Khmer as in Surin and Buriram

[Flashermac]

p.p.s. A very scholarly analysis:

 

http://www.anu.edu.au/~u9907217/languages/AAlecture2.html

[samak]

elef said: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.

in the northern amphurs of Bruiram, Surin and Si Saket close to the boarder of other Isaan provinces like Roi Et, Yasothon etc. they do not speak Khmer/Kamen but Lao/Isaan. in some amphurs of Surin they also speak Suay

[samak]

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

 

preahko is the expert, but here we go:

 

niang chamor oy? what is your name?

mor pee nar? where you come from?

 

know a couple more but i feel transliteration is more difficult than thai or lao; so if you do not know how to pronounce above phrases, you will not be understood! don't blame me on that!

[Guest]

Flashermac, thanks for the links and insight. TYhis becomes a very interesting thread.

 

One point about the Thais forcing everybody to speak Thai; unluckily that is a correct statement and quite some amount of force was used.

 

That all happened under the idea to force out communist insurgents and was directed mainly against the Lao speaking part of the Isaan population (there was also a Lao nationalistic movement that the central Thai government liquidated at the same time). Since the late 60s, only Central Thai is allowed to be taught in schools, and for teachers and radio or TV anchorpeople special tests in their pronounciation are made before they get their license.

 

Since this time it is also virtually impossible to find anybody in Isaan who would be able to write the alphabet the Lao way as was normal in times previous (the Lao alphabet is quite similar to Thai, but distinct enough to look weird when reading stuff).

[Flashermac]

As far as I know, the Thai government schools have always taught only in Central Thai. Goes back long before the communist threat. I suspect that before the government schools, most Isaan folks simply were illiterate. Boys received some basic education from monks, but girls got none. My wife's first language is Kham Muang, and her parents were educated in Central Thai too. (She's the baby of the family and her mother was past 40 when she had her, so we're going back before WWII here.)

 

p.s. The Laotian alphabet is based on an early Thai alphabet, which is why it looks older. (I can read it, though I'm rusty.)

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lao_language

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kham_Muang

 

 

[preahko]

not quite...lao alphabet was most likely based on khmer, just like thai was.

 

there are a number of similarities that khmer and lao alphabets share which khmer and thai do not, which probably points to the older relationship between khmer and lao. and there's increasing additional evidence that lao script could have been developed (from khmer) *before* thai was. haha, but don't tell the central thais that!

 

before thai was aggressively taught to northeasterners, you're right, there were very few options for literacy. your best bet was to be born with a penis, then you could learn in a wat khmer script (called "khom" by the thais), which was--and remains, in terms of magical inscriptions on buddha images, tattoos, magical cloth, and the like--the sacred language of thai buddhism until not too long ago. also taught in isaan wats was tham alphabet, also called "thai noi," which is the magical/sacred script still studied by lao monks in laos and which you'll find written in various forms in temples in laos today.

 

tham is even closer to written khmer than lao (or thai) is, which, once again, is fodder for the argument that the laos benefitted from the impressive knowledge of the khmers earlier than the thais did.

 

the great lao scholar Maha Sila Viravong writes in his recently published biography of learning, in a wat in isaan, where he was born before relocating to laos, khom, tham *and* thai script as a child in the late 1920s/early 1930s. he said that at that time, isaan people were not even required by the gov't in bangkok to speak thai, let alone read and write it.

 

plus, of course, the khmer-to-lao knowledge transfer took place based on royal cross-marriage and mutual military/political agreements and the like; the thais got khmer knowledge by sacking angkor in 1431 and taking it forcibly, carting all the learned khmers off to ayutthya...

 

preah ko

[Flashermac]

I'd suspect the Thai nationalism towards Isaan probably came after the 1932 coup ended the absolute monarchy and unfortunately paved the way for the semi-fascist government of Luang Pibunsongkram.

 

I know that before that time the people in Isaan were actually called Laos, whilst those in the north of Thailand were called Northern Laos. The "northeastern Thai" and "northern Thai" terms came after the 1932 coup. (Sort of like HM insisting that the people in the southernmost provinces be referred to as Thai Muslims and not Malays.)

 

The north is getting its own back finally. My Mrs is a graduate student at Chiang Mai University, and she told me the unie has decided that all grad students have to study Kham Muang, including the old script. She said it was boring for her, since it is her mother tongue. But the Bangkok students have a hard time with it.

 

p.s. Is it just my impression, or does the Laotian alphabet represent an earlier Lao pronunciation? If not why the almost Thai "r" letter for what is an "l" or "h" sound? No need for it, unless in fact it does represent a borrowing from the Thai alphabet.

[wonderlust]

preahko said:

som joy = can I please fuck you?

 

Just to clarify, that's som as in the Battle of the Somme and joy as in the English word? What about tones? I love surin and buriram girls and would love to speak a few words but from experience trying to speak to a Thai person having read a few romanised phrases just doesn't work. I think even I can pull this one off though. ::

[Guest]

I guess speaking becomes much easier when the transliteration is done into Thai, not into English -- I will not go that far learning how to read Khmer now, as none of the fgirls I ever met could actually write it.

But I guess at next chance, I will have a little pen and paper with me when I go out...

 

I remember my Thai language abilities made a giant leap as soon as I could recognize the first characters, and with a lot of words I could hear for the very first time *myself* how horribly wrong I spoke learning from an English (or worse, German) source as soon as I was aware how it was written.

[preahko]

som joy...the "o" in som is like the "o" in Rome, while the whole word "joy" is sufficiently close to the second word in khmer

 

the "r" in lao...used mostly for representing the "r" sound in loan words, including sanskrit/pali and thai. no dialect of lao contains an "r" sound, what's "r" in many thai words is either "h" or "l" in lao. but that letter persists in the alphabet, though for a while after the war it looked like they were going to do away with it. there is also only one consonant cluster in lao, "kw," and even that is pronounced more like two distinct syllables (like the way they do all clusters except those involving "r"--kr, tr, etc.--in thai) than like consonant clusters in english.

 

and yes, in many ways transliterating khmer words using thai alphabet is way more efficient than trying to use roman alphabet, but thai alphabet is still deficient, since khmer has more vowels than thai and a few consonant sounds that thai does not (vice versa too).

 

preahko