Varin's Blog

I'll first just clarify how I interpret these questions before I get into Khmer itself. To me, a script that is easy to read and write is one that is phonemic; that means that each letter/symbol (technically a "grapheme") corresponds to an individual sound (technically a phoneme). For example, the writing system for Spanish is mostly phonemic, so there is generally a one-to-one correspondence between graphemes and phonemes. When there are exceptions to this pattern, there's usually even a pattern to those exceptions; for example, the letter "c" is pronounced as "s" before "e/i", and as a "k" otherwise. Before "e/i", the "k" sound is spelled "qu" and before other vowels the "s" sound is spelled as "s". Now, going by what I said about phonemic writing systems being "easy" to read for me, it follows that writing systems that are less phonemic are harder to read.

As for the second question, I'm a native English speaker from California, and I'm also fluent in Spanish and Hindi. I'm also currently learning German. So, what I view as "hard to speak" would pretty much be anything that I wouldn't be familiar with from these languages. Of course, some aspects of Khmer, such as its complex vowels or consonants clusters, may not seem so bad to a speaker of a related language, such as Vietnamese.

With that said, let's first get into the difficult to speak aspects of the language, starting with the vowels. For fellow linguistics nerds or vocalists, I'll also be using some IPA here and there in square brackets to transcribe the language. Khmer has 31 distinct vowel phonemes (both monophthongs and diphthongs; that is, sequences of one vowel and two vowels). And that doesn't include cases where a "y" [j] or [w] sound can occur after one of these 31 phonemes; if each of those cases is viewed as its own phoneme, that makes the total number 93! Even when thinking of it as just 31, some of these phonemes have very subtle differences that many people wouldn't notice (and absolutely not an English speaker). For example, [ae] is a different diphthong from [ai] (technically a sequence of [a] and following "y"), and while these might obviously look different on paper, try saying them out loud quickly one after the other, and you grimly realize just how similar they might sound. Also, vowels can be "long" or "short", and in the case of monophthongs, some phonemes are actually distinguished only by length. And by the way, when I say length I don't mean in the sense English speakers are taught - like short "a" is in "cat" vs. long "a" as in "ate" - I mean the actual duration for which the vowel is held and nothing else. (This isn't actually that unusual compared to other world languages - Arabic, Sanskrit, Japanese, Thai, Classical Latin, and Finnish have it - but it's nonetheless confusing for English speakers).

The other pronunciation quirk of Khmer is in its consonants clusters. The consonants themselves aren't too unusual, however Khmer does distinguish between "unaspirated" and "aspirated" consonants. That is, consonants may be released with or without a slight extra puff of air that differentiates phonemes. This feature is often really hard for English speakers to master, since English doesn't have that distinction. There are also two consonants usually transcribed with the letters "b" and "d", but they aren't quite the same; in Khmer they're pronounced with a slight closure of an area in the throat called the glottis that gives these consonants the special name of "implosives" (in practice, these consonants are pronounced as normal English "b/d"). Besides that, the consonants are fairly usual

The issue is in the way consonants can be organized at the start of words; they often occur in clusters of two (rarely three) consonants. Clusters like this rarely occur in languages other than those in the same language family as Khmer, called the "Austroasiatic" language family. Within the family itself, however, they're all over the place; take "Khmer" for example, pronounced /kʰmae/, the words for "mother" ម្តាយ /mɗaːj/, "dog" ឆ្កែ /cʰkae/, "do" ធ្វើ /tʰʋəː/, "market" ផ្សារ /psaː/, "I" ខ្ញុំ /kʰɲom/, and "yesterday" ម្សិលមិញ /msəlmɨɲ/.

Then there's the script. Khmer is a "Brahmic" script, so it's inherited from the Brahmi writing system once used to write Sanskrit. Brahmic scripts are unique in that all of them use independent letters for consonants in a word, and represent the vowels after the consonant (or perhaps additional clustered consonants, as in Khmer, and maybe some consonants after the vowel too) as marks or extra features around the consonant letter (the fancy term is a diacritic). Of course, Sanskrit and Khmer are very different, and as with many other Brahmic scripts in Southeast Asia, it's been adapted a lot to fit the uniquenesses of the language. Below is a chart summarizing the consonants and vowel diacritics of Brahmi, their Khmer equivalents, and their pronunciations.