Spoken Cambodian

Originally published by Yale University Press, 1970. To order accompanying CDs for this book, contact the Language Resource Center at Cornell University (http://lrc.cornell.edu).

This is a unique learning aid for making rapid headway in the acquisition of comprehension and speaking ability in Khmer, the language of Cambodia. In recent years, Cambodia has moved from a society menaced by war to a society orientated to commerce. With this shift in attention from military to social and economic matters has come an increase in the numbers of foreign visitors and residents in the country for the purposes of tourism, aid work or investment-related activities. Many of these foreigners or 'chun bor-tay' speak English as a first or second language, but know little of written or spoken Khmer. This dictionary is designed to enable residents and visitors to better understand both the country and its people through speaking to Cambodians in their own language. With more than 6,000 key word entries, the "English-Spoken Khmer Dictionary" has the distinctive feature of presenting Khmer words in an all-new easily grasped Romanized writing system. Incorporating phrases is essential for tourists, business travellers, scholars and long term Cambodia residents who wish to become more familiar with a country poised to play an increasingly significant role in the area.

The reader contains 32 selections from some of the most important and best-known works of Cambodian literature in a variety of genres - historical prose, folktales, epic poetry, didactic verse, religious literature, the modern novel, poems and songs, and so forth. It concludes with a bibliography of some sixty items on Cambodian literature. The glossary combines the 4,000 or so items introduced in this reader with the more than 6,000 introduced in the previous two readers.

Beginning Khmer for English speakers covering basic grammar and vocabulary spoken by native Cambodians.

Cambodian is in many respects a typical Southeast Asian language, whose syntax at least on first acquaintance seems to approximate that of any SVO pidgin. On closer acquaintance, however, because of the richness of its idioms, the language seems to be a forbiddingly alien form of “Desesperanto” - a language of which one can read a page and understand every word individually, and have no inkling of what the page was all about. Like many of the languages of its genetic (Austroasiatic) family, its basic root vocabulary seems to consist largely of sesquisyllabic or iambic words, although there are an enormous number of unassimilated borrowings from Indic languages (which seem to play the same role in Cambodian that Latinate borrowings do in English). Morphologically, Cambodian has a fairly elaborate system of derivational affixes, and it is possible that the genesis of many of the most common of these affixes is related to (and undoes) the constant reduction of unstressed initial syllables in sesquisyllabic words. Again like many of the languages of Southeast Asia, Cambodian exhibits in its lexicon a penchant for symmetrical decorative compounding, a phenomenon which is so marginally attested in Western languages that the phenomenon has received little attention in the typological literature.