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| Elvish |
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| Khmer |
All growing up my family read Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien. I loved the story and the poetry and I loved the funny writing on the cover. How great was my surprise when, preparing to serve a mission for the LDS church, I encountered another missionary with the Bible in what appeared to be elvish. I had no idea that that language actually existed outside of Middle Earth. The missionary was going to Cambodia, not Middle Earth and the language was sadly not elvish but Khmer.
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| Khmer alphabet |
Khmer is as I
previously mentioned the name of a group of people, a civilization, and also a language. The earliest samples of Khmer writing are dated to AD 621 (Coulmas). It is a derivative of a system of writing found in southern India. Khmer is a syllabic system with 33 letter characters. One thing I found very interesting was that unlike most Western languages
spaces represents ends of sentences and thoughts rather than breaks between words. I also thought it was interesting that there is no set
location for the vowels, they can be placed before, after, above, or below the consonant they accompany (this site also has a great feature that you can click on the letters and it will pronounce them for you. Check it out) Also click
here for a further explanation of vowels. To me these two conventions seem like a brilliant plan. Speaking as a mildly dyslexic person who lets all her words run together, free positioning of vowels andnospacesbetweenwords seems like a wonderful idea.
The Khmer alphabet even features a whole set of characters that are only used in writing foreign words representing sounds that do normally exist in the Khmer language. Additionally there are special marks, diacritics, used to indicate letters that are used in spelling but are not pronounced (Huffman). I think this would be a valuable characteristic for any written language.
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| Old Khmer inscription |
The Khmer written language arose before 621 and so was well established by the time the Khmer civilization came to power. What is interesting is that the transition from pre-Angkorian Khmer to Old Khmer coincides almost perfectly with the rise of the civilization. Click
here for more information. Similarly the fall of the Angkorian empire in 1431 coincides with the beginning of the linguistical transtion from Old Khmer to Middle Khmer. Learn more
here. Khmer was the language of the empire and writing was limited mostly to the government officials (by contrast the religious leaders had a monopoly on Sanskrit, the language of Buddhism as discussed in a
previous post). As the government became more powerful it had greater control of the language. Scholars attribute the second transition to the
loss of standardization by a strong government and the consequent mixing of language with the surrounding areas as parts of the empire were conquered.
My main thought in regard to this idea of the change in government contributing to a change in language was that we spend a great deal of time talking about how a written language makes it possible to have unity and consistency in a large kingdom. While this is true and written language seems to be an important factor in the rise of empires, I think it would be worthwhile to investigate how the empires affect the languages. The Khmer is a good example of this.
Oceanic Linguistics Special Publication. Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1966.
Coulmas, Florian. The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Writing Systems. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996.
Huffman, Franklin. Cambodian System of Writing and Beginning Reader.Yale University, 1970.
I have always thought that cambodian writing looked so cool too. Ever since I first saw it in the mtc too. Such beautiful calligraphy doesn't seem too effective though. I mean, you would have to practice forever to write all those swirlys and twirlies on the ends. It's interesting how runic systems meant for engraving on rock ended up being a lot simpler than the systems made for using ink on parchment. Not surprising at all though.
ReplyDeleteBut they did engrave things on rock too. I think the important thing that distinguishes them from say Chinese is that they have letters rather than symbols for whole words. I makes it much more practical when it comes to typing.
ReplyDeleteOh duh. I totally should have realized that since you have a picture of an inscription. Well i'm sure that the suicide rate among cambodian rock inscribers is higher than air traffic control men because of job stress.
ReplyDeleteI am defiantly a sucker for the visual/graphical appeal and design of a written language, and for everything in general for that matter. I enjoy looking at aesthetically pleasing languages ilke cambodian. I would like to learn about how the aesthetics of a language are impacted by the medium that is primarily used to write it (think curvy and flowing because (or vis a versa) of the brushes for Chinese, angular and straight for Greek and stone carving etc...) Which one affects the other? Is it because of brushes etc the language naturally is curvy or the chinese wanted a curvy language so they used brushes...
ReplyDeleteI also wanted to comment a little bit about your last paragraph. I am interested in learning more about the varying degrees of control the government and the people have over languages. For example English is fairly open, changing and loose while Spanish or Chinese has more rigid rules. Is Spanish more rigid than say English because of the royal (directly and through councils) influences. I know that there was at one point there was an official council to standardize, maintain and control the Spanish language. The modern version of what I am talking about has a website here. I don't even know how you go about conrollling and standardizing a language, especially one that spans across many countries like Spanish does.
ReplyDeleteThat is a great point Will. I'm glad you brought it up. I wonder if it connects to the standardized British versus American spellings. If there weren't governments or councils regulating the written language would the language evolve differently?
ReplyDeleteAlicia, great post! But to answer your question, I think that without government regulation of written language the language would evolve differently. For example, in my last post I talked about how the Mycenaeans developed the Linear A system of writing, which was mostly used by government and religious figures. But as soon as the commoners began to learn to write, the Linear B system was created, which was more widely used.
ReplyDeleteI can trace your civilization's script back to my civilization's alphabet! I just think that is so cool, even though they look nothing alike and are 5 degrees of separation apart. Anyway, on to the discussion. I agree, government involvement, and really any organized institutions (like libraries) standardize a language more than it would be on its own. Even writing a language adds more structure than a purely oral language would have. But there are still modes of language invention, though they are becoming less common than Shakespeare's prolific invention of English words. And hasn't your Mom ever corrected your speech by commenting "is that word in the dictionary?" Just some thoughts on standardization.
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