[marcus_holmes]

I recently started learning Khmer (Cambodian). It's an awesome language. No tenses (all assumed from context... if something happened in the past, you say it happened "already", and there's a single modifier to all verbs to indicate they will happen). No genders, at all (there's no "he/she/they" problem). The numbering system is simple adn consistent, and it's applied to months and hours ("one month" is a measure of duration, "month one" is January). I reminds me of reading good code; simple, elegant, with no unnecessary cruft.

It's given me a new perspective on (as you say) all the useless crap we have in English.

Oh, and I started learning German, too. TFA made me laugh.

[InternetOfStuff]

Khmer is sure to have its own oddities.

I learned Thai, which shares Khmer's refreshing simplicity, like not having tenses.

However, it has "classifiers", which are used when counting things. In English, you might say "Three children", in Thai you would say "Children three persons", where "person" happens to be the correct classifier for children. Makes sense in that case, but in general it's weird (and somewhat comedic): for instance airplanes and bamboo share the same classifier ("long hollow things").

There are about 80 classifiers, and part of learning the language is learning the correct classifier to go with each noun, much like learning genders in German. Same as with genders, if you get the classifier wrong, you'll still be understood, but considered uneducated (or badly in command of the language).

BTW, and programmers will love this: this situation means that when counting things of disparate types, you need to typecast!

Funny (to me, anyway) story: my wife was simultaneously telling off one of our sons, nicknamed "O", and one of our dogs, also nicknamed "O". Since they don't share the same classifier, she cast their classifier to the made-up-on-the-spot classifier "O" so it would both be factually and grammatically correct.

Languages are funny.

[marcus_holmes]

Yeah, it's weird, Thai and Khmer are very similar, and share some words, but also very different. Khmer isn't tonal, and has really simplified grammar.

They used to share an alphabet, too, but the Thai opted to simplify it (westernise it) while the Khmer opted to keep their original alphabet. Written Khmer is hard for us westerners to deal with because of this. They have lots of vowels and consonants that we don't have (I always struggle with the consonant between 'b' and 'p', because it doesn't seem like there should be any room for another consonant in there).

[yorwba]

Looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA/Khmer the language does seem to have some fun sounds.

But English has a consonant between 'b' and 'p' ('pʰ' in IPA) as well. Just consider the difference between 'ban', 'span' and 'pan'. The 'p' in 'span' is not as forceful as the 'p' in 'pan', and they're actually different consonants.

[jfk13]

> The 'p' in 'span' is not as forceful as the 'p' in 'pan', and they're actually different consonants.

Yes, they're phonetically different, but in English the difference is not phonemic; they're allophones of the same consonant.

[InternetOfStuff]

I don't know enough (or in fact any) Khmer to make a meaningful comparison, but the "b", "bp", and "p" consonants exist in the Thai alphabet as well.

[coldtea]

>It's an awesome language

An awesome language to learn easily or to express yourself with full capacity? Those could be different qualities...

[marcus_holmes]

To continue with my coding analogy... German is like Java (huge, sprawling, full of conceptsextendedwaypastthepointofsanity), English is like C++ (mashed together out of two different languages and made to work, mostly), Khmer is like Go (favouring simplicity over expressiveness).

[vram22]

I wonder Sanskrit would be positioned in that analogy - like Lisp, maybe? Heh. I admit to bias about it, as an Indian and one who likes the language.

[therein]

I wonder if Khmer speakers are missing out on anything by not having these concepts in their language.

[marcus_holmes]

It does rely a lot on context. If you don't share a context with your listener, it's easy to get confused. Given the cultural gap with the West, it can mean that you're fluent in Khmer, but still miss a lot of the meaning because you don't share the same cultural context. Essentially culture-wide in-jokes.

But then, I had to explain British rhyming slang to my German gf the other day, and she thought it was crazy. I guess there's nothing that unusual about culture-wide in-jokes.