Experts Urge More Standardization Debate

A three-day debate on Khmer language made scholars and researchers realize how difficult it will be to reach consensus on standardizing the national language, which has not been scrutinized for several decades.

Experts on Khmer language, who attended an international conference on standardization and promotion of Khmer language at the Royal University of Phnom Penh, on Saturday concluded more arguments are necessary to develop standardized Khmer language.

“We have had 22 points of recommendations out of this conference,” announced Son Samnang, president of the Royal Academy of Cambodia, one of two research institutions on language.

He said there was urgent need for debate on aspects of the language addressed by participants before scholars can make any official conclusion on the unified usage of Khmer. “We need more discussions over how to standardize our language,” he said.

The conference, organized by the academy and the National Language Institute, was aimed at hearing out ideas and opinions on how to standardize the language in hope of creating a new official dictionary with 34,000 words.

More than 40 speakers consisting of two major groups—supporters of the traditional Khmer language based on the Buddhist monk Chourn Nath’s 1915 official dictionary and those of the more modern “Khmerization” writing style born in the late 1960s—presented their research findings on  inconsistent usage of the language, historical aspects of language development and computerization.

Participants in the end urged the organizers to create a national language committee and other sub-committees to further discuss the issues raised by speakers and participants. And many agreed Cambodia should keep all characters in the Khmer alphabets, following the word definitions created by the Patriarch Chourn Nath in early 1910s and develop one set of grammar rules.

In the course of the three-day discussion, Miech Ponn, assistant of the Buddhist Institute’s Cus­tom Commission, said Cam­bodia should maintain all the original Khmer alphabets studied and compiled into a national dictionary by Chourn Nath in 1915.

“Modernization is useless and makes the language more complicated to understand,” he appealed to more than 200 participants. The 75-year-old Buddhist scholar, one of Chourn Nath’s students in the 1930s and 1940s, said protecting the original language is a key to promote the foundation of Khmer culture.

But supporters of Khmer­iza­tion say modernization is a natural way of social development.

So Muy Kheang, president of the Institute of Khmer Literature Research, said the modernization would simplify Khmer language with each word having wider meanings.

According to the National Lan­guage Institute, the Khmer Rouge and the decades of civil strife devastated the Khmer language and scripts.

Extended efforts to standardize the language began within the past two years.

 

 

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