The Khmer Life & Times of...

DOCH CHKAE - Kam Knea Doch Chkae (OFFICIAL MUSIC VIDEO)

LINGUISTIC DIVERSITY CHALLENGE: southeast asia and oceania

K H M E R  |  ភាសាខ្មែរ

EXONYM | Khmer [kmɛər], Cambodian ENDONYM | ភាសាខ្មែរ [pʰiə.ˈsaː kʰmae]

LOCATION | Khmer is the official language of Cambodia, but is also natively spoken in Vietnam and Thailand.

POPULATION | Approximately 13 million speakers worldwide

BACKGROUND | Khmer is an Austroasiatic language of the Mon-Khmer branch, and has incorporated influence from Sanskrit and Pali. Most Khmer dialects are mutually intelligible but have very obvious differences. Old Khmer (600-800 CE) was heavily affected by Sanskrit, and with the fall of the Khmer Empire the language became less regulated and underwent a variety of changes. Middle Khmer (14-16th centuries) exhibited dramatic lexical, morphological and phonological changes when the language started borrowing more from Thai and Lao. Modern Khmer is governed by marginally different rules than Old Khmer as a result, making it hard to understand Old Khmer without prior knowledge. It is important to be aware that there are several social registers in Khmer which extends beyond variation in pronouns. The overall vocabulary you use to talk to your sister will not be the same as what you would use when talking to royalty.

GRAMMAR | Khmer is an analytic, isolating language, which means it often uses shorter words that include less morphemes and employs the use of helper words to convey meaning instead. For example, Khmer lacks inflections, conjugations, or case endings but instead has a wealth of particles and auxiliary words to compensate. Khmer follows an SVO word-order and places modifiers after the words their modifying. 

PHONOLOGY | Unlike many of its neighbors (Burmese, Thai, Lao, Vietnamese), Khmer is not a tonal language! Khmer generally places stress on the last syllable of a word, making stress non-phonemic (if you mess up your stresses, you will sound funny but you will not destroy the meaning of a word). Most words in Khmer are, on average, between one and two syllables. Most words with three or more syllables are loanwords, usually from Sanskrit or Pali. Intonation is used to distinguish mood and statements (kind of like how in English we may raise pitch at the end of a sentence to indicate a question). 

SCRIPT | The Khmer script is an abugida developed from the Pallava script of India and looks visually similar to Thai and Lao. There are two groups of consonants: series one with the inherent vowel /ɑː/, and series two with the inherent vowel /ɔː/. In Khmer, these series are referred to as “voiceless” and “voiced”, as series two was intended to represent voiced phonemes from Old Khmer. This makes Khmer kinda tricky to read because voiced stops have been lost, resulting in the use of dipthongs instead. Khmer now contains two symbols for most consonant phonemes, with vowel symbols having two possible readings depending on which series the consonant they come after belongs to.

SWADESH LIST

ក្បាល [kɓaːl] | head

សក់ [sɑʔ] | hair

ភ្នែក [pʰnɛːk] | eye

ច្រមុះ [crɑ.ˈmoh] | nose

មាត់ [mŏət] | mouth

ក [kɑː] | neck

ដោះ [ɗɑh] | breast

WHY KHMER? | Khmer is another one of those languages that despite their solid status and large speaking population they end up being neglected because they’re not “Western”, nor are they valued by the global community as much as they ought to be. I already knew about Burmese, Vietnamese, Thai, and Lao, which are the other big southeast Asian languages, so this seemed like the last one to know before I consider doing the lesser-known ones (maybe in future challenges!). Khmer also has a good number of free resources for this kind of challenge so it was an easy one lol 

Though 10-year-old Vira Rama didn’t understand what his family’s secrets were, he knew that they had to be kept hidden. At first glance, they seemed innocuous enough: a stash of family photos of trips to the beach and Siem Reap, a photo of Rama in a youth scout uniform, all wrapped up in a bag made of cut tarp.

When the Khmer Rouge seized control of the country in April 1975, Rama’s mother, Kim Pean Ky, had insisted on taking this bundle of photos with her as her family was forcibly relocated from their home in the northwestern city of Battambang. She kept them concealed as soldiers marched them into the country on dusty roads congested with people fleeing in three-wheeled tuk-tuks, on ox-driven carts, and even on foot. As soon as the family was resettled in a village called O’ Srarlao, located in what the military regime called Zone 4, Rama watched as his mother dug a hole under their small wooden hut just large enough for the bag of photos. He didn’t ask questions as she hid the traces of their middle-class life under a pile of banana leaves. Though the family would travel to several other zones during the rule of the Khmer Rouge, from 1975 to 1979, Rama’s mother never forgot about the photos. Each time they moved, she quietly and dutifully excavated the bag and then buried again, and again, and again. If the severe, unpredictable, paranoid Khmer Rouge had found it, their lives would be forfeit.

Now, 44 years later, the archive Rama’s mother risked her life to preserve has been published in a book, aptly named Buried. The book is a collaboration between the family and British photographer Charles Fox, who has worked in Cambodia since 2005 running Found Cambodia, an archive of photos of life before, during, and after the reign of the Khmer Rouge in the late 1970s. Of all the photos Fox has encountered in Found Cambodia, he says the Rama’s archive is by far the most complete. “Their story is one of thousands of stories,” he says. “But their collection is unique. Vira tried to record as much of his family history as possible.”

NEXT DISNEY PRINCESS (3/8)

#3: Sikha (Cambodian)

On 16 November, the Khmer Rouge tribunal, officially known as the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), pronounced senior regime leaders Khieu Samphan and Nuon Chea guilty of genocide. In the wake of this landmark ruling – the tribunal’s first genocide conviction of former Khmer Rouge officers 40 years after the fall of the regime – commentators and diplomats are growing increasingly confident that the ECCC’s operations will soon terminate, despite the fact that additional cases remain on its docket.

This pessimism is largely a reaction to years of Cambodian political opposition to the ECCC’s pursuit of cases beyond those completed in mid-November. Prime Minister Hun Sen – himself a former Khmer Rouge commander who defected from the group in 1977 to join the Vietnamese-led push to overthrow Pol Pot’s regime – objects to the ECCC’s prosecuting of these additional cases, which are aimed at lower-level Khmer Rouge cadres. Hun Sen has claimed that doing so would ignite “a civil war” that would kill “200,000 to 300,000 people.” Minister of the Interior Sar Kheng, in a November speech to a crowd that included some former Khmer Rouge soldiers, proclaimed, “There will be no more investigations taking place, so you don’t have to worry” and that “the process has ended”.

Asked how the ECCC will proceed amidst this government pressure, tribunal spokesman Neth Pheaktra responded opaquely: “No comment”.

Southeast Asian submissions to the 91st Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film

The submitted motion pictures must be first released theatrically in their respective countries between 1 October 2017 and 30 September 2018. The deadline for submissions is 1 October 2018.

Cambodia

ផ្នូរគ្មានឈ្មោះ (Les tombeaux sans noms) (Graves Without a Name) directed by Rithy Panh French, Khmer 

Indonesia

Marlina Si Pembunuh dalam Empat Babak (Marlina the Murderer in Four Acts directed by Mouly Surya Indonesian

Philippines

Signal Rock directed by Chito Roño Filipino

Singapore

Buffalo Boys directed by Mike Wiluan Indonesian, English

Thailand

มะลิลา (Malila: The Farewell Flower) directed by Anucha Boonyawatana Thai

Vietnam

Reviving—and Reinventing—the Magic of Khmer Classical Dance

Cambodia’s first LGBTQ dance company has big dreams.

PRUMSODUN OK IS A KHMER classical dancer, choreographer, and the founding artistic director behind Prumsodun Ok and Natyarasa, Cambodia’s first LGBTQ dance company. The company began in Ok’s living room in 2015, with the goal of not only preserving a 1,000-year-old art form, but also creating innovative works that reflect the LGBTQ experience in Cambodia.

Khmer classical dance has roots in animism, Hinduism, and Buddhism. Ok describes it as entertainment, worship, and education all at once. In the 1970s, when the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime was targeting elites around the country, an estimated 90 percent of Khmer classical dancers were among those who were killed. As Ok puts it, “It was a real tragic loss because Khmer classical dance is not passed on in a book.”

The shores of Yeak Laom Lake form an almost perfect circle. And though the lake has a small circumference, it’s just shy of 160 feet (48.77 m) (about 48 meters) deep. Its shape and depth are due to its volcanic origin.

It’s believed that 4,000 years ago, a volcanic eruption created a crater that, over time, filled with water. The lake was once surrounded by thick forest on all sides, but today only a thin layer remains, with most of the land having been farmed.

The waters of Yeak Laom are crystal clear, and they stand in stark contrast with the bright green in the background—if you visit during or shortly after the rainy season. Exotic birds and butterflies are common sights, and wild pigs may also come around.

Although the lake is considered sacred by the local people, swimming or playing in the water is common for both locals and tourists. Wooden docks with steps have been built to facilitate access. In 2018, bureaucratic procedures were started to register Yeak Laom and the land around it as state land to better protect the environment. Other measures to protect the lake forbid people from using detergents, gambling, or having arguments while in the lake.

Gnarled trees wrap around the ruins that speckle this archaeological site. The centuries-old temples, many of which are capped with grass or shrouded with tree roots, are slowly being reclaimed by the forest.

Sambor Prei Kuk consists of a fortified wall enclosing 150 Hindu buildings. An engraving on the main temple of this complex refers to King Isanavarman I, and it is accompanied by a date: September 13, 627. Whether or not this is the exact date when the construction of the temple was completed, it still means that Sambor Prei Kuk predates Angkor Wat by several centuries.

Sambor Prei Kuk was the capital of the Chenla Empire (600 to 800). The label of “empire” should be qualified, as it stems from accounts by Chinese emissaries, but it probably referred to a cluster of semi-independent chiefdoms co-existing in a peaceful federation.

The site is divided into three groups. Group N (North) and S (South) are both from the seventh century and glorify Shiva. Prasat Sambor (the main temple) belongs to Group N. Group C (Central) consists of more recent temples from the ninth century, including Prasat Boram, a temple famed for its lion sculptures.

There are some obvious architectural similarities between Sambor Prei Kuk and the temple found on Angkor Wat grounds. The outstanding lintels, pediments, and columns of Sambor Prei Kuk are precursors of the Angkor style. There are, however, some aspects that are distinctive to Sambor Prei Kuk, such as the 10n octagonal towers, which are unique in Southeast Asia.

Of the 150 religious buildings, most are in ruins and barely recognizable, but it is a thrill to wander in the forest and trying to locate some of these buildings, which, at times, blend in seamlessly with the vegetation. As in other archaeological sites in Cambodia, the intrinsic value of these temples is only part of their attractiveness. The other part is the interplay of human-made structures and nature that stands simultaneously as a reminder of the reliance of these ancient buildings and the sobering thought that in the long run, nature will always have the upper hand.

Tonle Srepok is a major tributary of the Mekong River that runs between the Vietnamese province of Đắk Lắk, and the Ratanakiri and Stung Treng provinces in Cambodia. Before the development of modern roads, the river was crucially important to Lao, Khmer, and Vietnamese people for trading purposes, and as a supply line during the U.S.-Vietnam War.

Tonle Srepok (also called the Srepok or Serepok River) was along a branch of the Ho Chi Minh Trail and was used to supply North Vietnamese forces fighting in South Vietnam with weapons, ammunition, and food. When the U.S. Army discovered this, the whole area was heavily bombed, leaving behind a huge amount of unexploded ordnance that even today maims those unfortunate enough to step on or hit one. Rumors of U.S. Special Forces infiltrating Ratanakiri province abound—as to the veracity of these rumors, opinions vary.

As for Apocalypse Now, in a nutshell, Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 film portrays Captain Willard’s journey along a river going from Vietnam to Cambodia on a mission to find and assassinate renegade Colonel Kurtz. It’s unlikely the scenes were actually shot on the Srepok River, as Coppola was forced to film the movie in the Philippines due to security reasons in Cambodia. However, it’s often said that the river in the film was meant to depict the Tonle Srepok, which may well be true. Among all the sizeable rivers running from Vietnam to Cambodia through heavily forested areas, Tonlé Srepok is the most likely to fit the bill.