Chigaijin

Home Walkthrough #2

2012-02-02T21:30:00+07:00

New house, new walkthrough video…

Everything’s smaller than in the old house, but mostly we’ve managed to get by quite well. Except for the new bathroom. Lots of problems with the bathroom. OTOH, Mami and Mr. Savuth now have a proper room, as does Kuoch.

BTW, this was filmed on a new camera, a (relatively) cheap Sony Cyber-shot. My dad’s old Canon finally broke under the stress of, uh, being banged around a bit too much. Then again, it was eight years old or so and already not in perfect shape when I brought it here. The new camera is actually not very good, but it’s a point-and-shoot for being a tourist. Maybe I’ll buy a nice camera when I get home.

Khmer Gender

2012-01-27T18:00:00+07:00

I’ve posted before about gendered language, and how I’m generally in favor of moving towards gender-neutral occupations and supporting a gender-neutral third-person pronoun in English. In Khmer for the most part this is already reality…but there are a few funny quirks in the language which still don’t make sense to me.

The first good sign is the third-person pronoun, koat, which is gender-neutral. (If you really want to indicate the gender, you can use nea and neang, but except when translating from English no one seems to do this.) Next is the collection of second-person pronouns, of which there are a lot. The most generic is nek, but there are several others, and I never actually use nek in real life:

bong, for people around your age or older than you.
bu and minh, for men and women, respectively, who are around your parents’ age
dta (?) and yeay, for men and women, respectively, who are around your grandparents’ age or older
oun or bp’oun, for people younger than you. Bp’oun is a contraction of bpor oun and is a bit more polite.
loak and loak srey, for men and women who you want to address formally/respectfully. I’ve never actually used these, but I can feel that it’s right for the director of our organization, Ms. Noun Phymean.

The interesting thing is that all of these, including nek, are just normal words. (You can mouse over them, or possibly tap them on a phone/tablet, to see what each of them means.) I would bet that koat is a normal word too, though I don’t know its non-grammatical meaning. And you can also address someone using their title, like in Japanese: nek kroo nyam bai haʉi dtei? “(Did) Teacher eat rice yet?”

The most interesting “pronouns” for me are bong and (bp’)oun: the natural division of siblings in Khmer isn’t between male and female (“brother” vs. “sister”), but between older and younger (bong and oun). You can of course use these (and all the other second-person pronouns) as titles as well: I can talk about my host brother as Bong Piseth, and his friend as Bong Sea.

Even though the more respectful pronouns are gender-divided, the different division in bong and oun and the neutrality of nek are still good signs, right? Plus there’s no grammatical gender on nouns, like in many European languages.

Then, for no reason I can fathom, the word for “yes” is different whether you’re a man or a woman.

WHAT‽

That’s right. I mentioned it in passing in the post on syntax, but no one seemed to find it unusual. (Or at least no one commented on it.) But I can’t think of a historical-linguistic reason for this: what linguistic pressure could possibly result in two words for the simple concept of affirmation? It’s usually not even confirmation, just a sort of “what?” or “uh-huh, I’m listening”.

Men say baat, women say jaa. It turns out not to be hard to get used to, but it’s still weird.

(The best hypothesis I can come up with is that it’s a status thing, that jaa is somehow more submissive from a time when women had to be more submissive. But…it doesn’t feel likely.)

Oh, and “no” is the same for both: awtei.

As for professions…well, mostly they’re gender-neutral to begin with, not to mention very simple. “Cashier”, for example, is nek ket lui, or “person who thinks of money”. But “teacher” is an exception: the original word is loak kroo, but loak is masculine. So female teachers are now called nek kroo, using the neutral nek instead. …And male teachers are still called loak kroo.

*bangs head against wall*

Happy Lunar New Year!

2012-01-22T10:00:00+07:00

Sua sdei jo chhnam chin, 新年快乐, and happy lunar new year!

In Cambodia, the big new year’s celebration is not on January 1st (“international new year” in Khmer), nor is it the same as the Vietnamese, Korean, and Chinese lunar calendar (“Chinese new year”). Rather, it’s in April…which means I’m going to miss it! And it’s also a lunar calendar (shared with Thailand and I think Laos as well), so saying “lunar new year” is no longer specific enough.

Okay, to be fair I’ve known for a long time that the Muslim calendar is also lunar. So forget it; I’m going to keep saying “lunar new year” because being 100% politically correct is impossible.

…not to mention silly when this yearly tradition involves posting a Japanese new year’s card (nengajō), even though Japan now uses the European/international calendar, though they still follow the twelve-year animal cycle…

And this year was particularly interesting because it’s the Year of the Dragon. Everyone knows that a Chinese dragon is pretty different from a Western dragon, but a Khmer dragon is actually what we usually translate as “naga” (neak in Khmer). Hence this card:

And as a bonus, here’s the envelope I sent it in. (Please don’t try to send anything to me now; it will get here pretty much the same week I have to go home.)

One last story: we went out yesterday for my host brother’s birthday, and in the shopping center there was a tree covered in red envelopes. And for me, having grown up in the Bay Area…it felt like a little bit of home.

Takeo and Kompong Cham

2012-01-22T09:50:00+07:00

It’s a busy weekend, so I’m going to punt on wise thoughts for another handful of pictures. Apart from my large trips to Mondulkiri and Siem Reap, I’ve also been on a couple of day trips with my host family. Last time included some pictures from a trip to Wat Prasat (“Temple Pagoda”) and Udong Mountain, a long-ago capital of Cambodia (even before Angkor). This week I’m going to post a few from my two trips with Piseth to Mr. Savuth’s homeland in Takeo Province, plus my one trip with Kuoch to her homeland in Kompong Cham Province. As usual, they’re on Facebook.

If you’ve forgetten who these people are, Mr. Savuth is my host father, Piseth is my host brother (works for the UN), and Srey Kuoch is my host sister (Piseth’s cousin, who’s staying in Phnom Penh while she studies at university). A couple of the other volunteers also show up in this set; the full and final¹ count of volunteer housemates is now 10: Nina, Jaclyn, Jennifer, Cathy, Art, Joe, Kim, Nakita, Marianne, and Louise. Plus a past volunteer, Josie (now part of a donor organization).

Next week…well, who knows?

This is the final count because our house is full, and I’m now the next volunteer to leave! :-(↩

Phnom Penh Excursions

2012-01-14T20:00:00+07:00

I realized most of the pictures I posted are of Mondulkiri and Siem Reap, neither of which is representative of my everyday life. Well, neither are the ones I’ve selected for today, but you can at least see that Phnom Penh is a city and not beautiful green countryside. Take a look on Facebook.

Any further Phnom-Penh-area pictures will just be added to this album, so maybe check back at the end of my stay? (…all too soon, at the end of February!)

Next week: maybe a proper blog post, maybe a quickie, or maybe more photos, from my smaller trips to Takeo and Kompong Cham provinces!