Sanskrit Khmer

Modern Khmer Language and Sanskrit - The Myriad Things Are One

by Mark Moore 10-2-2013 (October) Updated September 7, 2014

Introduction

Modern Khmer words derived from Sanskrit, and represented clearly in thousands of stone inscriptions located in temples around modern Cambodia, Thailand, and Vietnam for example, are called "loan words" in the literature of specialists in this field. After reading a few of these inscriptions, and learning modern Khmer, I feel that the relationship between Khmer and Sanskrit is more significant, and "loan word" does not capture the depth of the relationship. The common assumption that the inscriptions in Cambodia are Sanskrit is only partially true; most of the text is ancient Khmer transliterated into a script originally Grantha-Pallava, from southern India.

Prior to the arrival of the ancient Grantha-Pallava scripts from India, the people who lived in the regions now referred to as Cambodia and Vietnam for example, apparently did not write, and only used spoken language. Stone inscriptions dated 1,500 years ago contain a mixture of Sanskrit and non Sanskrit (meaning ancient Khmer of that period, like "krawbei" meaning water buffalo, which are also in use in modern Khmer language.) The purpose of this paper is summarize several personal revelations resulting from my study of Khmer language and culture, as this might be interesting to others exploring the area.

During my first year learning to read modern Khmer, I noticed while gazing at the stone inscriptions at a temple near my house that a lot of the ancient characters are similar to the modern ones. When local friends disagreed and claimed this was not similar, I was provoked to study more seriously. I quickly discovered that the Khmer writing system was imported from India. Most Khmer people are not aware of this at all, and some actually take offense at the suggestion. Would an American take offense upon realizing that her letters are Latin? This nationalistic pride in Cambodia illustrates one of the insular qualities of the people, and showed up again in the perverse genocide here. Many of these same people feverishly pretending to study English are equally surprised when I inform them that English is written with Latin and embellished with Greek characters, and that we inherited most of our words from those languages and a few also from Sanskrit such as suture, and that this is analagous to the relationship between Khmer and Sanskrit. It's not English writing at all.

I found translations of the many inscriptions at the Sealang site, and discovered that the inscriptions include long lists of the names of slaves! Indeed, the great majority of the inscribed text is nothing but a ledger of the material possessions given to the dude to whom the temple is dedicated. This surprise focused my awareness more keenly on the reality that the entire temple complex including Angkor Wat was built by a vast army of slaves. If the Khmer empire was weaked by the extravagant use of human resources to build temples, the names of many temple slaves carved into stone on the temple doors makes it less mysterious and hopefully less attractive as a tourist destination.

Imagine a native American pueblo with a plaque outside to inform visitors that, "this indigenous group inhabited these dwellings for a thousand years until white people came and murdered them all." Likewise, Unesco and it's corrupt bedfellow "Apsara Authority" charged themselves with "conserving" the temples and make no effort to illustrate the true history of the Khmer empire.

The question i carried with me for months was, why are there no plaques offering information about the contents of these ancient inscriptions? Perhaps still more peculiar was the fact that in my four years of study around the Siem Reap area I never heard another foreigner nor even a Khmer person ask what these inscriptions say! The insctiptions are the only direct written information left by the ancient Khmer people. As I studied this subject, I found a French institute in Siem Reap, and interviewed a scholar there who attempted to answer the question. He claimed that, "these inscriptions were not intended to be read by ordinary people, that they are just accounting ledgers." The scribes are dead, and I don't feel compelled by the wishes of their power hungry bosses. And funny thing about scholars who want to be the technocrats and reserve the knowledge for themselves: they have to publish it or perrish! (Might as well publish it cos you're going to perrish no matter what you do.)

So much for the curiosity of the two million temple visitors every year. The answer did not reduce my curiosity. My current theory about why the contents of the inscriptions is not revealed for tourists is that Khmer people, government, Apsara Authority, and Unesco are ashamed of the reality that this national heritage site was built by SLAVES. In fact, the Khmer empire probably destroyed itself from within by squandering its human resources!

But let me return to the focus of this paper...

Modern Khmer letters closely resemble their ancient ancestors found in the inscriptions. However, modern Khmer people that I interviewed claimed that they cannot read the inscriptions. This is because of the extensive appearance of long unfamiliar names in the inscriptions, such as "dvijendrapura" - the name of the temple at Wat Ankosei - not only because the style of letters is unfamiliar. Asked if they can find a word that looks familiar the answer is always "no." Encouraged to look carefully at an inscription, especially one where the text is clear and well-preserved such as the temple at Batchum near Angkor, a local person will indeed recognize several letters which are the same as the modern form of the letter. Khmer people often distinguish Sanskrit or Palli words as such in their vocabulary, usually in written form.

The word for "crown" or "diadem," appears below, from left to right in Angkorian Khmer (K.262 N, year 968,) modern Khmer script, the Devanagari, and the transliteration. Notice that the "M" and "K" in old and new Sanskrit are identical forms! The subject of this paper is a personal history which led to the realization that modern Khmer is in fact more than __% Sanskrit in original form! Fill in the blank. This is also an exam.

Following is a screenshot of a SEALANG dictionary entry for the word in the above example:

To search the sealang dictionary as above for a word we need the correct phonetic spelling. Notice the dot under the t in makuta above. without the dot this querry will produce zero results. the best way to find the phonetic is to copy it from one of the transliterations of inscriptions on the same site. Here is the example of krapi, water buffalo which has no special characters:

http://sealang.net/api/api.pl?query=krapi&service=dictionary&language=oldkhmer

Article (some parts of this article are obsolete, having been written early in my study of Sanskrit and Khmer)

Sanskrit writing carved into stone doors - the door "jamb" in modern terms, but much wider then - of the ancient temple inside the modern Wat Preah Enkosei is dated over a thousand years ago. The script contains letters some of which are exactly like their modern day Khmer equivalents, some are similar, and others very different from modern Khmer. The script evolved from Pallava and earlier Grantha of southern India, which arrived at the Mekong delta with Indian merchants in the area called "Funan," perhaps as early as 200 BCE. I should mention that I read this idea in several articles but I am too lazy to mention the sources. Several estimates claim that modern Khmer is composed about 70% Sanskrit. Listening to modern spoken Khmer, though, I did not hear obvious cognates with Hindi, as I did when listening to modern Farsi (persian.) The majority of literate Khmer people can usually identify a word that is of Sanskrit origin, but call it "Baley," meaning Pali (which is an error, the result of modern Theravada Buddhist liturgy containing Pali words, and the assumption that a Sanskrit word is of Pali origin) and state quickly that they don't know the meaning, and that "this is a word used for writing and not for speaking." There are some exceptions, such as the words for "sea" or "ocean," which are the same in Sanskrit, modern Hindi and modern Khmer. After learning modern Khmer script, I noticed that the old Khmer script of more than a thousand years ago, is very similar. This is the century following the beginning of the Khmer empire (usually 802.) With a quick glance at a chart (appearing as the last table in this paper) it became a fairly simple matter to identify Sanskrit words in the ancient inscriptions, and some of the words are also still in use in modern Hindi. The purpose of this paper is to illustrate some examples of the remarkable similarities among these ancient and modern languages, and to display some images from 1000 year old inscriptions that bear proof of the connection between past and present.

This project is mainly the result of a curious sequence of personal experiences which never appeared to be related until recently. I am a verist tyro of epigraphy. My background is in computer algorithm design, math, and physics. My apparently unrelated and random interests of the past 30 years recently united in a surprising and meaningful personal experience in Cambodia.

Purely in the pursuit of folly as a young person I became interested in the Devanagari script, now used commonly for writing Sanskrit texts such as the Ramayana, Hitopadesha, and the Vedas. If you crack open a copy of the Bhagvad Gita, you often see this form of script with a transliteration and translation beneath it. At the time I was fascinated with the ancient script. I did not know that much older scripts were originally used to write the Vedas, and other Hindu sacred texts. I was an early dolt of epigraphy - an anti prodigy. But i was a specialist in the field of doing whatever I wanted, and magnificently curious, and these qualities have potent potential. Yet I felt a desire to achieve something...

I decided that it would be more practical to learn the modern language of Hindi, and about 95% of the Hindi alphabet corresponds to the Devanagari used for Sanskrit. It was only through an improbable course of career changes that I found myself working as a volunteer in Cambodia, delivering food, medicine, and education to people in poor and remote villages around Battambang and Siem Reap, places where there are ancient Khmer temples ranging upward from 1,100 years old (?)

A question mark in this paper may indicate uncertainty, not just questions. A friend recenty suggested that I remove the personal experience aspects from this research paper. That was when I realized that this is not a research paper. And now I am editing this mess to include a greater abundance of personal anecdotes. Horseshit, if you will, because I like the freedom of writing whatever I want in my paper.

Nearly a year before the writing of this paper, my volunteer work began to merge with jobs for pay in the Siem Reap Area. I taught statistics at a university called Pannasastra ( the "iron balloon" what a bogus chunk that place is, what a cirque des fous. Mes Bordelles!) The name of that University contributed to a growing interest in the subject before you. Modern Khmer people write infrequently, and a large number of people are effectively illiterate. But those who write, and those in possession of significant education in Khmer language, deploy a lot of words of sanskrit origin, rendering the writing nearly incomprehensible to people outside this isolated academic realm, until you look up some of the words and discover that these people just have a copy of the Sanskrit thesaurus to increase the syllable count in their mumbojumbo. When I asked people at the university about the name, they all replied that is was derived from "Baley" as they call it, meaning "Pali," which is the language most Khmer people now believe to be the parent language of their modern Khmer language. The name of the university is actually two Sanskrit words combined. I imagine it must be annoying to scholars of Sanskrit when one word has 10 different meanings. "Panya" can mean: booth, baloon, glorious, praiseworthy, sellable, trade. "Sastra" can mean: iron, advice, manual, science, scripture. To derive the meaning of a phrase we need a context of time, place, and purpose. I guess the founder of the university Pannasastra intended the name to mean something like "excellent study," and not "iron balloon" or "advice booth," although a good advice booth is something modern Khmer people certainly could use.

I starting reading books by Aymonier and Coedes, some of the original studies of the ancient stone inscriptions. I read that most of the writing on the temple stele was Sanskrit, and so I had this question in the back of my mind - my hintergedanke - for quite a while: "Why would the Sanskrit language, which I only knew as Devanagari script, be written in old Khmer letters on the stone slabs here?" I bypassed the common remarks about Pali because I read that the modern Theravada Buddhist liturgy is Pali, and guessed that Khmer people simply don't know the Sri Lanka heritage of their weird form of Buddhism. Like German people listening to a passage from the Bible before Grandpaw Luther translated that mutha. The question of the relationship of Sanskrit to modern Khmer was intriguing, but more urgent and practical matters imposed themselves and I did not pursue the question. Instead I drank a bottle of rum.

(end of 1st stage of bastardization...)

A few months ago, I was searching for a subject to motivate one of my private students to participate more in conversation. She said that she was interested in the history of the Angkor temples, and so I began putting together some highlights of Angkor history. During that process, I happened upon items that reminded me of Sandskrit. All the kings from roughly the 7th century through the 15th century had Sanskrit names! Why? Why was Sanskrit written in old Khmer letters? To the epigraphist, these are trivial questions, but for a tyro of linguistics, and a random resident of modern Cambodia just beginning to dabble in ancient history, they are mysterious. I had lived in Cambodia for two years, hardly taking notice of the ancient history all around me. I lived in a village 500 meters from the ancient Taprum temple. An even older ruined temple was next door to my house. I never thought about it, because there were 25 starving kids waiting for me every day, waiting for me to come and teach, bring snacks, and medicine. I rode my bike along the path, an arm's reach from the ancient wall around Taprum. I took my kids to swim at a river where a section of the wall had fallen into the river, and as we waded out into the river we walked on massive stones from the ancient wall. I was just focused on the kids. They don't know how to swim, and I have to do a head count every 3 minutes. There was just no time for the esoteric.

After my project at the village ended, I moved to a village just north of the small city of Siem Reap. I began reading more about the confusing history of the larger area which now consists of Cambodia, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, Malaysia, and if you go back far enough, even Java! A single thread of reasoning eventually emerged which united all the chaos. In brief, prior to the 5th century, Khmer people in this area commonly had no written language. Merchants came from south India to sell their wares, and brought with them the older form of written Sanskrit called Pallava Grantha (derived from Brahmi.) They began to settle here, peacefully, and the Khmer people, who had only a spoken but no written language, began to learn writing and religion from the Indians. The majority of influence was Brahman, and this is why, ultimately, the "usurper" Khmer king Suryvarman II dedicated the great temple of Angkor Wat to Vishnu. This also answered a lot of other questions, such as why place names and names of kings are Sanskrit names. The arrival of Indian people with their highly organized systems of writing and religion must have impressed the iliterate natives here, but there was also disagreement. One king favored Vishnu, and then the next favored the Buddha. Still another hated the Buddha and had thousands of statues of the Buddha destroyed during his reign. Some of the temples are devoted to Shiva, and those are all endowed with an enormous shivalinga - the phallus of the god. Yet, modern people around the temple know these as Bhuddist temples, and there is a giant concrete statue of the Buddha inside Angkor Wat, and Theravada Buddhists come and put incense and pray to Buddha in the temple of Vishnu. My Methodist chuch in the suburbs of atlanta was only 20 years old and there had not been time for an historic upheaval and transition from one religion to another, such that "Allgood Methodist" could somehow be transformed to "The Church of Gotama Buddha of Stone Mountain," for example. But in the many hundreds of years, and many violent transistions of sovereignty, many such transformations of belief occurred in the famous temples in the Angkor area.

This was a source of confusion for me since my arrival in Siem Reap. Many tourists also come and go with the misconception that these are Buddhist temples. After learning enough modern Khmer to listen to the people in my village, I learned that they believe all the temples to be Buddhist temples. But I had read, especially about Angkor Wat, that it was dedicated to Vishnu around the middle of the 11th century. Yet again, more urgent matters impinged and disallowed my pursuit of the topic. During my extensive reading recently, i happened across an article which referred to a stele - a stone inscription - dated around 968, more than a thousand years old, even older than Angkor Wat, and the article stated that this stele was located inside the modern pagoda at Wat An Ko Sai. I had lived next door to this temple for 6 months without knowing that there was a small, ancient "prasat" somewhat camouflaged by more modern surrounding buildings, and there is even a government school inside the complex, with hundreds of primary school kids running around in their little blue and white uniforms. Even stranger, I had walked around that old prasat and noticed that it appeared older than the other buildings. But the day I walked around it, I was embroiled in a discussion about marriage with a woman that I was involved with. We sat on the steps by the East facing door of the larger prasat.

This tiny temple, a larger one at Kravaan, and the 12 duplicate temples near the Elephant Terrace look like giant brick B-B-Qs to me, especially with the black sections that look charred by fire. "That's where they roasted the giant sacred cows," I thought as I biked past them, and such was my level of reverence and interest. I am a vegetarian, and the freaky foods that Khmer people eat freak me out, most of all "prohoc." That's how closely I studied the temples at the time. But now recently, with more free time on my hands, reading with zeal that there is a 1000 year old stone inscription in my back yard, and it contains a Sanskrit inscription, I jumped on my bike and raced there as fast as I could go. Along the way I felt a bit hopeless. I had pictures of the temple in my head and I did not remember seeing any writing in stone. I had read that a lot of stone inscriptions had been moved to museums, and along the way I felt that I was probably racing in vain. When I arrived at the place I had passed hundreds of times on my bike, it was still there. I walked round and round looking for an inscription. Nothing. I sat staring at the big B-B-Q temple and took a few pictures. I would google it when I returned home and surely learn that the inscription was moved to phnom penh in 1960 or destroyed by the Khmer Rouge morons.

But then I remembered something that I had read about the old inscriptions, that many were carved into the interior stone slabs of the East facing doors. I stood inside the door, turned north and looked at the interior door stone, perhaps half a meter in width and about as tall as me. There, carved lightly into the stone, were rather small letters about as tall as my index finger is wide. I was surprised at how small they were. Right there, not protected from vandalism, not enclosed in bullet-proof glass as would be the case in the USA, and I recalled the transliterated text of the first line, and noticed immediately that enough of the characters were like modern Khmer characters that I could actually make out the Sanskrit words by inferring the value of the several characters I did not recognize! IT was truly an amazing moment. Why had I studied Sanskrit and Hindi? Why had I lived in Cambodia, learned to read Khmer, but shown no interest in the ancient history of the place? Why did my volunteer project end? Why did I stay in Cambodia a year after it ended? Is all of this leading to something?

The answer is simple. My heart makes decisions, and then my brain is the last to learn what is going on. I was intrigued by Cambodia since I was a kid. I recalled news broadcasts about illegal bombing in Cambodia as a part of the Vietnam War. President Nixon, the war criminal. The images were horrible. I never forgot them. I was fascinated with scripts of all kinds. I learned Atic-Ionic Greek script in college, then Russian script, and much later made a significant effort to learn Hindi. When I found that Farsi words came into Hindi in the 1500s, I learned to read the Persian and Urdu scripts. I did not learn a lot of vocabulary, just enough to have a good cross-section. I focused on cognates and etymology.

Finally, what exactly is carved into the stone door slabs at the little temple of Dvijendrapur, in the modern "Wat Preah Ankosei?" What is so important that it had to be carved into stone? According to the Chinese diplomat Dzaguon who visited Angkor in the year 1296, the writing materials in daily use by Khmer people included animal skins dyed black and chalk. He wrote that, when rubbed with something moist, the writing disappeared. Given that ordinary texts vanished quickly and this was obvious to all, you might think that only something rather significant would warrant the labor of stone inscription. Not that i mean to diminish the significance of the content in any way, but since this paper is largely a person commentary, I would like to point out that what stuck me most profoundly about these two stele was that about 25% of the content was a list of the names of slaves! (and their children - destined to be slaves.) What could distinguish modern thinking more dramatically than to carve the names of slaves into the entry of a place of worship? The primary purpose of the inscription is dedication of land and valuables to "my holy lord of Dvijendrapur." This includes the date, the name of the king, an account of negotiations pertaining to a parcel of land, a list of "treasures" bequeathed to the temple, and among the valuables a long list of slaves and their children. And so now when I look at this stone writing I wonder, "If I had to write something for people to read 1000 years from now, what should I think they might find interesting to know about us in 2013?" I know exactly what I would write: "There are a few educated people in our world of seven billion who care about the environmental problems caused by unsustainable growth in population and industry, the widespread extinction of species, and even the predicted endangerment of our own species. The inhabitants of an island called Kiribati are now relocating to mainland because their home is being flooded by rising sea levels. There are a few of us who worry about these problems, but not enough. Most people still consume too much of everything, especially energy resources. We the few are sad that there seems to be nothing we can do to stop this destructive behavior of the many greedy people. For the very ugly future state of the world which you may inherit from us, we the few extend our solemn apology. We don't know the future, but we see where it appears to lead, and we wish you good luck." My sister said to just write, "good luck." That would be a lot easier to carve in stone.

The following tables contain some of my recent work here. I have photographed the stone inscriptions at An Ko Sai, and have operated on them a bit with photoshop to make the characters clearer. The first table is a comparison of specific words from the inscriptions at An Ko Sai with their modern Khmer, and Devanagari equivalents. The second table shows some modern Hindi and Khmer words which are cognates from Sanskrit. Most of these are not in popular use. For example, the khmer word for the mother of the king has limited application, and is found in Khmer folk tales of old age. The equivalent Hindi word is also not the popular word in use for "mother." On the other hand, the word for "sea" or "ocean" is the same in Khmer, Hindi, and Sanskrit, and remains the commonly used word in popular Hindi and Khmer.

Table 1. (A photo of the first six lines of the inscription from with this table is taken appears at the end of the article.)

Cognates in Modern Hindi and Khmer

This project was spawned by my continual discovery of Hindi and Sanskrit words in other languages, or the reverse. Many Farsi words entered Hindi in the 15th century, for example, and they can be heard distinctly. It is comical and tragic that many millions of speakers of both Hindi and Urdu regard these as two distinctly different languages. Apart from the fact that Urdu is written in a script resembling Arabic and Hindi in the Devanagari script, the two languages are effectively identical in pronunciation and grammar. Here in Cambodia, though, is revealed in stone a much more ancient source of etymology and cognates. As you can see in the table below, Hindi and Khmer share many words. While the modern usage and meaning vary, the common ancient origin of the two languages must be intriguing.

Screenshot of an entry from the sealang dictionary of ancient Khmer and Sanskrit. As you can see, the Sanskrit is not provided in either Devanagari or Old Khmer, but other web resources mentioned in the bibliography will convert the transliteration to Devanagari.

Global Perspective:

What was happening elsewhere in the world at the time this early Angkorian inscription of 1000 years ago was being carved? If we start in the vicinity and look outward in the middle of the tenth century, inscriptions of the period just prior to Suryavarman II, such as Sdok Kak Thom, a Khmer temple in present day Thailand, illustrate that Thailand was once a part of the larger Khmer Empire. Lynn White said that "to the modern eye, it is very nearly the darkest of the Dark Ages." (8) In the Wiki article on the tenth century world history, as of the date of this writing, the Khmer Empire is not mentioned. The Maya civilization collapsed. The Vikings settled in Northern France, China lost control of Vietnam and people believed the emperor had lost "the mandate of heaven," whatever the hell that means. One site claims that women in a Chinese harem invented playing cards in 950, about 20 years before the little temple above was dedicated. Europeans began to use Arabic numerals in 975. Erik the Red was expelled from Iceland, and I think I would be happy to leave, but he then went to Greenland instead of seeking the warmth of Cambodia. In 980 something cool happened in Japan. Wealthy people refused to pay taxes and the government had to shut down the army. This led to wealthy landowners creating their own private armies, and members of these little armies were called Samurai. Several other history sites about the 10th century also make no mention of the Khmer people or the budding empire, an empire which was about to created the world's largest pre-industrial city and temple complex!

Illustration of the first six lines of the north side of the door inscription (K.262 N) Einkosei:

Bibliography

0. Author's photos at Wat Preah Enkosei - khmer spelling:

1. http://translate.google.com/#en/hi/sun

2. http://spokensanskrit.de/index.php?script=HK&beginning=0+&tinput=sun&trans=Translate&direction=AU

3. http://www.english-khmer.com/index.php?gcm=1&gword=sun

4. http://sealang.net/ok/index.htm

5. http://sealang.net/ok/image.htm

6. http://khmerkhom.wordpress.com/khmer-inscription/

7. Aymonier:, E. Le Cambodge III, Le Groupe D'Angkor Et L'Histoire

8. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10th_century

9. http://www.macrohistory.com/time/ce10.htm

Special thanks to the site "sealang," which contains an extraordinary library of reference materials about these inscriptions, images, transliterations, dictionaries, and more (with the exception that sealang apparently has no image files for K. 262 N or S (Enkosei) which is the reason that I have provided my own photos for reference.

here is how to search sealang for a transliterated old khmer word:

http://sealang.net/api/api.pl?query=krapi&service=dictionary&language=oldkhmer

(change the fragment in the above browser search from "krapi" ... this dictionary will NOT find the word unless you use their peculiar symbols.)

Searching Old Khmer for "krapi" (as ""(?:[^"]*(?:-| ))*()*krapi\d?(?:(?:-| )[^"]*)*"")

2 items found

krapi ~ krapī ~ krapiy ~ krapiyy ~ krapīyy /krəˈɓiː/ A328

[Pre-Angkorian krapi ~ krapī; mod. Khmer ក្របី krapī /krɑˈɓɤːy/ ``n. water buffalo''; pfx /krə‑/ + *pi ~ *pī; a connection with Austronesian1 remains to be shown; cf. Thai กระบือ /kràbʉʉ/ `(eleg.) water buffalo';2 cf. Biat rʼpu,3 presumably /rpuː/].

definitions

references

notes

1 Cf. Old Javanese kĕbo, Malay kĕrbau; Dempwolff, 76b: kəbav `Büffel'. Thurgood, 322: ``Despite its occurrence in various Malayic dialects, this words looks to be a MK borrowing.'' The consonant [b] runs through Austronesian forms. The expected correspondence would be Austronesian [b] : Old Khmer [w], Austronesian [b] : Old Khmer [ɓ] being anomalous.

2 Haas, 12a. Note the vowel of the Thai form, showing Angkorian /iː/ before development into mod. /ɤːy/.

3 Hoeffel, 25.

krapi ~ krapī /krəˈɓiː/ PA596

[Angkorian krapi ~ krapī ~ krapiy ~ krapiyy ~ krapīyy; mod. Khmer ក្របី krapī /krɑˈɓɤːy/ ``n. Water buffalo''; analysis undetermined].

definitions

references

citations

notes

1 Pou, 115a; LS, 147.

Keywords: variations of spelling for name: Wat Vat Ankosai Einkosei Eynkosei (Aymonier) Enkosei