Khmer script

On this page

1. Origins
2. Letters
3. Vowels
4. Subscripts
5. Styles
6. Numerals and punctuation
7. Spacing
8. Other languages
9. In computing
10. See also
11. References

On this page

1. Origins
2. Letters
3. Vowels
4. Subscripts
5. Styles
6. Numerals and punctuation
7. Spacing
8. Other languages
9. In computing
10. See also
11. References

Khmer script carved in stone at Angkor Wat

The Khmer script, called aksaa khmae (អក្សរខ្មែរ, "Khmer letters"), is the writing system of the Khmer language and the official script of Cambodia.

Origins

The Khmer script descends from the Brahmi script of South India, like the Thai, Lao and Myanmar scripts. The Unicode Standard notes that its exact sources are unknown, but that the earliest inscriptions in the region closely resemble the Pallava script of the Coromandel coast of India. It has been a distinct script of its own for more than 1,400 years.

Michael Everson, writing in 2002 for the international working group on character encoding, stated that a script of the Pallava dynasty of southern India had reached Southeast Asia by about the sixth century. There it grew into regional forms, one of them in Funan, in what is now southern Vietnam and Cambodia. He wrote that a script known as "Cambodian Nagari" had its own features by about 900. The script came to Cambodia as a vehicle for Sanskrit and Pali, whose sounds differ from those of Khmer. Over the centuries, changes in the Khmer language moved its spelling further from the original values of the letters.

Letters

The Unicode code chart lists 35 consonant letters. Two of them, sha and ssa, are used only to write words from Pali and Sanskrit. Each consonant carries a built-in vowel, and other vowels are shown by signs written before, after, above or below it. The script runs from left to right.

Khmer has more vowels than the languages the script was first made for, and fewer consonants. The script uses this by dividing the consonants into two series, or registers. A letter of the first series carries the vowel -a, and a letter of the second carries -o, so pairs such as ka (ក) and ko (គ) stand for the same consonant with different vowels. Two signs move a letter from one series to the other: the muusikatoan (មូសិកទន្ត) from the second to the first, and the triisap from the first to the second.

Vowels

Most vowels are written with dependent vowel signs attached to a consonant. The script also has a letter for the glottal stop, qa, which can take a vowel sign, so many sounds written elsewhere with independent vowel letters can be written with qa instead. Khmer keeps a set of independent vowel letters as well, and some words use one spelling to the exclusion of the other. The nikahit (និគ្គហិត) marks final nasalization, and Unicode notes that it is usually regarded as the vowel sign am.

Subscripts

A consonant that follows the first consonant of a syllable is written beneath it, in a form called coeng (ជើង), a word meaning "foot" or "leg". Two letters written side by side keep the vowel between them, so a cluster with no vowel needs the subscript form. The common word khnyom (ខ្ញុំ, "I") is written with kha and a subscript nyo, followed by the vowel om.

The robat (រេផៈ), a mark above a letter, stands for an r at the start of a syllable and appears in some old loanwords from Sanskrit and Pali. In some of those words it is no longer pronounced. The dictionary of Chuon Nath, the standard reference, sorts the robat as if it were a full consonant.

Styles

Modern Khmer has two main styles. Aksaa crieng is the slanted script and aksaa muul the round one. Unicode describes them as having the same structure. In the round style some vowel signs join with the consonant to form a single shape.

Numerals and punctuation

Khmer has its own ten digits, zero to nine. A separate set of numerals is used in divination and is not used for counting. The script also has signs for the dates of the lunar calendar, one for each waxing and waning day. Among the punctuation marks, the bariyoosan closes a section or a whole text, and the lek too (លេខទោ) shows that a word is repeated.

Spacing

Khmer is written without spaces between words. Spaces fall between clauses and between the parts of a name.

Other languages

Besides Khmer, the script is used to write several minority languages of the region, such as the languages of the Tampuan people, the Krung and the Cham people.

In computing

Unicode encodes Khmer in two blocks: Khmer, from U+1780 to U+17FF, and Khmer Symbols, from U+19E0 to U+19FF. It writes each subscript as a control character followed by the full letter. In 2002 the Cambodian Committee for Standardization of Khmer Characters in Computers argued that this model did not correspond to the reality of Khmer, and that writing subscripts as letters of their own would work better for display and sorting.

See also

• Cambodia
• Khmer script in computing