Title taken from this page linked to in a previous post.
I didn’t read it to the end the first time (otherwise I would have discovered that the author had managed to up his alphabet count to 155 *phonemes*). As I read it now I waver between sympathy (thinking of my own struggles with the Khmer Alphabet from Hell) and annoyance, simply because this guy seems to have little respect for Khmer and the people that speak it, and spends more time making clever, smart-ass comments about the language than learning it.
And only does he not learn it, but he also manages to get some very elementary facts wrong:
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 here, would be defined as larger than twenty-nine. Having this mix of Thai and Khmer was completely inconsistent. For example, the word for FIFTY was not related to the word for FIVE, because FIVE was Khmer, and FIFTY was Thai. Apparently it doesn’t bother the Khmers to look at two FIVES, as in 55, and pronounce it HASEP PRAM, instead of HA or PRAM SEP PRAM. HA SEP means FIVE TENS in Thai. So, that part is logical in Thai. But in Khmer HA SEP has no meaning other that it is FIFTY.
While it’s likely true that Khmer got the multiples of 10 from Thai, it’s even more likely that Thai got them, and a lot more, from Chinese. Let’s compare the names of the Thai numbers with their Cantonese pronunciations:
1 nèung
2 sãwng
3 sãam (sam)
4 sìi (sei)
5 hâa
6 hók (lok)
7 jét (jat)
8 páet (bat)
9 kâo (gau)
10 sìp (sap)
11 sìp-ét (sap-yat)
12 sìp-sãwng
20 yîi-sìp (yi-sap)
21 yîi-sìp-ét (yi-sap-yat)
30 sãam-sìp (sam-sap)
Following this logic, the Thais likely had no need for numbers larger than…5.
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 MACHINE. Now this isn’t too far off. A lot of languages use the word machine for every single apparatus. In Chinese and Thai, and even in Italian machine is everything, from a camera to an airplane. But the frightening thing is that Khmer uses the French word for machine. So does this mean that they didn’t have any machines before the French came?
Again, very flawed logic here.
ម៉ាស៊ីន maasiin is not the only word Khmers have for machines, they also have the Sanskrit derived យន្ត yuən– found in the word យន្តហោះ yuənhâh “flying machine” = airplane, and គ្រឿង (krıəŋ, apparently a native Khmer word):
ជួសជុលគ្រឿងអគ្គិសនី
cuəh cul krıəŋ akkisanii
repair of electrical appliances/machines
akkisanii – derived from Pali aggi “fire” asani “lightning”. Does this mean the Khmers got electricity from India?
And it doesn’t stop here:
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
Had enough yet? Let’s go on, shall we?
“Gi that 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.
Sealang, which is (usually) reliable about giving the etymology of words, does not give anything for ជិះ cih, so we’ll give him a pass.
“Rot that is the Khmer word for car.”
“No, that is the Thai word for car.”
But here he is wrong. Thai got this word from Khmer រទេះ rôteh. Which very likely got it from Pali/Sanskrit (referring to sealang again:
1 n cart, vehicle, carriage, coach, chariot. (see: រថ which is probably related. According to Menetrier, 1933 រទេះ was borrowed from an Indian language, which may not have been Sanskrit, during preKhmer times.) (see plate 8.) )
Thai also has the word គ្រឿង (In เครื่องบิน kʰrʉ̂aŋ ˈbin – airplane) and many, many, other words taken from Khmer. Not to say that the borrowing was all one-way, but anyone who reads their history will know that the Thais are relative newcomers to the area and did not even have an *alphabet* until they created their own – based on Khmer.
It’s understandable that a simple tourist, comparing richer, more prosperous Thailand with the relative poverty of Cambodia would come to the conclusion that the poorer cousin is the one that steals its ideas from the richer one. But this guy is a trained *linguist* who really ought to know better.
