1893, When the French and the British Fought to Rule Southeast Asia

An amusing article about the bad old days of French and British Colonialism in Southeast Asia: https://medium.com/p/e9844c270f9d

I wrote this in about two-and-a-half days; the deadlines were very tight, and, as a result, the style is a bit bombastic.  However, the primary sources and subject-matter were bombastic to begin with, so… the results are an amusing mix.

Totalitarian by the Numbers

Totalitarian by the Numbers: The Quantification of Democracy and Despotism in Southeast Asia

      An essay from the early 1990s crossed my desk a few days ago, opening with a world-weary remark that now seems to have a very different tone in retrospect: "Democracy", it read, "is the legitimating myth of the 20th century".*¹  In surveying the prospects for democracy in Asia, the essay made repeated reference to the Freedom House rankings, a name that was familiar to me, but that I couldn't recall hearing much about since the early 1990s myself.  I rarely (if ever) see this statistic mentioned; it reminds me of the passing optimism of that era when even the most cynical of commentators looked forward from the baseline of 1989 with the expectation that we would be able to chart rapid political improvement in the years to follow.  I hesitate to write "improvement", as the term used at the time was "liberalization", and the meaning of the latter word has been very much in flux ever since.  1989 was a year marking both the demolition of the Berlin Wall and the Tiananmen square protests.
      Further removed from the headlines, but closer to the interest of this essay, 1989 also marked the year of the declared quittance of Vietnamese troops from Cambodia (though not quite their withdrawal, nor, indeed, anything like peace in the country).  It was the year that Myanmar (Burma) adopted its new name, in the prelude to the (quashed) elections of 1990.  The Communist government of Laos had resolved to adopt free market economics a few years earlier, in 1986, though the first effects of that change might have been felt around 1989, as Laos had just emerged from a brief but important war with with Thailand (1987–1988).  Thailand itself had elected a new Prime Minister in 1988, but this was to come to a violent end with a coup d'état and a counter-coup soon thereafter (1991–1992).  In mainland Southeast Asia, the year 1989 is a baseline pretty close to the base.
      In retrospect, both the cynicism and the optimism of the 1990s seem misplaced. 
      It is a measurement that is meaningless at its extremes: Cambodia's "Pol Pot" regime gets the worst possible rating (double sevens), but the government of occupation that replaced it continued to receive the same rating throughout the early 1980s.  The military government of Myanmar (Burma) earned the same rating again, and, at first glance, many would tend to dismiss the measure for creating this seeming-equivalence between such starkly different regimes. 
      The Freedom House ranking system has its merits, and these are, perhaps, easily forgotten because of its limitations; the statistic may be so rarely quoted because of its inapplicability to the stuff that newspaper headlines are made of. 
      At the opposite extreme, many Europeans would be baffled to find the highest possible rating (double ones) shared by countries as dissimilar as Estonia and the United States of America. 
      Does this invalidate the statistic?  Not at all.  Simply put, the Freedom House system does not measure the degrees of difference that separate one of these governments from another, but it does provide a useful set of indications for a middle range.  An ordinal measure calibrated for one spectrum of values will (inevitably) exclude all others.

      The chart shows that the island of Taiwan (a.k.a. the Republic of China) made a transition to a culture of political rights and civil liberties at a slower pace than South Korea (but with a somewhat smoother transition); meanwhile, in the People's Republic of China, political rights have merited the worst possible rating consistently since 1989.  Was there absolutely no improvement?  The faded green line diverging from 1994–1999 denotes the "loosening up" of civil liberties in mainland China during the same period, albeit without any relaxation of the state's political control.  On China's other frontier, I note, Mongolia (not shown on this chart) had the dreaded double-seven rating from 1979 to 1989, but then rapidly progressed to its current rating of double-twos, only a half-step behind Taiwan and South Korea (shown on figure 5, right-hand side).
      Figure 2, above, shows how this can be immediately useful in contrasting political changes over time.  At a glance, we can "see" a set of changing conditions in Asia that most researchers would be subjectively aware of over the last twenty years in the field, though, I think, most of us would lack the means to quantify such impressions.  The lines illustrate, for example, that there was a time (still very much in living memory) when Taiwan, South Korea and Communist China were all clustered together in the rankings (ca. 1984), but the decades thereafter show some clearly diverging trends.  Even if the numbers are somewhat abstract, this lets us illustrate and compare the changes of this chapter of recent history with reference to something more tangible than personal impressions, or citations of isolated political events.
      In Asia, the score that Freedom House assigns for civil liberties tends to correspond closely to the score for political rights (e.g., in fig. 2, above, the two scores are identical for the P.R.C. from 1979–1994, and thus the two separate lines are only visible for the years thereafter; similarly, Taiwan's score for civil liberties only diverges from its political rights by a single point for a few of the years shown, and is thus difficult to see on the chart).  Hong Kong is an interesting exception to this pattern: the numbers suggest that political rights moved a step closer to mainland China in the 1990s, whereas civil liberties hovered around relatively positive scores of 2 and 3 during the same period (1989–2009).  Currently, this gives Hong Kong an unusual gap between a score of 2 for civil liberties, but a dangerous 5 in political rights (the latter being a step up from mainland China, but a stark contrast to the Taiwanese and South Koreans, who have recently achieved the highest possible rankings in this category, cf. figure 5).

      In terms of year-by-year political changes, both Thailand and Cambodia's charts (below, figure 3) demonstrate a clear correlation to changes in government that the reader will hardly need to be reminded of.  Thailand's chart shows two self-evident "spikes" in the numbers, with the country's best scores (for both political rights and civil liberties) constrained to a clearly-defined period: 1998–2004.  Cambodia's year-by-year chart (shown in the same figure, below) similarly correlates to changes in government (both violent and peaceable) with the country's best score (relative to a very different benchmark) constrained to a period of just two years (1993–4, with no improvement in the elections thereafter).

     Some frustration may be inevitable with the reduction of political change to a single-digit number.  While Laos has undergone a complete transformation in the period described, the chart for the Lao P.D.R. (shown below, fig. 4) is nearly a flat line.  Similarly, there seemed to be no point in displaying a year-by-year chart for Myanmar (Burma) as their numbers remained resolutely unchanged for the entire period under consideration: the Burmese received the lowest possible ranking (double sevens) from 1989 through 2009, consistently.  For some readers, it might be interesting to place a wager on when this "losing streak" will end; for others, it would be frustrating that various upheavals during that time simply do not show up in the numbers at all (unlike the charts for countries that fall into the mid-range of values, as with Thailand, shown above).

      Anyone who reads the Freedom House methodology in detail could come up with a series of criticisms and suggestions for new approaches to the problem of the quantification of despotism.  The Freedom House seven-point scale is meaningless in isolation, but becomes more and more meaningful when it is applied consistently over many years, allowing comparison between examples in various contexts and between historical periods.  We can only work with the measurements we've got until someone is willing to sponsor the creation of something better (does anyone want to write up a proposal for the Toyota Foundation?).
      However abstract such numbers may be in isolation, the Freedom House ranking allows us to assign a number to what would otherwise be an unsubstantiated opinion, to then counterpose the figure to others generated with consistent assumptions.  For example, it is often enough said (as if it were a platitude) that Sri Lanka's long civil war resulted in an erosion of civil rights; although the chart above (figure 4) is certainly an abstract set of values, we can at least show an arc of declining civil liberties (in this period) with the Freedom House data.  In some ways, this is more useful than citing specific instances of abuses of power, or specific controversies in the court (although it is just an abstraction).  Likewise, if someone were to venture the opinion that Thailand had a stronger claim to democracy than Taiwan in 1989, but that Taiwan is significantly more democratic than Thailand today, the numbers would allow us to rapidly compare such a claim against a consistent standard (which is not the same thing as an objective standard, as it is, after all, just a normative checklist).  Of course, political conditions in all of the countries reduced to dots in these charts have been transformed in the last 20 years (in ways both big and small) and to encapsulate that political change requires a great deal of abstraction; but, for many practical purposes, a number will serve better than a platitude, and the number can be compared to politicians' platitudes.
      Change is empirical if we measure it empirically; progress is merely an ideology, no matter how we may measure it, propound it or critique it. 
      While daily life in Laos has been transformed in innumerable ways in recent years, the flat line of the Freedom House ranking (shown above) corresponds to the underlying fact that the structure of social control has hardly changed at all (in the same period of time).  A formerly isolated country with strict border controls has now become dependent on international tourism and foreign investment; however, the proliferation of hotels and casinos (even schools and doctors' offices) does not equate to any change in the scope of political rights, nor civil liberties (not as defined by Freedom House, that is).
      There remains a meaningful challenge for anyone who would create a ranking system that could accurately measure political change within countries such as Laos in the 20th and 21st centuries; indeed, it would be meaningful to see a competing system calibrated to reflect the vicissitudes of political change within contemporary Myanmar (Burma), Cambodia and mainland China as well. 
      Freedom House did not set out to create a research tool that would effectively measure contrasts between Burma, Laos and other political systems that are currently lumped together at "the bottom of the barrel" as they've defined it.  Instead, the design reflects an interest in particularizing the desiderata of what can be frankly called a bureaucratic capitalist democracy, i.e., setting out a checklist to articulate what is adequate and what is inadequate by that standard (all the while, "…not maintain[ing] a culture-bound view of freedom", in their own terms).³  The seven point scale is necessarily a blunt instrument, inasmuch as it was intended to be applicable to myriad cultures (without much adaptation to each instance) and to encompass at least some variety in forms of state power without too much prejudice (although they admit that the basic premise favors, "liberal democratic societies").³

      I was part of a generation that went through university when the professors didn't know what to do with Communism anymore, but, more pressing still, they didn't know what to teach without it.  The deletion of Cold War politics from the curriculum created an opportunity, but at the moment of my own studies it was encountered as a void: the custodians of education had responded to the challenge with an appalling lack of imagination --and had simply left it blank.

      There seemed to be very little interest in the politics of Cambodia as something that existed for Cambodians (and so on for Thai politics for the Thais, or any of the other countries mentioned).  Previously, countries on the periphery of Soviet and American influence had been treated as case-studies to illustrate critiques of Communism, American interventionism, and other themes very far removed from the rights and liberties of individuals, in practice, that Freedom House tries to measure.  Places like Laos and Nicaragua were presented as symbols that existed for no purpose other than to reveal forces at work within American politics, Soviet politics, and so on.

      Once the framework of Cold War diplomacy was removed from the equation, the study of such remote and exotic governments didn't seem like political science at all anymore (or, it wasn't what political science had come to expect itself to be).  If a government is studied as a phenomenon of its people (a thing perceived by, sustained by, and primarily existing for its own people, even if it be to their detriment) the entire undertaking starts to resemble cultural anthropology: the "case study" ceases to illustrate anything other than itself, and is instead revealed as a knot of unique cultural and historical conditions that neither support platitudes nor grand generalizations.  Alas, the facts that precede and follow politics are poorly suited to the format of the one hour lecture. 

      It is from anthropology that I would like to see some quantitative methods emerge to broach the problem under discussion: it would be interesting to design a system of evaluation that proceeds from the smallest localizable unit of the ethnos (such as a tribe or group of villages) to then establish the limits of how far certain generalizations about political conditions are applicable (through ethnography and other empirical methods).  Some political rights and civil liberties are uniform over huge territories, but others are (de facto) reserved to elites in the capital city only, or can be exercised by one ethnic group but not another, in one language but not another, and so on.  These informal "borders", demarcating degrees of liberty and of state power, could themselves be the subject of study (rather than proceeding from the abstraction of the national unit downward) to be established in the process of the quantification of social control, working from the ground up.
      There is an unexamined reverberation of American attitudes in accounting for ethnicity "last and least" in the Freedom House method: ethnic minority problems are set down as a matter to be subtracted from a national sum.

      In the case of any of the former British colonies (Canada included), we do not, in fact, come to an equation that depicts the conditions of the indigenous people by looking at an equation that first measures the privileges of the white colonists and then subtracts a penality for the mistreatment of minorities.  There seems to be a propaganda function implicit in such a sum, however it may be reduced for genocide, slavery, or apartheid, inasmuch as it still precludes the evaluation of the conditions of a plurality of indigenous peoples as units unto themselves (i.e., as something existing prior to the state). 
      Freedom House has a separate score for North Cyprus, but not for the Cree, Ojibwe or Navaho; for white Americans, this is not so much anathema as it is unimaginable (despite whatever the legal reality of sovereignty may be). 
      It is a misleading feature of newspaper writing that ethnicity is depicted primarily as a problem that exists for the state, as if the business of the state were to manage ethnic minorities, and as if state power itself had no ethnicity. 
      In general, each ethnic group would generate very different figures for how they are governed (even if the same Freedom House score were applied), and how the state exists for them, if we proceeded from the smallest unit up, instead of from the largest unit down (Burma-watchers will have myriad examples at their disposal). 
      Certainly, there are contrasts (in political rights and civil liberties) within the territory of China that are more striking than those found in comparing any two nations of Europe; these often correspond to declared but unofficial boundaries, that can be discovered through fieldwork (for example, that Burmese migrants are tolerated to come into Yunnan as far as Baoshan without paperwork, but can proceed no further).  Indeed, some significant contrasts can be found in pairs of villages along the same highway in Northern Laos, where the respective inhabitants do not share any common language, and deal with their government through very different intermediaries, with different results.  It would be a delightful task (even if nearly impossible) to try to put a number on such degrees of liberty, working from the ground up.

===== Endnotes =====
1. The event actually transpired in Phnom Penh in 2011.  The book that I discovered a copy of (in a restaurant) was: Chan Heng Chee (contributing author), 1993, Democracy and Capitalism, ISEAS: Singapore.  The remark I'm alluding to is found on page 1.
2. The most recent census data at my disposal for Laos is from 2005 (published in March, 2006, by the "Steering Committee for [the] Census of Population and Housing", Vientiane).  Average male life expectancy at birth was only 50 years as recently as 1995; it had increased to 59 in 2005.  Women's average life expectancy at birth had a corresponding increase from 52 to 63 years in the same period.  For the two genders together, we may say that life expectancy extended by roughly a decade.
3. I am quoting from the introduction to the methodology chapter of the 2010 report available from the Freedom House website (without pagination, i.e., I cannot provide a page number).  The paragraph in full reads: "Freedom House does not maintain a culture-bound view of freedom. The methodology of the survey is grounded in basic standards of political rights and civil liberties, derived in large measure from relevant portions of the [U.N.] Universal Declaration of Human Rights. These standards apply to all countries and territories, irrespective of geographical location, ethnic or religious composition, or level of economic development. The survey operates from the assumption that freedom for all peoples is best achieved in liberal democratic societies."

A new system for transliterating Khmer

The very idea of "a new system" has a bad name these days (perhaps because the people who propose them tend to be stuck on the notion of newness as the primary purpose of invention, or else because they pursue systematization as an end in itself).  So, instead, I'm calling this "a modest proposal" for transliterating Khmer (into Romanized phonetics).  Hopefully, the notion of a modest proposal doesn't have such negative connotations.

I'm not offering a lengthy explanation of the advantages of the system, because the main advantage of the system is that it can be understood easily enough without much explanation.

If you're already fluent in Cambodian, you should be able to figure out the correspondence just by comparing the poem in Khmer (top-left) to the transcription (top-right).  If your first language is English, but you already have had the (frustrating) experience of using the inconsistent mix of phonetic symbols found in Khmer-English dictionaries and textbooks, you should find this system relatively easy to guess at.

The system isn't perfect, and it isn't intended to be perfect: it's intended to offer a flexible solution that can easily be used with pen-on-paper to take notes (for students learning Khmer at any level).

It does also have the advantage of a one-to-one correspondence with I.P.A. symbols (more on that later) but we should be wary about pursuing that correspondence too far in the name of perfection: with increasing accuracy of phonetic notation, you have decreasing flexibility for the student and increasing confusion for the native speaker.

If we transcribe Khmer with a high level of phonetic accuracy, you would have very different spellings for different dialects, and even for different accents found within Phnom Penh.  The same is true of English within the city of London, England: if we spelled English more accurately (noting the sound more perfectly) we would spell words very differently for people living in different neighborhoods of London.

If you don't think this is a problem for Cambodian, try comparing the work of Judith Jacob to the work of Huffman and Proum.   They both use I.P.A. symbols in a mutually-incompatible way, partly because of differences in their analyses of the language, but partly also because of differences in the dialect (or idiolect) of the speakers they treated as standard.

Now try comparing both of the above to the more recent work of J.M. Filippi.  If you actually did all of this comparative reading (in a systematic way) you would probably have invented your own transcription system for Khmer by now.

I think there are many students informally creating their own "halfway measures" in the process of learning the language, trying to note down Khmer phonetics in the absence of a practicable standard.  I remember being shocked at the hand-written notes taken by two different foreigners in Phnom Penh, that used a mix of different symbols from different dictionaries (with mutually-incompatible phonemic assumptions).

Returning to the illustration that introduces my own "modest proposal": the phonetic values of the symbols are as simple and self-evident as possible, while giving priority to the ease of rendering them with a pen.

For anyone who already has some knowledge of both Khmer and the Latin alphabet (as used for English, French, etc.), it should be fairly easy to figure out the entire system just by reading the single (short) poem in the top half of the illustration above.

The phonetic values of the symbols are systematic. I don't just mean that they correspond systematically to the I.P.A. symbols; rather, I mean that there's a systematic relationship internal to this ("new") set of symbols.

As you can see from the chart below the poem, there is a systematic relationship between ą and ǫ (one is "open a", and the other is "open o"; thus, without any complex linguistic explanation, it is very easy for a student to catch on to the logic of why ę is different from é, just by studying a few examples).  The "hook below" (forming ǫ from o) thus has a consistent, logical meaning; likewise, the "forte mark above" (forming é from e) has a consistent meaning (so it is easy to remember how á is different from ą, because it follows the same pattern as the other vowel-markings).

These symbols are especially good at rendering sounds that are "foreign to foreigners".  Look at the first word on line five (in both Khmer and transliteration: រឿង = Rÿüŋ).  If you were to find this word in five different Khmer-English dictionaries, you would find five different (awkward) attempts to render the sound into English letters.  If you then consulted the dicionaries' explanations as to how these vowels are pronounced, you'd be even more confused.  The I.P.A. symbols, meanwhile, are very difficult for anyone to interpret who isn't a linguist (and, even worse, they aren't very clear or useful in their application to Khmer).

In I.P.A., Rÿüŋ becomes Rɨɘŋ.  If you try writing them both down quickly with a pen, you'll see what I mean about the impracticality of the I.P.A. symbols: it is very easy for ɨ to look like a lower-case t, and it is hard for anyone to rapidly draw ɘ/ə/e without making mistakes.

Unlike many other systems, this one is actually practical for use with pen and ink.  By contrast, it is impossible to write (in cursive script) the symbols that the I.P.A. chart relies upon (bottom-right of the illustration).  The I.P.A. symbols also rely on the eye differentiating too many symbols that look extremely similar.

On the I.P.A. chart, you've basically got the letter e upside down, backwards, etc. etc., and there is no systematic relationship between them in learning Khmer (e.g., you can't guess how a relates to ɑ by comparing them to how ϵ relates to ϶; but, in the system I'm now modestly proposing, these are á vs. ą and é vs. ę; this is both easier to remember, and has a logic to it that is suited to the contrasts internally necessary for the language).

As I've hinted at before, if you have five different Cambodians say this word out loud, you will not get the exact same vowel sound all five times; however, each speaker will (probably) be consistent in their pronunciation of the cluster -ÿü- in different contexts.  This is another reason to shift away from the direct use of I.P.A. symbols when you don't want to use full phonetic notation: in travelling around Cambodia, you need to be able to think, "Oh, that's the way they pronounce rÿüŋ here"; ultimately, symbols like ÿ just indicate a category (of allophones), and not an entirely specific sound.

Is this system systematic enough?  Is it specific enough?  How much is enough?  Frankly, the answer may be a matter of taste.

If you look at the first line of the poem, you'll see the symbol ː in the middle of the last word, ˀąnláːy.  This symbol is used to explicitly mark a long vowel where it is important, but I don't mark every vowel as long or short with this symbol.  This is, by the way, the standard I.P.A. method of marking long vowels, and it has the awkward name of "the triangular colon" (obviously, in hand-writing, everyone just puts down two dots).  Sometimes, in Khmer, it is important to distinguish a long vowel from a short vowel (as in my former example of ស្លាប់ = sláˑp, not sláːp) but it is only important in a minority of words.  Cambodian also has vowels that can be of variable duration, without changing the meaning of the word.  I don't mark any of the vowels as "especially long" in the first four words of the poem (Préy Véŋ viel véŋ = ព្រៃវែងវាលវែង) because what is really important for the student to know is the type of vowel sound in these words (é is not the same as ę) but it would be possible for someone to add more detail (such as distinguishing véŋ from véːŋ) --adding many more dots and markings to the page (and thus making the system more complicated, but also more accurate).

This discussion (kept as brief as possible) has been completely devoted to vowel sounds.  Why?  Because Cambodian has huge difficulties in transliterating vowel sounds, but almost no problems with transcribing consonant sounds.  The one innovation that the reader will see (on lines two and three of the poem in the illustration) is a distinction between ch and cʜ, to help clear up confusion between the different consonants in Khmer that bear this sound.  Despite the fact that I'm a Pali scholar, I actually don't think it's useful to insert further markings to indicate the correspondence to the Pali and Sanskrit alphabet (you'll notice at the end of line six I have láęy, but the corresponding Khmer "l" is Pali retroflex-l, writ with a dot below, as ḷ, looking rather too much like an exclamation point).

The one symbol that may surprise some people is the use of a small circle for the schwa sound (shown in the middle of the chart, corresponding to I.P.A. ə).  This is because Khmer frequently has a very short schwa (I.P.A. ᵊ, even harder to write than ə).  I have seen this sound noted just with an apostrophe, perhaps because Khmer speakers often omit it, or pronounce it almost like a pause between other sounds.  The small circle proposed here is less confusing (when later reading your own hand-writing) than an apostrophe, and, you'll note, I still use a full-size schwa (ə) for the rare situations in which this vowel sound can be heard in full with some duration and emphasis (e.g., I wrote line 8 as "Préy ˀəy…").

I did use this system myself for several years.  (How many years?  Well, my comparative study of Cambodian phonetics and romanization dates back at least 10 years, and there are still some resources on the internet that I uploaded during that period).

A new system doesn't need to be perfect: it simply needs to offer some advantages over the ones that were used before.

What are my expectations for this system of transliteration?  It seems reasonable to assume that it would never be used by more than five people --although it might be extremely useful to all five of them.

Conversely, there are some positive examples of new transcription systems that have come into use simply through people posting them onto the internet, and allowing flexibility for anyone to use them however they see fit (i.e., unlike a government-enforced spelling standard).

For Taiwanese (a.k.a. Hoklo) a new system was proposed simply on a website and then came to be used in providing sub-titles to karaoke songs on Youtube.  Why did this happen?  Well, people needed a way to write the phonetics of the language that could work well enough on the internet, and they didn't find it in the dictionaries.

Currently, the universe of Cambodian youtube videos is dominated by informal Romanization that's neither accurate nor consistent (see the lyric sheets that accompany almost any Khmer song online).  Partly because the Cambodian internet is dominated by overseas Khmer who really do need phonetic transcription (because they're born and raised in Long Beach or Paris, as the case may be) there is a real need for a standard that is "good enough" --but much more practical than full I.P.A. notation.

My own modest proposal can be simpified further, simply by omitting anything the reader finds annoying (I'm guessing that most Khmer would not bother to note the glottal stop [ˀ] at the start of ˀąnláːy, nor the long vowel [ː] toward the end of it).

So, I've set out a simple grid of symbols, that anyone can use or ignore as they please: that's the modest proposal.  However, the one thing I'm not modest about is that this new system is less of a mess than the other systems that I've seen in use in Phnom Penh, from the classrooms to the street-signs.  Phonetic notation for classroom use has driven the development of the other standards aforementioned (J.M. Filippi uses a confusing hybrid of I.P.A. symbols, but it is probably the best textbook currently available, despite whatever flaws it may have) --but the only way to make a system that lasts is to invent a system that native speakers themselves adopt.  In the 21st century, whatever people prefer to use on Youtube videos probably will come to define the written language (no matter how I may choose to transliterate this poem).

Pali Revival and Survival in Cambodia

(1) This is a short notice on some of the things that make the comparative study of Pali and Cambodian so rewarding, and also a few reflections as to why it is now so rare.

(2) Take a look at the illustration.  This is a nanoscale study of just two lines of Pali that equate to three lines of Cambodian text in translation.  Several different language asymmetries arise from this comparison.

Some obvious asymmetries are set out in the table forming the bottom half of the illustration --and these can be seen by someone understanding no language except English.

In some cases, the Khmer-script spelling is identical in the Pali and the (verncaular) Cambodian, but with a wildly different pronunciation:
 • [Pali] paṇḍita ☛ បណ្ឌិត ☛ [Khmer] bąndüt
In other cases, you have the conflation of multiple Pali words in one verncaular Khmer spelling, as is noted with:
 • [Pali] bāla & vāla ☛ ពាល ☛ [Khmer] piel

Some of the other asymmetries require some knowledge of the languages involved to detect.

You might notice that Khmer ស្លាប់ does indeed have the vowel marker for long ā after the first two consonants, but, nevertheless, it is quite necessary for this to be Romanized with a short aˑ (explicitly marked as sláˑp; the symbol after the á [ˑ] is the I.P.A. standard for indicating a short vowel, bearing the awkward technical name of "the triangular half-colon").

Thus, orthographically, we have ស+ល+ ា= ស្លា, but phonetically, we have s+l+áˑ=sláˑ (because sláˑp≠sláːp, they're two different words in contemporary Khmer).  A few specialists may complain that I'm not digressing into the mark that appears above the "p" in Khmer script (ប់ at the end of ស្លាប់) but my reason (for failing to do so) is simply that this would be a digression.

(3) On the top half of the illustration, there are some asymmetries of other kinds.

There are two footnotes to the Khmer-script Pali (top-left, and reproduced in the Romanized Pali, top-right) indicating two (minor) differences between the Cambodian edition of the Pali text and the Sinhalese edition.

However, this isn't the only difference that emerges from comparative reading.  This entire poem in the D.N. (i.e., that these two lines were quoted from) is omitted from the early translation of T.W. Rhys-Davids (1881), based on Sinhalese manuscripts edited by Childers (JRAS 1875-6).  These verses are very similar to a few lines found in the K.N., Sutta-Nipāta, Sallasutta; the two passages may (or may not) share a single origin.

This, too, is an asymmetry that only becomes evident through comparison, and would lead to more comparative reading to see how consistently (or inconsistently) the poem appears with the remainder of the text in different versions preserved by different manuscript traditions.

(4) The asymmetries that arise purely from modern translation are less instructive, but do provide practice of a certain kind for the reader (if you are really reading all three languages concerned).

Does [Khmer] kháŋ-muk really render [Pali] parāyaṇa adequately in this context?  This type of question would arise with any translation of an ancient (dead) language into a modern vernacular, but it is a bit more intellectually stimulating in the Cambodian context (than in English, Chinese, etc.) because of the long historical interaction between the languages involved, and also because of the frequent reliance upon Pali loan-words in the Khmer rendering.  Frequently, these loan-words have shifted in meaning since they were first adopted from Pali (as happens so frequently with English borrowing from Latin and Greek).

For a student of the languages concerned, this type of problem is worth puzzling at primarily as a method of study: you end up memorizing fine distinctions in the (overlapping) range of meanings of all of the words concerned.  It isn't something that anyone should pursue as if it were paleontology: in undertaking this type of work, you wouldn't be in the position of digging up dinosaur bones.  Admittedly, it's closer to digging ditches simply to build up your strength (or as a competitive sport).

With philology and philosophy both, the process is the product: the reason to take on this type of work is to make yourself into a scholar.  There is rarely any other outcome or reward.

(5) I have never met anyone evaluating the Cambodian translations of Pali sources, nor (despite much asking) have I ever heard of anyone doing such work in the past.

The comparative study of controversial passages would allow us to evaluate the extent to which the Khmer translators exercised their independence, in contrast to (pre-existing) English, French and Thai translations.  To some extent, the distinctively Cambodian form of Buddhism would be declared in these differences, or least, Cambodian assumptions about the texts that were incompatible with the other translations might come to the fore.  Conversely, we definitely would also find evidence of the degree of diffidence of a bygone era of Cambodian scholar-monks, who were racing to catch up with European scholarship, and who certainly copied a great deal from the earlier precedents in Europe.  Some of them aspired to imitate the European sources, others to contradict them or outdo them; in looking back (and looking forward) it is not always easy to see who was pursuing which course.

The "new" translations (of Pali into Khmer) that I found in Phnom Penh were all minor rewordings of the old translation published (as the Cambodian canon) in the Buddhist Institute edition associated with the generation of Chuon Nath.

I formed this opinion through comparative reading of the most cursory kind (in this case, comparing Khmer to Khmer --not my forte).  In the new editions that I saw (generally closer to pamphlets than books) all of the changes seemed to be intended to avoid repetition, to achieve a more natural-sounding sentence, etc.; I didn't discover any examples (in my completely unscientific survey) that were substantively "new".  It remains interesting that such books are being published at all, and that they include the original Pali parallel to the Khmer translation.

(6) Another approach to interrogating these texts would be to start from a list of errors (i.e., that we already know to be wrong) originating in old European translations (by Rhys-Davids, etc.) to verify the extent to which the Khmer translation reproduces these errors (that could only have originated in English or French, as the case may be, and could not have arisen in Cambodian spontaneously).  A similar "test" could be run, in some cases, to check for Thai influence (and there was a great deal of Thai influence at that time, because the director of the Buddhist Institute was herself a scholar of Thai, and neither of Cambodian nor Pali, at the time of her appointment by the French to the position).

(7) The lack of any long-term interest in developing scholarship (or even reading comprehension) amongst the donors and the beneficiaries alike has been a recurrent feature of the failed revival of the last ten years.

Manuscript projects, publishing projects, libraries and even universities are predominantly thought of in terms of construction.  The shortage is presumed to be a number of concrete rooms and parking spaces; whereas, in fact, the shortage is of scholars, and of advanced literacy in any of the languages concerned (Khmer, English and Pali).

Libraries have been built, along with monasteries and universities too.  Books have been reprinted, distributed, and now accumulate layers of dust in the same concrete rooms that the donors rushed to provide for a revival that was presumed --but that did not ensue.

I recall a dialogue with the publisher for a (donor-driven) project that was typesetting the entire Pali canon anew (in Khmer script, and with Khmer translation alongside the Pali).  This was under the direction of someone who apparently was fluent in none of the languages concerned (neither Khmer nor Pali) and the actual typing was being done by people who (at most) had some understanding of the Khmer (but some, I suspect, were more familiar with Chinese than Khmer).  Many of these positions (of decisive influence over the project) are determined by fundraising, or else direct donations (in plain English: money).  Of course, the standard for Khmer spelling has actually changed since the original text that they will be copying from, so the matter is not so mechanical as it might seem, even in working from Khmer to Khmer.  New decisions would have to be made (even in such spelling conventions) even if there were no impulse to innovation whatsoever.

Unlike the illustration you've just seen (examining only two lines of Pali) the source text in that project would neither be examined in contrast to the Sinhalese edition, nor to any other; the translation will neither be contrasted to the English, nor any other.  The questions of asymmetry internal to the Khmer edition also will not be puzzled at.  At best, the typists won't introduce too many new errors into the text (as typing a language that you have no comprehension of is much more difficult than typing one that you do: I have no idea how they will "proof-read" the Pali, but my assumption is that it will be approximate at best).

There were zero scholars of any kind involved in scrutinizing the text; worse, there were neither scholars nor students simply learning from it, as the undertaking unfolded.

The process of reading and revising such a text is a tremendous opportunity to learn, even if no improvements are made.  The participation of a number of aspiring scholars in such a project could have created an entire generation of people with reading comprehension of Pali.  The same is true of scribal projects: copying manuscripts need not be a mechanical or meaningless process, but can involve quite a lot of thinking, of exactly the type shown in my two-line example illustrated.

The positive effects of philology can be much more durable than a concrete shack in the tropics.  The "real estate" is thought of as a more tangible and durable outcome of donor intervention; however, in the tropics, the buildings and bookshelves do not last nearly so long as Europeans might imagine.  The donors feel assured that their money isn't being wasted if they can see the outcomes; however, there is nothing easier to fake than the quality of construction itself, unless the donors are truly scrutinizing the concrete as it gets poured.

The result of the example I've just mentioned will probably be an edition full of errors, but, more importantly, it will be a lost opportunity to really produce the next generation of scholars (as the race to compile the canon, and its coeval dictionay, in Chuon Nath's time did before).

Copying out the Pali canon is not a process comparable to setting up a concrete monument (although it is most definitely thought of as equivalent).  The most valuable product is not the printed page, but the scholars capable of scrutinizing the page --and that is exactly what Cambodia is lacking (and what Canada is lacking also, for that matter).

(8) The conditions are not unique to Cambodia: I received a detailed verbal detailed account (from one of the monks present) of the process of typing out one of Thailand's official canons.

The incompetence of the typists was ensured because the job was granted to donors, on the basis of donations.  When a typewritten page was complete, it would be handed to the one monk considered competent to proof-read it.  This monk (who was extremely elderly, with failing vision) would then circle the errors.  The page would then be handed back to the same (Pali-illiterate) typists, who would produce another page, with a different set of errors, at the same rate.

All of the crucial stages were handled by people who both (i) had zero competence in Pali, but, worse, (ii) who had zero long-term interest in developing competence in Pali.  Making mistakes is inevitable; the problem is that the people who have been given the opportunity to make those mistakes are not interested in learning from them.  In this way, a donor-driven project can institutionalize incompetence.

In both instances, Cambodia and Thailand, the donors' money will be spent much like a construction project: the output will be measured in so many hours spent at so many typewriters, producing so many volumes in so many years, just like bricks going into a wall.  Measuring the number of people with reading comprehension of Pali at the start and at the end of the project might be a more important statistic.

(9) The post-war context of Cambodia allows rumors of revival to arise without any basis in fact.  The implicit contrast to the Khmer Rouge makes even a rotting facade seem like a revival --and, indeed, many of the facades created 20 years ago are now rotting rather badly.

There are others who can (and should) write articles about it, but, during the years that I visited Cambodia, it seemed that I witnessed the last spark of life depart from Phnom Penh's Buddhist Institute.  The director there admitted to me openly (during our first meeting) that they had already been blacklisted by many of the donor agencies, and that I should not even mention the name of the institute in my own applications for funding, i.e., even if my plan was to actually base the project in their offices, and co-operate with them.  No such co-operation eventuated, and, on the contrary, in the succeeding years, I was an occasional witness to the skilled staff disappearing (amidst rumors I won't repeat here), the foreign-funded projects disappeared, and, finally, the books disappeared out of the offices.  I am not even insinuating that the books were stolen, however, the office pertaining to Pali had a shelf full of reference materials at one stage, and, the last time I was there, all of the books had disappeared from the same room (perhaps simply because they weren't being used).

Even the very modest manuscript project funded by the EFEO (at Wat Unnalom) has finally folded up its table and closed its doors (firing its last few staff, as of the news that reached me most recently).  The reason I was given for this was simply a lack of money; however, it is more often the case that the money is weighed against throughput and output (in other words, it is rare to encounter a question of money that is not related to a question of value).

When I met with the Japanese charity responsible for reprinting the Khmer-Pali canon (with the Buddhist Institute's name on it), I was astounded to hear them declaim that they had absolutely no interest in Pali, nor in Cambodian Buddhism generally.  They considered themselves "development professionals", who were burdened with these Buddhist publishing projects because their donors (in Japan) forced them to take on the burden, against the interests of the organization, in their opinion.  I wouldn't have guessed this if I hadn't heard it from the executives of the charity directly; however, this example reflects how arbitrarily responsibility is both arrogated by and discarded by those who have their logos stamped on the title pages of Pali texts.

Is this simply donor disinterest, or is it a longer-term pattern of (i) donor-driven development, followed by (ii) donor disappointment and (iii) donor flight?

I both read about and verbally heard about a foreign-funded project for female monks that received no support from the local community (and, indeed, I don't think the monks were even cultivating the support or respect of their parishioners).  When the foreign funding stopped, the project collapsed with some acrimony.  Some people reported this to me as a great injustice; however, from the donor's perspective, the point of the project was not to create a situation of perpetual dependency, but instead to establish some basis for a (viable) community-based project in future.  The final phase of every project must be self-reliance, and that self-reliance must entail the end of foreign funding.

From the donor's perspective, poverty and war are not exceptional, they're the norm: if you have the liberty of donating money to any cause, anywhere in the world, you would need very palpable proof that your money was not being wasted to sink money into anything more scholarly than a sack of rice in Cambodia.  There are plenty of people who could use that sack of rice.

It isn't an easy thing for monks (of any gender) to earn the respect of laypeople, and, in this case (that I am leaving unnamed) the foreign money (and "haughty" sense of entitlement among the monastics) could have prevented the very development of grassroots support that it was supposed to encourage.  The perception of arrogance is a very weighty matter in Cambodian culture, and very difficult to translate in full for outsiders.  Memorably, while I was in Phnom Penh, there was a case reported in the newspaper of an old woman in robes arrived at one of the major temples from the countryside seeking sanctuary; she responded to the arrogance of the refusal she received (from a younger, male monk) by attempting suicide on the spot, at the gates of the same temple.  The degrees of respect and disrespect expressed between one monastic and another, as well as between monastics and laypeople, are deadly serious matters in Cambodia; at the time, it was easy for me to imagine the sense of disgrace (and also of "revenge" against the institution) that motivated the attempted suicide, although it is not difficult to imagine that the younger monk may have been offended at the old woman's sense of entitlement to arrive unannounced and demand a bed.

(10) In beholding the brightly-painted concrete walls that now surround so many temples in Cambodia, it is easy for the casual observer to imagine that there has been a tremendous religious revival in the last 10 years.  I did not meet a single person in Cambodia (neither monk nor layperson, neither student nor professor) who was learning Pali, nor any who aspired to learn reading comprehension of Pali.  Outsiders tend to grossly underestimate the extent of this problem, because they (falsely) assume that the ability to chant a number of short texts (in the context of a funeral ritual, etc.) indicates reading comprehension of the language.

Over a period of several years visiting the country from adjacent Laos and Thailand, plus more than one year living within Cambodia continuously, I did meet several monks who had gone to Sri Lanka to study and who had then returned to Cambodia.  They had learned English, not Pali; they had merely learned to say things about the history of Pali, not to read the language.

Everywhere I went in Cambodia, I encountered people who lectured me about Pali (presuming that they knew much more than I did) who had very basic misconceptions about what the language is (and what it is not).  This included monks, university professors, and so on, as well as people who had no formal education, but who sometimes claimed a connection to Pali literacy via a deceased grandfather.  In its way, this experience was a sort of survey of social attitudes toward the language (and related areas of religion, literature and learning) in 21st century Cambodia.  I can't say that I enjoyed it.

There was a time when Cambodians were proud to present their own versions of the ancient texts, in contrast to both the Europeans and the Burmese.  They were able to muster this palpable link to their ancient past (in both manuscripts and printed editions) when their representatives attended the 20th century council to revise the canon that was convened in Burma, starting in 1954 (an historical event about which there are still more rumors than facts circulating).  When (former) King Sihanouk visited Sri Lanka, he was proud to donate Cambodian palm-leaf manuscripts (in Pali) to the Sinhalese temples he visited.  Thanks to the translation provided to me by Rev. Nyanatusita, I saw some of those manuscripts when I was in Sri Lanka; I think they had been unwrapped very few times since their initial donation, perhaps not even once.  It remains a palpable link to the past, but it is a link that fewer and fewer people care about.

You can teach a language; you can provide the opportunity to learn a language.  You cannot teach people to want to learn a language; you cannot force people not to squander the opportunities they're given.  In Cambodia, the opportunities have been squandered both by the donors and the recipients.

Reprinting (and literally photocopying) old books does not entail a revival: at a minimum, a revival would require reading comprehension of whatever those books contain.  In Cambodia, the facade of Buddhist education is maintained by large numbers of students in robes who learn everything from accounting to carpentry --and who proceed to quit the monastery for the secular life as soon as their university degrees are complete.

In many ways, large and small, Cambodia is coming to the end of an era of excuses: donor fatigue is inevitable, and there will always be another disaster somewhere to command public sympathy.  The cause of literacy and philology is never an emergency: it can't really be justified in the same humanitarian terms as the proverbial sack of rice.

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[Addendum: wondering what Cambodians have to say about it?  Take a look at the comments section that follows below KI-Media's reprinting of the article.]