A Proposed Study of Historic Southeast Asian Languages and Writings: A Conlang

[Bob]

A Proposed Study of Historic Southeast Asian Languages and Writings

I am very excited about a new side-project I have begun! In order to make use of my budget-friendly collection of books, I'm going to "translate" the 1300s Thailand, Theravada Buddhist core classic "Three Worlds according to King Ruang" into perhaps a mixture of Classic Pali, Modern Cambodian, and then some Thai and Vietnamese. I'm also adding texts from the recent translation masterpiece, the bilingual "Lotus Sutra" in Classical Chinese and English. Which might be a Mahayana Buddhist text.

So it would be a invented language "conlang" based closely on various real languages and writing systems.

But I don't know how much time I'll find for this side-project as I'm currently engrossed in one project and have another that I put down waiting for me to finish this and return to that.

I bought "Three Worlds according to King Ruang" about October 2018 but haven't studied it much yet. It's a lot like Dante's Divine Comedy only I have that one in bilingual 1400s Italian in two editions and probably won't even be able to find the 1400s Thai (Old Thai? Middle Thai?) on the internet. But maybe at one of the nearby university libraries! Eventually.

These two classics of the Extreme Orient are nice because they end up as explorations of Indian and Southeast Asia from around ... well, like 500 AD or so. But there's also a lot of details "which seem fantastic or mythical" if you're not a true believer. (Note well, currently and or in the past, both of these texts are taken as extremely sacred by tons of people in Southeast Asia and China. Thousands of M and T Buddhist monks may be hand-copying or reading them as we speak. Them or their no-doubt myriad commentaries and commentaries upon commentaries.) They, and works like them, go on and on and on and include all sorts of interesting historic vocabulary - though often in the form of less-than-riveting lists. Still, the poetic passages are plenty.

So lots of kings with huge and elaborate palaces and empires filled with tropical plants and animals. But then also multiple universes populated by many different sorts of humanoid beings with all sorts of amazing or even seemingly impossible things. But all with reference to historic realities of c 200 AD or 1300 AD or far before that.

And then Ancient India literature is also marked by frequent very gigantic numbers for years and measurements. I have studied lots of the oldest known myths from around the world and "such fantastic elements" may also be found in them in describing the lands and doings of the gods and such.

Well, this is a weighty and sensitive matter.

First off, it's easy to balk at "fantastic elements" in historic accounts but it's notable how they teach and imply good deeds. And this in some contrast with modern literatures the world over.

But I will at least say without too much insensitivity that such accounts were not doubt welcome to humans and or hominids from all ages past because their lives were as boring or more boring than our own. And I suspect that even animals, maybe plants, tell eachother of such things, beyond the reaches of science.

In the ancient myths, the gods and heros travel all over the universe and explore everything. But archaeology and historic accounts indicate that humans and hominids only a few times a year moved their cities until the invention of agriculture, and almost always to the same places. As exciting as a vast world covered in forests and jungles and teeming with giant monsterous animals may seem to us, it was probably quite boring and even scary to past peoples and hominids, on top of the greater dangers of interpersonal faux pas's and misfortune.

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Anyhow, so I have this really huge and rare dictionary of Cambodian to English, without an English to Cambodian index, from the 1970s. Then I have some very small Thai and Vietnamese dictionaries and phrasebooks and Schuessler's ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese with much reference to all these Southeast Asian languages, even many obscure ones, reconstructed and attested.

And I'm thinking about getting a huge Classical Pali dictionary. But neither I'm thinking of have English indexes (indices). Pali seems closely related to Sanskrit and is by far the number one ancient language of choice is Southeast Asia.

And, again, it would take me a lot of time to try to gather dictionaries, and their English indexes, of Old and Middle Thai and Vietnamese and Khmer (Cambodian), and more time and money still to buy copies, let alone dictionaries. And many of them might be in French, thus rendering the languages within that much less accessible to me. (Though I'm reading fluent in French, German, and some others, I still don't know every single word. Nor do native speakers, obscure words also have to be looked up by them.) Perhaps in 200 years, all these things will be free online. But if they are, projects like mine will be part of what stirred up global interested toward that end.

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So I'm going to mix all these languages for words and grammar and make a constructed language out of them into which to translate selected texts from those works. I hope to mix the original grammars with exotic grammar elements in order to make the project more interesting. I may even make some writing systems for it, the hieroglyphic (logographic) being my specialty.

I might think of some simple imitation historical linguistics sound changes to apply to Modern Thai, Vietnamese, and Khmer. But maybe not, the whole thing sounds complex enough as it is. And only key words will I be able to "approximate" using real languages. The gaps will have to be quickly filled in according to a matching phonology and word-formation tramlescence and rebigumulation.

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And notably, I'm working toward returning to a project I started back in 2010 of making a huge collection of bilingual English translations of the Old Khmer (Old Cambodian) and Sanskrit inscriptions of Angkor, c 800 to 1400 capital of Southeast Asia. Currently, the best translations are spread apart c 1930s issues of the academic journal JEFEO Journal D'Ecole Francais d'Extreme-Orient. And in French. And dense French with not a lot of explanation of complex words.

This corpus is epigraphic (carved) and not actually very extensive but still with much interesting vocabulary. They're land deeds and gift lists often prefaced by brief poetic passages in Sanskrit. They may be a few other things, I forget. About 2005, we had Professor Paul Jenner of the University of Hawaii, him to thank for producing 3 dictionaries of the Pre-Angkorian Khmer, Angkorian Khmer, and Middle Khmer of these Angkor inscriptions and of the total corpus of inscriptions of that the Khmer Empire (Cambodian Empire), covering all of c 800 to 1400 Southeast Asian and influencing all islands to Australia and maybe even its coast. What little we have of epigraphic Philippines? It's a good match for that at Angkor and of the Khmer Empire.

The great overarching concept of these inscriptions, though, is that certainly the Khmer Empire had vast libraries of treated leaf books of which we have nothing to survive the tropical climate. But we have works from the Middle Khmer language or maybe Early Modern Khmer (c 1500s) which might not be epigraphic, then we have this "Three Worlds According to King Ruang" and the vast Pali corpus for Theravada Buddhism of Southeast Asia. And then we also have many, many lengthy and insightful, even amazing and sometimes tedious, classics from Ancient India and even a few from "Ancient Dravidia" which are entirely Hindu. So we almost always have some surviving works which give us an idea of what we're missing. And this goes for all things in the study of history and prehistory. There's always something to study, even if few study it.

So we'll see if I ever get back to that or do anything with it, it could be decades, but a project like this helps build my enthusiasm and probably that of other people.

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Previous to this, I thought of doing this for Classical Mongolian, Classical Manchu, and Jurchen. And I did some work toward this a few weeks ago but we'll see how into it I ever get. One of my universities does have a huge dictionary of Classical Manchu. And maybe with an English index. Still, my current work with West African Languages is wearing me out for alphabets and after that I have work on Western North America Native American Languages to which to return.

[Bob]

I actually did this for two days but should put it down now, maybe take it up some other thing.

I used a 1977 dictionary of Cambodian by Headley, a really huge one. Cambodian to English with no English to Cambodian index.

I also used a 1975 New Dehli, India publication of the 1921 Davids dictionary of Pali. Also with no English to Pali index.

So my work on both ended up doing some work toward English indexes (indices) for both.

I did two texts, one from The Three Worlds according to King Ruang, the 1300s Thailand "Dante's Divine Comedy". And the second from The Lotus Sutra in a recent bilingual translation into Classical Chinese.

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For the first one, I used mostly Modern Thai words and grammar from the short dictonary phrasebook's that I have. Then I added words derived from neat ones I found in the Modern Cambodian dictionary. I tried to have the semantic shifts be in keeping with my vast experience with the historical linguistics of many different language families. Then I made up the rest of the words based on a quick imitation of the phonology of the Modern Thai words. Then I made some simplifications and changes to the grammar to make the resulting constructed language more interesting. For one thing, they're both SVO languages. Vietnamese had interesting before or after positions for verb modifying particles, like tense and aspect. Thai is so funny because all the words are like glorp and snerd. I don't remember how Modern Cambodian compared to both. I was quite busy just writing down interesting definitions and page numbers.

Then for the second one, it was mostly Modern Vietnamese with many Pali words.

After doing quick studies of the phonology of Thai and Vietnamese, I noticed that Vietnamese is a lot more like Mandarin than I remembered. It's like somewhere between Cantonese and Mandarin for its syllable finals. I should have also done a study of the tones for both but I decided to just skip it this time.

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The Pali and Cambodian words I included by their page numbers. These I made into imitation Thai and Vietnamese words by assigning each number a syllable initial medial and final value. For the Cambodian, the first one, I had all the words written out on the page and the page facing it on the left. But for the Pali, I just had them all on separate numbered pages that I cited when I used them. Streamlining.

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So it ended up like two different conlangs. I named them after their dates and then also Poor Man's Old Thai and Poor Man's Old Vietnamese. [ This refers to an idiom in English where "Poor Man's X" refers to a recipe containing some imitating ingredient for something extravagant. I also thought of Imitation and Pseudo- and Mock, as in Mock Turtle's Soup from Alice in Wonderland. But I thought, oh, Poor Man's sounds okay. And that's how that happened. ] And Vietnamese or such was probably something like that under the Mahayana Buddhist second half of the 800 to 1300 AD Khmer Empire. But at some point Cambodia became Theravada Buddhist instead. I forget how that all works out. First half Khmer Empire was some sort of Shiva Hinduism. Vietnam is otherwise notable for formerly being apart of the Chinese Empire, Han Dynasty et al.

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Those dictionaries are amazing. I once had this huge 1800s Sanskrit to English dictionary. I had two or three. Those were like this. It's all this amazing ancient empire stuff and far-flung Buddhist philosophical terminology. I even found a word for "toothpick". That was a highlight. That 1977 dictionary of Modern Cambodian is really phenomenal, going into all sorts of old-time lore. It's probably based on some works in French.

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I've been working a lot with Egyptian Hieroglyphic the last month or so, thus I have been thinking a lot about exotic sets of common prepositions. Every East Asian language I've ever studied, most of them, always have a locative particle that it leans on heavily.

[Richard W]

I don't quite follow what you're doing, so I have a question on sucking eggs. Are you aligning Pali, Thai and Vietnamese by noting the tone correspondences and bearing in mind the replacement of a voiced/voiceless contrast by a tone split, with Thai's slightly unusual aspiration of old voiced consonants? Pali and Khmer are basically all tone A and tone D. (Khmer doesn't aspirate former voiced stops, except allophonically in clusters.)

[Bob]

I don't quite follow what you're doing ...

I don't understand what you mean by "sucking eggs" though I looked it up online. People don't use that idiom in American English and I don't interact with British English people all that much.

Are you making fun of my conlang for not being complicated enough?

I think I said that I just totally skipped over tones. Pali has tones? That surprises me since I Sanskrit doesn't have any tones.

Oh, it's interesting what you say about tones and these languages. Mandarin has tones and I get into that some. Not so much with when I work with Cantonese, which is rare. Tonogenesis comes up in Old Chinese Studies for me often.

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Basically, I made two conlangs by mixing words from Pali, Thai, Vietnamese, and Khmer. Then I based their grammar on Thai and Vietnamese with some a priori alterations to make them more typologically interesting but without following typology rules.

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I think I said quite clearly I was just ignoring what they have to do with tones.

I don't understand the "sucking eggs" idiom you used, again. So do you like my project or not? You sound into the languages. Did you just make up your comments to mock these languages? Are you into Southeast Asia or not?

[Bob]

I'm not sure if _anyone_ is interested in this conlang. But it just so happens that after posting here and on my facebook groups about this project, I found a small dictionary of Cambodian (Khmer) at a local thrift store, plus a sizeable history and a Bible in Khmer. And a Barron's book of Japanese vocabularies. Also Barron's 501 French Verbs. What a day. Which is alright, though I don't really like Japanese that much. I guess it's better than finding vocabularies for some European language or Arabic. I actually have the Barron's or something Arabic one and there's no transliteration and it's awful.

Maybe not a lot of people on this Zompist Bboard conlanging linguistics internet forum are much interested in Southeast Asian languages. I see people posting about European history. Huh.

And the books came with all sorts of slightly interesting notes on separate papers in them, too.

But I spent a few days on this project and haven't done anything on it since. I've been back working on that dinosaur and Art of War conlang. That's been great; I'm trying to wrap that up.

[Bob]

I don't quite follow what you're doing ...

I also have a book by maybe Jerry Norman all about different Chinese languages. That talks about tones.

I used to have a phonology book from my phonology university course. But I donated it to a public library and haven't gotten another one. I just look up things I need in the books I have or on the internet.

I'm not much into tones, especially not for conlangs. They seem like a hassle to me because I'm not comfortable writing them using Roman letters. Which I think is the ideal for me but I usually don't end up doing it.

It's a function of my research. Often I'll be working with something like Oracle Bone Script, right? So I'll look up the word and write it. But the tone doesn't matter, you can find it in the dictionary without the tone. Just include the page number maybe. And when I work with Classical Chinese or Oracle Bone Script Chinese or whatever, it's just like that. I work with a lot of dead languages, so tones aren't a matter unless you're comparing reconstructed Old Chinese forms to arrive at puns.

Otherwise, tones are a hassle to me. My conlangs both help me explore linguistic theory but also blow off steam and have an escape from my research. "Wow, what a release this is!"

Like a year ago, I was on here posting my conlangs. I got a lot of flack a year ago. Well, you know, it's so sad, because I'm one of the only serious scholars to study the 1600s Massachusetts Language and my conlangs were a reflection on the joys and pains of that language. Part of why no one studies it is that the words are a mile long apiece. The orthography is Shakespearean and inconsistent and just goofy.

My conlangs were really interesting. I tried to explain why there were so interesting. I remember it being a mess.