Khmer as in Surin and Buriram

[Guest]

Would be anybody able to point me to a vocabulary list or other resources for Khmer dialect as spoken by a lot of girls from Surin and Buriram.

 

We have lots of them here in Phuket and it would be nice to be able to say a few nice things (even though all of them do understand and speak Thai of course).

 

Does anybody know if this Khmer dialect is actually spoken in neighboring Cambodia as well or is it something distinct.

 

Thnx.

[samak]

i have raised this question some time ago, but without success. there seem no online resources.

 

i recall there is one guy on this board, who seems to be the expert in this area!

 

the dialect of Buriram and Surin are actually different! but they are still closer to each other than to the language spoken in Cambodia. while there are a lot of similar words, Cambodians have difficulties to understand Thai Khmer and vice versa.

 

the girls will like it if you say to them:

niang la oh

bong salan niang

som ther som joy

[..]

samak said:

the girls will like it if you say to them:

niang la oh

bong salan niang

som ther som joy

OK, what do they mean?

 

Cheers,

SD

[preahko]

niang l'aw = pretty female or "you're pretty" said to female

bawng sralanh niang = I (male) love you (female)...the final "nh" is like portuguese "nh" or spanish n~, it can end words in khmer but not in thai

or english

som joy = can I please fuck you?

 

can't say as they'd "like" it if you say the last one to them, depending on context of course.

 

here's something funny: when surin khmers work with thais, they often teach them that last one but don't

tell them what it means. often when thais find out I speak khmer, they say "oh, I worked with someone from

surin, and they taught me this..." haha, a little khmer revenge on the thai conquerors.

 

there is in fact a surin khmer dictionary. it's in the library at chula; I have a photocopy of it in the US. every entry

is in 1) thai transliteration of surin khmer 2) thai 3) english. doubt if it's for sale anywhere.

 

"surin khmer" is usually the general term used to refer to what are at least 3 distinct dialects, surin, buriram and sisaket.

native speakers can tell all 3 apart instantly; I can only tell surin from buriram. buriram is even weirder (to a speaker

of central khmer) than surin. all of them are probably the farthest out dialects in the khmer language.

 

with a little patience and application of critical thinking (you see the problem here!), speakers of surin khmer can

understand about 60% of what a central khmer speaker says. but often they don't even want to put forth the effort.

native speakers of central khmer can understand only about 40% of what a surin khmer speaker says, however, *unless

the central khmer speaker also knows thai*. a large portion of surin khmer vocabulary is from thai, that's the reason.

plus, haha, they really butcher some of their vowels and consonants!! although chances are they speak closer to the

way people spoke back in the days of angkor.

 

preahko

[Flashermac]

I rode with a taxi driver from Surin a while back, and he told me about a strange experience. A Farang passenger who did not speak Thai turned out to be an English girl who worked for an NGO in Cambodia. She tried speaking Cambodian to him, on the chance he might understand it. He told me he could understand virtually everything she said and was able to take her where she wanted. But she had trouble with his dialect and couldn't carry on a conversation with him.

 

p.s. La-or is understood by Thais. It has been adopted as a common girl's name. A lot of the "royal language" is also borrowed from Khmer, from back in the days long ago when the Khmer were the poobahs in SE Asia.

[elef]

Hi,

 

I had a GF before who was from Buriram, she always said that they speak lao there as well as in rest of Isaan, she used isaan and lao as the same for the name of the dialect.

Once we met with a cambodian girl she didn't understand one word, but she had no problem understanding girls from near the lao border. Can you clarify this mystery?

[Palad_khik]

There is a Dutchman- must be a very interesting fellow, too- who has roots in Isaan. He has a site offering some fluency in the local dialects.

 

See: http://www.phrasebook.thai-isan-lao.com/

[Guest]

Thanks a lot for the answers so far, especially from preahko. I would not have thought that the "Thai"-Khmer is so different from Cambodian Khmer.

 

If somebody knows a few more sentences besides the three examples, I would be thankful if they would be posted here.

 

To elef: Lao and Thai are actually variants of the same language, while Khmer is a completely different one. Only a minority of the population in the three provinces mentioned speaks Khmer, the rest Lao, as both groups overlap there (often on the line that one village speaks either one or the other language).

 

As was pointed out, the Thai Royal language has a number of words borrowed from it, very little has been taken over into commoners Thai -- an example would be however jamook (nose), a Khmer borrowed word as far as I know.

A remark: I would be carefully mentioning to common Thais that the Royal language contains a lot of Khmer, they might react quite aggressive to such a suggestion.

[Flashermac]

Kra-daht (paper) is another Khmer word. The "real Thai" word is still used in Lao and Kham Muang (aka Northern Thai) -- Jee-ah.

 

Also, Khmer is responsible for the "infixes" in Thai. (English only has prefixes and suffixes.)

 

dtroo-aht --> dtahm-roo-aht

dern --> dahm-nern

 

etc.

 

I would expect any Thai who had even gone to primary school to realise that Ratchasap contains many Khmer words. But they might not be aware that these are simply ordinary words in modern Cambodian!

 

I have heard Thais refer to the Surin and Buriram dialects as "Kha-men Soong" -- more or less Mountain Cambodian. There also used to be a lot of Thai speakers inside Cambodia just across the border along the southeastern coast. Several thousand managed to escape into Thailand, but the Khmer Rouge murdered all of the rest! The Khmer Rouge were great ones for ethnic cleansing.

 

 

[Flashermac]

Total balderdash about the Thais forcing everyone to become Thai speakers, but a nice example of Surin Khmer:

 

http://www.khmer.org/us/doc/doc888.htm

 

p.s. The Khmer have got a hard on about the Thais "stealing" Isaan from them, which is as valid as Italy claiming the French, Spanish, Portugese, Germans etc stole these countries from them after the fall of the Roman Empire.