A Little on the Khmer Writing System

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Okay, so if you're actually interested at all in my life then you've seen some Khmer writing by now. Just so we have something to work with, I put some up at the top.

It's read left-to-right like English, but it doesn't have spaces between the words; only between sentences. It's more or less phonetic, but in a way (like English) ends up feeling not-so-phonetic to its native readers. By that I mean, sure you could sit there and sound out "eh nuh guh luh ih sh.... ENGLISH" if you wanted to, but by now you just recognize the group as the word, "English."

Groups in Khmae are more like syllables than words; that's how people can instantly recognize something as they're going along. Most of the time, the syllable is built off of one of the 33 consonants, which is like a building block of the group. 33 might seem like a lot but it's strangely little; they duplicate sounds a lot and they actually don't have the sounds to match our "F" "V" "W" or "X," and their "J" is more like a "CH" than a "J." But they also have some sounds that we don't have, such as the initial "ng" sound, also common in Vietnamese.

Well anyhow. So each consonant character actually has a consonant sound and then either an "aw" sound or an "oe" sound (like in "joe"). So there's one character that I'll call "c" that you call "caw" and another that I'll call "C" that is pronounced "coe." When you see those characters standing alone, you would say respectively "caw" or "coe."

However, you usually add vowels. The vowels go in different places, so it might be like the following. If we wanted to say "cee," we would first write "c" and then above it write two "e"s. If we wanted to write "ca" we would write "c" and then to the northwest put an "a." That's how the placement of vowels works, but they are always read AFTER their base consonant, even if they're placed to the left of the consonant. Furthermore, depending on whether you use the "caw" or "coe" version of the consonant, the vowel marking will change its sound. So, "c" with "ee" on top of it might be "cee," but "C" with "ee" on top of it might be pronounced "ceh."

Making sense?

Look at that last character in the first line of regular text. That character that resembles an upside down U is "(bp)oe," somewhere between our B and P sound. That little guy floating above it is a dependent vowel, and here it makes the "EE" sound like it "meet," so you would see that group and read "(bp)ee."

There are lots of subtleties, some that I don't understand yet, but that's in general how most of Khmae is written. There are some independent vowels that don't need to have any consonant sound near them, and there are also "sub-consonants" that help make consonant clusters at word starts, such as the "kaw" symbol with a sub-consonant "m" sound, which would start the word "kmae" (Khmer). Also, a plain old -aw/-oe consonant at the end of the word only makes its consonant sound. So yeah, there's still much more that I'm working through, but I thought ya'll might like to know for now.

Also, it's just so damn pretty.

Peace out.