Let's speak Khmer!
on Oly's Cambodia Blog (Cambodia), 29/Oct/2009 13:39, 34 days ago
Normal0falsefalsefalseEN-GBX-NONEX-NONE/* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0cm; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;}Lining the banks of the great Mekong river at the southern end of the impressive new Japanese-funded Kizuma bridge, the quiet town of Kampong Cham, 3 hours north of Phnom Penh, will be my base for the next 8 weeks.My task here is to learn to speak Khmer (or actually K’mai).I will need this to be able to communicate once I start work in December, as few if any people will speak English (or French for that matter) where I’m going.This is mainly as I’ll be at a hospital in the remote Banchay Meachay province of NW Cambodia, which by all accounts will not be a hotbed of educated English speakers (though rumour has it there may be some French-educated doctors if I get really stuck).The lack of even French speakers is also of course a legacy of the brutal Khmer Rouge era, when such‘intellectuals’ were prime targets to be killed.After a week of lessons I confess I’m finding it hard work.I haven’t studied this intensively for years -and the heat here really isn’t conducive to studying the finer points of adjectival verbs.Not that I can complain:our teacher Dara is inspirational, not only through his energetic teaching, but even more as someone who survived the killing fields and learned English during 10 years in a Thai refugee camp.Given his history, his patience and constant good humour is impressive, not to mention humbling.K’mai is not exactly easy for usbarraing(westerners).For a start it has 33 consonants and no fewer than23 vowels– a few more than ‘a e i o u’!Thankfully we’re not even attempting to learn the written language, which uses a huge and baffling alphabet of hieroglyphics.It’s also difficult just because there is seldom any reference point for learning words – they just don’t sound like anything else, so are difficult to remember.So you have to be inventive:a rabbit-thief eating by the water in the Lake district gives me‘po-cha-ni-yah-taan’ (poacher near tarn) so I can try to remember the word for ‘restaurant’.I may not be eating out too often.On the other hand there are many up-sides– no tenses, no plurals, no genders and no tonality (by which I understand that a word doesn’t magically change meaning if your voice goes up at the end or something – linguists can correct me on that one).And there are also some lovely words in K’mai.I find a beautiful simplicity in the verb to like (cho-chet– ‘to enter the heart’) and in bed-, bath- and dining-rooms (‘sleep-‘, water-‘ and ‘eat-rice’-rooms).Not to mention lashings of bongs, dongs and pongs to keep me amused.The most useful phrase of all, I hope, will be‘no problem’:ot pan-ya-haa!