ENGLISH

Cambodian: Khmer

By Prof. John Haiman

Book information

Publisher
John Benjamins Publishing Company
Year
2011
ISBN
9027238162, 9789027238160
LCC
PL4323 .H35 2011
Google Books ID
Pr3Q1VL_94EC
Open Library ID
OL25138747M
Language
english
Format
PDF
Filesize
21 MB (21782861 bytes)
Series
London Oriental and African Language Library
Pages
447\447
Topic
Linguistics Foreign
Orientation
yes
Scanned
yes
Time added
2012-02-04 16:00:00
Языки и языкознание;Кхмерский язык

Description

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.

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