Cambodia - អក្សរខ្មែរ âksâr khmêr

One of the things that most fascinated me on my trips to Cambodia was the Khmer alphabet. Having spent a year in Thailand, I'm quite proud of the fact that I can read Thai script - okay, not fast enough to recognise the destinations of passing buses but, you know, given time to pore over the squiggles and rounded syllables, I can manage okay! Going to Cambodia (and Laos), the script was very familiar looking, but a lot more complicated and squiggly.

A shared heritage - Thai and Khmer

I guess Khmer script is more complicated than Thai because it's the script that Thai, Lao and some other South East Asian scripts derived from. I'd imagine it's retained a lot of it's original complexity which, perhaps, was simplified when the script was used to write Thai, a language that is tonal and couldn't be more different, phonologically, than the Khmer language. I think this paragraph is probably very controversial for Thai readers. Understandably, most people prefer to think of their culture as being unique and not under the influence of neighbouring cultures. As an outsider though, I have to say - that's how it looks!

Khmer writing on book cover

Writing as a tool for technology

Since its invention, writing has been a powerful tool for the advancement of technology. Think of all the things that writing has enabled us to do. The very essence of civilisation, history, science and communication, has been dependent on the technology of writing to help us share our ideas, learn from our mistakes and count the spoils of war or trade. It's hardly a surprise that some of the first examples of 'writing' were connected to accountancy and I have to wonder, yet again, at the power of trade to push forward technological developments.

The sacred nature of writing

In Ancient times writing was something that was sacred. Until the Middle Ages in Europe, only spiritual men (and usually only men), scribes and monks, were taught how to read and write (the two surely go hand-in-hand?). Written text enabled Pharaohs and Kings to create a legacy that would potentially be eternal and could speak for the writers long after they had deceased. In some Ancient societies, written creations had to be approved and stamped by the King, before they could be left behind as records of that society.

The power of the written word



Writing is just as powerful today. I'm sure J.K. Rowling would agree, having seen her Harry Potter series of books take the world by storm, being translated into innumerable languages and read by an audience of millions around the world - millions of people who speak different languages and come from very different cultures than the writer herself. And then there's the Media - newspaper headlines or a scathing review can make or break public figures. There is more power in a well-written text sometimes, than in any spoken words.



Lao script is much rounder and softer than Khmer

The 17th century French mathematician Blaise Pascal once said 'To know how to write well is to know how to think well' and I tend to agree. Perhaps good writing is only rivalled by good music, as a source of inspiration and change for the human mind.

The alphabet revolution

As part of my research for this blog post, I read A Very Short Introduction to Writing and Script by Andrew Robinson (published by Oxford University Press). It gave me a great overview of a topic I find endlessly fascinating. There was so much to learn from this book, but one of the main things I came to understand was how the alphabet revolutionised writing systems. I guess most of us will presume that alphabets have been around forever, but they're a much more recent invention and were pre-dated by other forms of writing, such as hieroglyphs, cuneiform writing and pictographs.

Thai script and other scripts like Khmer, Lao and Tamil are kind of like an alphabet (unlike Chinese or Japanese, where you need to learn thousands of characters before you can read). Having said that, they're not like any alphabet I'd met before and are actually somewhere between a true alphabet, where each individual sound (or phoneme) is represented by a single letter, and a syllabary, where each letter represents a syllable. Khmer, Thai and the others are like a hybrid between a syllabic system and more phonetic alphabet. I guess this type of 'alphabet' is probably better described as an Abugida..

Of course, it's all well and good to try to define everything and put things into boxes, but the reality is always a lot more complicated and even the English alphabet is a bewildering combination of letters and sounds.

Where do you put the vowels?



Chinese script

What I found really different about Thai and Khmer is that the vowels can appear in front of, behind, on top of or even under the consonant. There are rules of course and certain vowels tend to stand alone, whilst others are dependent on their partner consonant. Vowels have always been an issue and the first alphabets didn't contain any - some modern alphabets, like Arabic, Hebrew and Hindi generally leave them out. The existence of vowels in European scripts is mostly down to the Greeks and linguists speculate as to the influence Greek poetry had on the addition of vowels to a script.

Apart from that, learning to read a script like Thai or Khmer isn't all that difficult. The letters don't morph or change, as they might in Arabic or Hindi and, once you get over the initial culture shock of a completely different writing system, it all falls into place somehow and you will be able to make out words in other Brahmic scripts (which all have their origins in India).

The world's biggest and smallest alphabets

If Khmer is considered to be an alphabet, then it's probably the largest alphabet in the world, with 74 different signs (again, some of these are quite obscure and have disappeared in neighbouring scripts like Thai).

By all accounts, the world's smallest alphabet is the one used for the Rotokas language in Papua New Guinea - it only uses 12 letters (all from the Roman alphabet) - a e g i k o p r s t u v - there's definitely something to be said for keeping things simple!

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The Netherlands - Een Hart van Steen - A Gothic tale from Haarlem

I was a bit too excited about the prospect of reading a novel by a well-known Dutch writer and my preliminary research brought me to a recent novel called Een Hart van Steen, or A Heart of Stone, by well-known writer Renate Dorrestein, although this is her first novel to be translated into English.

I feel that we lose out so much by not reading other countries' writers and, it's not that we don't read foreign writers in the English speaking world, but the ones we do read are predictable and, most likely, being read by every second person on the daily commute to work. I wanted to read something that I wouldn't have otherwise read. Entering Dorrestein's world was certainly an eye-opener.

I studied literature and linguistics at university and I have mixed feelings about novels. Spending four years dissecting and analysing text, it almost takes the pleasure away from reading and most of my post-college years, I've felt more comfortable reading history books or books on politics or culture.

A Heart of Stone was a harrowing world to enter. The topics dealt with in the novel were quite dark and disturbing and, if I can come to any conclusions about the cultural difference of this novel, then I would say that the topics Dorrestein deals with, especially the torture of a small child, are things which are fairly taboo in my society and not something I would expect to read about in an English novel.

Without giving away too much of the plot, suffice to say the descriptions in the novel made me feel incredibly uncomfortable and the eerie whining of the sand dunes and cold, wet nights in Haarlem evoked a landscape of pure fear and a darkness I wouldn't otherwise have associated with the Netherlands.

The story was incredibly powerful and I really empathised with the main character, Ellen, and the short straw she'd drawn on life.

The narrative was set back in the 70's and Dorrestein raises some important questions about post-natal depression and how this wasn't properly understood back then. She also raised issues of societal responsibility. When Ellen tells her favourite teacher about the abuse at home, she's told to be more discreet and not to be washing her family's dirty laundry in public. Ellen quite humorously puts this down to the fact that her teacher's subject is 'Ancient Greece', therefore any modern tragedy would seem trivial compared to the endless wars and family vendettas of Greek history.

There has been a lot of controversy in England this year about Baby P and the Haringey Council. Abuse is so often overlooked or trivialised. I guess there is an expectation from the general public that the authorities will somehow unfailingly uncover abuse in families. The reality however is a lot more complicated and although it might be something of a cliche, you really don't know what's going on behind closed doors.

Ellen finds a kind of peace at the end of the novel. The psychological journey she has to go on to get there is as intense as the gloom of her parent's home, the Bureau van Bemmel. Truly a modern Gothic tale, I found it to be very well-written and morbidly engaging.

Image credits

The fascinating image of the heart made up of stones on a beach is by flickruser Coletree - he is from China, loves Hong Kong and wants to travel to Iceland.  Coletree you need to check out my blogpost about Iceland :)  Thanks for sharing this photo with us using the Creative Commons license.