"I don’t believe that absolute truth is necessary. I only need the power to freely accomplish my dreams. One could say that it’s the power not to have to take orders from those one despises.” - Reinhard von Lohengramm (Legend of the Galactic Heroes)
@marudny-robot! I did a thing based on the thing you sent me!
This reads, in Angkorian Era Khmer (both language and script):
“Vvaṃ git ʔañ vnyat niṣkala ʔaṃpacc. Paṅ guḥ kanlāṅ noḥ ta svapna paṃbañ jraḥ. Gi neḥ kanlāṅ vvaṃ diḥ ti cap śāsana nai ta ʔavajña ti noḥ ʔnak.”
Under the cut is an explanation and introduction to reading Khmer from the 700-1100s:
These two images show the consonants and vowels of Angkorian Khmer.
The purple form is for the sound that starts a syllable (but see ⁵). Purple vowels are used for syllables that have no starting consonant sound (other then a brief pause like in the middle of ‘uh-oh’ which is shown by the ‘ʔ’ symbol.
Blue consonants are used used as additional parts of consonants. They’re placed below the initial consonant. Up to 2 consonants can be added below, but usually it’s only 1.
All consonants include a following ‘a’ sound. Blue vowels are used in syllables that have different vowels, instead. I’ve shown them on a ‘ka’ character, so you can see how they attach. Note that the first ‘ka’ has no vowel attached.
Vowels with a line above (‘ā’) are long. That means that you make the song for longer before moving to the next syllable. Khmer rarely marks the difference between short and long vowels, other than ‘ā’. ( ‘ū’ is used, but seems to be treated as a variant of its short counterpart, not a separate sound.)
‘kaṃ’ and ‘kaḥ’ are special characters from Sanskrit. In Sanskrit, the ‘aṃ’ character means that the vowel comes from the mouth AND nose (its ‘nasal’). Khmer didn’t mark nasal vowels, so the the symbol is used for ‘m’s that end syllables. Not sure what the ‘aḥ’ marks.
The ‘k-’ is used for consonants that aren’t followed by a vowel. Consonant sounds that follow a vowel are usually used as the first character of the next syllable, even if they’re pronounced as part of the earlier syllable. If a consonant sound marks the end of a sentence, or the following syllable already starts with a consonant cluster, the consonant will be written with a line over it, instead.
Khmer reads from inside to out. You start with the base consonant, then read down through secondary consonants. All vowels withing a consonant cluster are lost. Then you read the vowel, and finally, any special characters. The above image shows three examples, each slightly more complex than the last.
Breaking the text into words requires understanding of the language - there are no spaces between words, and they frequently end in the middle of consonant clusters.
Footnotes:
¹only used to write Sanskrit, not native Khmer.
²only found in grammars, not used in actual writing.⁶
³appearance of these characters are my best guess based on 1-2 very blurry images and comparisons to related scripts.
⁴ appearance of these characters are my best guess based on comparisons to related scripts, since I couldn’t find any examples
⁵black symbol is a special form of ‘r’ when its the first character of a consonant cluster.
⁶‘ḹ’ is also included in grammars for related scripts. Both ‘ḹ’ and ‘ṝ’ were created by Sanskrit grammarians to make their charts have a pretty, balanced appearance. Given that the only use for ‘ḷ’ in Khmer that I’ve found is as a rare variant of the word ‘li,’ and I’d run out of room, I didn’t bother including including my guess for the imaginary long version of the character.
Not sure how long this was available, but then again for all I know, I could be the last one to know about this... haha my cousin Virak shared this with me! :) Google translate can now detect Khmer!
