yes.” Then they would give you the real answer, which could be
yes or no. And the meaning of this first yes wasn’t the silly polite yes
in Thailand, where they just never tell you that you are wrong. Actually
it was a polite yes, which meant “I heard you,” or “I am
listening.” Unfortunately, it took me a long time to figure this out,
which resulted in me shouting at my teacher a number of times. “BUT YOU
SAID YES!!! THEN YOU TELL ME I’M WRONG!!!” Now that I am used to hearing “Yes, but No” we are getting along
well. I know now that I have to ask once, pause, wait for the yes, pause
again, and maybe ask a second time, before I will get the right answer.
Pausing is hard for New Yorkers. And politeness is also not one of our
strong suits. But when in Phnom Penh… My first post-graduate studies were in the field of applied
linguistics, which I studied at the University of Mainz, Germany, for four
years. I never delved deeply into the field of psycholinguistics, but I
have always been fascinated by the cultural facts which are revealed by a
language and the way it is spoken. I really want to get a history book, and read about how undeveloped
Cambodia must have been in the 1850s, before the French came. They must
have had absolutely nothing, because even very basic words were French.
Newspaper and magazine were both French words. So, this would suggest that
they must not have had either before the French came. The word for air-conditioner is MACHINE DRAWJACK, which literally
translates as COLD During vocabulary lessons I am staggered at the number of foreign
words, which the Khmers use. “Gi is the Khmer word for ride, like ride a horse,” said my
teacher. “No, actually Gi is the Chinese word for ride,” I pointed out.
“Rot that is the Khmer word for car.” “No, that is the Thai word for car.” “Aleman is the Khmer word for German.” “No, it is the French word for German.” Incidentally, aleman was also the word for Germany, German language,
and German people. And even when they are speaking English, Khmers can’t
be bothered to learn an adjective form, a noun form, and separate forms
for people and countries. Instead they just say “He comes from
German.” That is, unless they say “He comes from aleman.” Learning the Khmer language helps me to interpret their unique brand
of English. Recently everyone was coming up to me saying “Happy merry
Christmas.” I couldn’t figure out why they did that. So I asked my
teacher how to say Christmas in Khmer. “Buon Noel.” She answered. It made sense that they used the
French word, because they definitely didn’t have Christmas before the
French came. “But buon noel is merry Christmas.” I pointed out. “I just
wanted the noun, you know, Christmas.” Of course she answered,
“Yes,” followed by “Christmas is buon noel.” What I guessed was
that they had adopted the French word for merry Christmas to mean just
Christmas. But they couldn’t just walk up to you and wish you a
Christmas so they then translated their word for happy, and voila “happy
merry Christmas.” Some other theories I came up with may have been a stretch. For
example, the word for tourist is DESKJA. And I really have to wonder if it
was some bastardization of the word desk job. Maybe when the first
tourists came here, in the early seventies, the Khmers asked them “why
are you here?” And the tourists answered something like, “Oh I have an
awful desk job. And I am trying to escape.” Or maybe when the Khmers
asked them what they did at home, they said “I am an advertising
executive.” or “I deal in collateralized mortgage securities.” And
when the Khmers didn’t hear, “I am a farmer, a doctor, or a school
teacher,” they would just say, oh, “DESKJOB.” Where learning to speak had been interesting, and gave me little
cultural tidbits to mull over at night, learning to read and write is a
nightmare. When you start going to school determined only to learn a
little speaking and listening, they slowly turn the sales screws, until
they got you coming to school three hours per day, seven days per week.
Then, just when you think they couldn’t bleed one more dollar out of
you, they talk you into learning to read and write. They lure you in,
telling you “It’s easy, try it.” You believe you’re as smart as the average Khmer. And over seventy
percent of them can read and write. So, what the heck? I signed up for
reading and writing, and I paid my money. On the first day, the teacher showed me an alphabet chart and said.
“You see how simple? This is how small children learn. Each letter has a
picture of an animal next to it. So, if you can’t remember how that
letter sounds, just look at the picture.” “That is easy,” I agreed. “So, this W-looking letter, next to
the picture of a pig makes a P sound?” She frowned. “Well, no. It
makes a J sound, because pig in Khmer is JEROUK.” Duh! Now I felt
stupid. Of course it would be the sound, according to the Khmer animals’
names. Ok, no sweat. I figured first thing I would do is just make a list
of the animals, and memorize their names. Starting at the top of the
chart, I said “OK, pig?” “Jerouk” Answered the teacher, “Cat?” “Chma” “Horse” “Sae.” But then I hit a stump. The next picture was of a gold-colored
devil-man, with a sword. “What is this one?” I asked. The teacher said some Khmer word, which meant nothing to me. “No,
I mean what is it in English?” “Don’t you know?” She asked, confused. “I thought you were
American.” “I am, but we don’t have golden dragon demons in Brooklyn. So,
we don’t really have a name for them.” We skipped that one. The next one was a picture of a little girl.
“What is this one?” Next, there was a picture of a fruit. “And what is this?” I
asked. “You don’t know?”
“No, in Brooklyn our fruits tend to be very empirical, apple, banana, “The New Zealand students know what that one is,” my teacher
said, with a chastising voice. “Oh yeah, well New Zealand isn’t an adjective.” “What is the adjective for students from New Zealand?” She
asked. Was it New Zealander students? Or, was New Zealand students
correct? Now I was stumped on a question in English. My brain was
short-circuiting. How the hell did they expect me to learn to read these
ancient scribbles that they called an alphabet? “All the New Zealand people know this one,” She repeated.
“Well, hurray for New Zealand!” I shouted. “It’s a tropical country. They probably eat this fruit everyday
for breakfast. But I have never seen one before.” The same was true of
the next four fruits, all of which, allegedly, New Zealanders would know. “Why do New Zealands know so many more fruits than people from
American? Are “No, it’s because we spent our free-time creating the first
modern democracy, while New Zealand was happy to be the British colony
with the largest fruit vocabulary.” Now I was angry at New Zealand! Normally I didn’t even have an
opinion on that country that I always confused with Australia. But on that
day, I wanted to get in a boxing ring with them, all twenty-five of them,
or whatever the laughable population of New Zealand was. “Maybe you should have learned more fruits,” suggested my
teacher. “Yeah, maybe. I mean I’d definitely trade my right to vote for
greater fruit identification.” Actually, thinking back on the latest US
presidential election, that might not have been a bad trade. The next five
or six pictures were large, flightless waterfowl. “Pigeons, I have only
seen pigeons.” I told her. “Pigeon is the only bird you know?” asked my teacher in the same
empathetic voice you would ask “and the doctor really said you only have
six months to live?” She felt sorry for me. “I know some other birds.” I amended. “There was a toucan on
my breakfast cereal.” Unfortunately, toucan didn’t come up, oddly,
either did penguin. Luckily the new Zealanders didn’t know those birds
either. Abandoning the alphabet chart, I asked “In just what way is this
language easy to read and write?” “First off it is written left to right,” answered my teacher.
Well that was good. When I opened my book, I just saw a huge jumble of
characters, written all the way across the page. “That is the longest
word I’ve ever seen.” I said. In Thailand some words were so long I couldn’t even begin to
pronounce them. My best friend’s name had about fifty characters in it.
I still call him by only the first three. And we have known each other for
nearly a year! “That’s not a word,” said my teacher, momentarily putting my
mind at ease. “It is a sentence.” “But then why is it all written together like that?” “In Khmer we don’t separate words.” What a nice system. “Why are some letters floating in the air like
that?” I asked. “Those are vowels.” “I thought you wrote left to right.” “We do. But some vowels are written on top.” “Some?” “Yes, some are written under, and some are written before. And
some are written after or around a word.” Of course, boy! This does sound easy. “It’s easy compared to learning Chinese.” She pointed out. That was true. And that was why I could speak Chinese well, but I
gave up on reading and writing after about a month. “How many characters are there in Chinese?” She asked. “Tens, maybe even hundreds of thousands.” “And how many do you need to read a news paper?” “About 1,500.” “And to finish university?” “At least 2,500.” “OK,” She said triumphantly. “Khmer only has 33 consonants.”
“33 letters, oh, that is easy. Where do I sign up?” But that’s
how they get you. Looking at the chart, I counted the 33 consonants, my
teacher had told me about. But then, I noticed all this mess at the
bottom. “What’s all that?” I asked. “Those are the vowels.” She said, a little embarrassed that I had caught her in a near-lie “I thought you said there were only 33 letters.” “No, 33 consonants. But, obviously you also need vowels.” “Obviously,” I agreed. “So, how many are there?” “Twenty three.” So, fifty-six letters. Yikes! That was a lot. But ok, at least it
was a finite number. With Chinese you can’t even write your name with 56
letters. In fact I knew about two hundred characters before I learned to
write my name. And I still do it wrong sometimes. The first word I read was composed of two characters. There was a
consonant GA and vowel A. “GA” I read, proudly. “Very good.” said my teacher. This is going to be easy. I thought. The next word was consonant KA
and vowel A. “Ka.” “Good!” Next was consonant GO and vowel A. “Goa?” I guessed. “No, GEA,” corrected my teacher. “Why GEA?” “There are two kinds of consonants, those with A sounds and those
with O sounds. We call them big and little consonants. If a vowel occurs
after an A sound it has the sound you are familiar with. But if it occurs
after an O sound, it changes.” “So, there are 23 vowels, but each one has two sounds?” I asked.
“Yes.” “So, there are 46 vowels?” She looked at me blankly. “I never thought about it that way, but yes, I guess so.” I was beginning to hate the Khmer language. So, we had 33 consonants
and 46 vowels, 79 letters. Annoying, yes, but ok. I could do it. I had a
Khmer friend named Klack who wasn’t too sharp. He told me the reason I
wore glasses was because I was demon possessed, and the proof that there
were demons in my house was that I had a bookshelf. And everyone knows how
much demons like to collect on shelves. “Do you know why Khmers don’t have book shelves?” he asked. “Because they don’t read?” I surmised. “No, because of the demons,” Klack answered. Well, in the end I figure, if Klack were smart enough to read Khmer,
so was I. The next word that we studied was the pronoun I, which in Khmer is
knyom. It seemed to consist only of one letter, Ka. “But where is the
yom sound?” I asked. “The yom sound comes from these subscripts under the word.”
Explained my teacher. It turned out that each consonant could be converted into a
subscript, which appeared below the word, and added phonemes. Once again
33 consonants meant 33 subscripts. So, now 79 plus 33, now we had 122
characters. I wanted my money back. But we wouldn’t learn how to say
that until chapter ten. And by then it would be too late. The next word we learned was the pronoun HE, which I knew was guat.
It was no surprise that guat was both HE and SHE. That is very common in
many languages. So, the pronunciation and usage of the word was nothing
special. But the writing, of course, left me looking for some razor
blades, so I could cut my wrists. Guat had a ga sound, and ended in a ja sound. That didn’t exactly
make sense to me. But Khmer, like Thai, doesn’t have a lot of harsh
terminal consonants. A and K, J and T may sound the same to our ears. In
fact, that is why when Khmers speak English you don’t know if they are
offering you milk or meal. The two words would be pronounced the same.
Rice, ride, and right are also pronounced identically. As it is rare that
someone would offer you meal with your coffee, the milk/meal controversy
is easily remedied by context. But when a girl asks you to Write her, buy
you understand RIDE, the results could be catastrophic. I just realized I am on my second paragraph, writing about the
experience of learning the word HE in Khmer. What other language is so
complicated that learning a single word would need two paragraphs? I mean
I could barely make a sentence about learning the word HE in Spanish. “The teacher said HE is el.” OOOOh! That’s riveting. What an interesting story. Guat ended in a JAW sound. But it was pronounced with a harsh T. so,
“Where does the harsh T come from?” I asked my teacher. “It comes from this symbol here.” She pointed at two dots over
the final consonant. “Symbol?” “Yes, symbols occur over words, and they change the sound of the
consonants.” “Over the words? I asked, skeptically. “Well, also under words.” I was too mentally exhausted to shout AH HA! But trust me, I was
thinking it. “And just how many of these symbols are there?” “Oh,” She said, looking reflectively. Then after too long a
pause, “about ten,” she answered. “About, you mean you aren’t sure?” “Yes.” She said. The only consistency in the Khmer language
seemed to be that my teacher always said “yes.” Would you like a knuckle sandwich? Yes. So we were up to 122 characters. Now, we had ten more so 122. And
those ten symbols changed the sounds of all the consonants, so maybe we
had 155 phonemes to remember. “And that’s it?” I asked, not
believing it myself. “Well, also dependent and independent vowels.” When I asked how many, she just laughed at me. Because I quit learning to read Chinese, and I quit learning to read
Thai, I am determined to stick it out with Khmer. But it just seams so
hopeless and silly. There are almost no websites in Khmer. You can’t
send SMS on a cell phone with Khmer. There are almost no books written in
Khmer and certainly none that I would want to read. The only thing you
could do with written Khmer is write a letter. But of course the houses
have no addresses. And the post office is just a false front for a huge
theft machine. So the letter wouldn’t get there anyway. And even if I
chose to write to one of only 13,000,000 Khmers, there is a 38%
probability that he couldn’t read. So, why am I learning to read and write Khmer? I am learning so it
will be easier when I go back to a temple to learn to read and write Thai-ai,
a language spoken only in the Shan State of Burma. Is that stupid? Yes, it
is insane. But if I wasn’t so wrapped up with learning obscure languages
maybe I would fall in with bad company, join a gang, and get into trouble. If the nuns could see me now… At catholic school I refused to
decline even a single French verb. Now, I sit for hours a day, learning to
write this bizarre and useless language, based on ancient Pali, of India. In all honesty, given the difficulties which Khmers and foreigners
alike have with the language, I really think Vietnam and Indonesia have
the right idea by using the Latin alphabet. The Chinese and Thais claim
that they can’t switch to Latin because their language is tonal, and
there would be too many completely different words with the exact same
spelling. But Khmer doesn’t have this issue. Anyway, as soon as I can write Khmer I am planning to write a letter
to King Sihamouni to outline my reasons why I think they should Latinize. Until then, I guess I am relegated to sitting in my dark little
classroom, with a sixty-watt light bulb, matching Khmer letters with
colorful pictures of animals and fruits, which only New Zealanders could
identify. Being able to get a degree from reputable online colleges can get you an online degree for so many different degree programs which you can get from the comforts of home. |
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