Three Sides (Afterword)
This is an afterword for a three-part story with a twist. You should read the story first if you haven’t yet!
So, like everything I write—like everything anybody writes—this story has elements of real experiences in it. The characters and relationships are composites of people I know, either firsthand or secondhand…but of course none of them are based entirely on any one real person or situation.
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.
"Accident"
This is taken from the Wednesday entry in my daily journal, slightly edited.
I was just in an accident.
On the way to school, riding down Preah Monireth, turning at OSK as usual, my bike was hit by a moto. Side-on.
It was both of our faults. I was taking advantage of what looked like a large gap after a car. I could see another moto further back but closer my visibility was blocked. He was going a little too fast, but not a lot too fast, trying to speed through the gap to catch up with the next group of cars and motos.