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.
Khmer Syntax
A couple people have already asked about how teaching’s going, so I really should have written about that this week. But I really want to get the series on the Khmer language tied up, even though I’ve sadly been pretty stagnant in learning new words and new grammar patterns in the last month. Will have to figure out how to turn that around…maybe a regular class is the best way, despite feeling quite busy.
This last language section is on syntax, or grammar; how sentences are put together. And it turns out there’s not too much to say; Khmer syntax is fairly simple and will feel familiar to anyone who speaks, say, English, Spanish, or Chinese.
Khmer Morphology
Welcome to the second post on the Khmer language. This time I’m going to talk about morphology, or how words are put together.
In Khmer, there’s a tendency to keep new words to a minimum, at least compared to English. For example, English has the word “beef” to mean “the meat of a cow”.1 In Khmer, it’s just saich go [saɪt̙̚ go], or “meat cow”. This is the same as, say, Chinese, which uses 牛肉 (“cow meat”), except that in Khmer adjectives and modifiers come after the main noun.