Encounters In Khmai: January 2010

In an older post, Almost Got Me Shot, Happened Just the Other Day, I wrote about the 'finger of death', the use of the rigidly pointed finger (at the end of a fully extended arm) in Cambodia to indicate extreme, perhaps even dangerous levels of frustration. Seen between males, usually someone really, really ticked off by another, it indicates that the confrontation is moving to a dangerous phase, unless the person pointed at backs down in some public fashion. But sometimes, at that point, maybe it is too late.

On a trip to Angkor Thom recently, I saw two elephant mahouts carved into the stone facade of the Elephant Terrace. Their raised and rigid arms were pointing at each other in a very unfriendly looking encounter. But the entire procession of elephants is hard to read. Aesthethic considerations may have dictated that the elephants be presented in pairs, facing each other, so really it is no procession at all but pairs of elephants confronting each other, two by two, all of them with raised trunks. This can easily be read in more than one way. The mahouts pictured below are the only ones who are pointing at each other, however.

Most sources say that the Mahouts are all Khmer, and that the terrace was built by King Jayavarman VII to celebrate a military victory, so it is hard to make the argument that these two guys are enemies. If one had been Cham and the other Khmer, it would be easy to imagine them shouting at each other: "I am going to kill you!"

There are wall carvings at the Bayon, the central temple at Angkor Thom, which include bas-relief of a naval battle between Cham invaders and the Khmer, but also (peaceful) military processions which include both Cham and Khmer soldiers, and then a scene where groups of Khmer are arguing and fighting with each other!

So that gives us some space in which to ask: what are these two Khmer mahouts up to, did they have a falling out of some sort? Is one trying to say: "Hey, don't I know you? Weren't you that guy hitting on my sister last year? Didn't I tell you then I don't want to see your face again?" We will never know. (Of course, trying to read the past by projecting back a thousand years from the present is a highly suspect activity!)

I saw this sign at a Cambodian Government Fisheries Facility in Prey Veng Province. Very nice sign. Somehow, even though I was cruising by on my motorcycle, I noticed that their work focused on "Fish Seeds".

Well, maybe not so surprising since these were the first two English words and my eyes had just blown by the Khmer -- so much for my work to read the language!

My first thought, after I stopped and as I took a picture was: "maybe they produce some sort of fish food?" But the Khmer is clear, it refers to eggs, not seeds, and not to food. So of course the question is: was this a mistake? In US English usage we distinguish clearly between eggs and seeds. Fish lay eggs, never seeds. But that is not what this sign seems to say.

That doesn't mean that you or I would not know what the sign meant. Any English-speaker (at least from North America) with the slightest generosity of spirit would have said, "yeah, okay, got it", after the initial small shock of this encounter with translated Khmer wore off. But was it a mistake? It seemed so at the outset. But I was partly wrong.

My suspicion that this might be a mistaken translation was strengthened by the fact that the Khmer usage is very clear: eggs, not seeds are used in the Khmai.

Poang (trei), the Khmer noun is used to refer to what we in English call (fish) eggs; it is also used when referring to chicken or duck eggs. If the Khmer had used the word we translate as seed, it would have used kruop, the noun that is used to talk about plant seeds in the same way we do in English.

Of course both words have other uses. Poang (egg) can mean testicle, as the English can, and kruop (seed) is used as a measure word for stones. Kruop (seed, stone) is never used to refer to testicles in Khmer, though in US English, stones can be so used: "that guy's got some stones!" A more common synonym for testicles in English is the informal "nuts" a kind of seed.

Of course the word "seed" has been used in some English contexts to refer to sperm (also 'oats', a type of seed), but also to the result of human reproduction, children might be referred to as "his seed". But most often, the word poang, like the English word egg, refers to those things which are the result of animal reproductive activities and which have been fertilized already (after which the egg remains an egg, but a fertilized one) and which in turn grows into animals.

In any case, the bottom line is: the Khmai noun poang is easily and readily translated into the English word 'egg' in spite of some variation in its other usages. Instead the sign-makers chose kruop or 'seed'. This was either a considered choice, or a mistake. In the US, children do not confuse these two nouns. They encounter them at an early age and are taught the distinction, an important one, in their science classes. They don't cross the line that this sign does.

I found a lesson plan by an American teacher on the WWW who said that her first-grade "students agree that seeds become plants and that eggs become some kind of animal" after testing this out with samples of each. Their eggs became brine shrimp and their seeds became clover (the first "wiggled" and the clover did not :).

First grade. How early we are socialized in the proper use of these two words. And the larger, unspoken lesson is how wonderful language is. How it so readily and unambigously maps onto a world cut up for it into distinguishable objects!(The funding for the development of this lesson plan came from the US National Science Foundation, it is worth noting :).

These kids would have shouted gleefully: "Fish seeds? No! Eggs!"

But translation mistake? Well, apparently not.

In Indian English usage, fish eggs are called "seeds". If you Google "fish seeds India", you will find a ton of documents which use the phrase "fish seeds" to refer to what we call eggs!

The only question that remains is why the Cambodian Ministry of Fisheries would have adopted Indian English in this regard. Maybe the Indian government provided foreign assistance in this area. Nice thought. Both economies are rice-based and fish play a very important role in both economies and diets. It would make perfect sense.

While fish seed does not appear in American or British English (as far as I can find), it is used in Malaysian and Singapore English. On the WWW I also found this usage in documents from the UN organization FAO. It may thus be a technical usage (regional?).

But I am starting to worry for Mrs. Schwartz' and her students in Missouri.

This could really mess them up, not to mention her lesson plan. And the repercussions could go all the way up to the National Science Foundation! We have major parts of the English-speaking world where 'fish seeds' is the accepted usage for what we call 'fish eggs'!

For the moment, I think it best we not even tell these folks, while not as devastating as the first encounter with a furry, egg-laying platypus, it could have far reaching implications. Apparently, teaching kids that young requires air-tight lexical categories, and succeeds to the extent you can avoid granting the lacunae, contradictions, paradoxes, cracks, fissures and over-laps of language as it is really used!

They are first-graders! Letting them see how complex, if not irrational, language can be would be as cruel as telling them there is no Santa Claus. :)