[
Another post from Mo., our intrepid boy contributor. Hooray!—ed.]
A Situationist author whose name I forgot famously suggested one should hike through the Harz mountains in central Germany using a London city map for orientation. An adventuresome traveller can achieve similar incongruencies if she or he lets the 1987 Gesprächswörterbuch Deutsch-Khmer (German-Khmer conversation book) by Ngen Yos guide their communication in today’s Cambodia. The book was published by VEB Verlag Enzyklopädie Leipzig (people-owned publishing house Leipzig), as one in a series of publications on Cambodian language and culture. Written in the last years of the GDR (German Democratic Republic) socialist regime in the East of Germany and in the last years of the Vietnamese-run People’s Republic of Kampuchea in Cambodia, the book was intended primarily to assist “German-language readers who have the opportunity of using Khmer in their jobs, because of their studies, or because of personal connections” (according to the author’s introduction, it was meant also to be useful for Cambodians learning German). Starting out from German, it provides translations into Khmer and pronunciation help in the phonetic alphabet.
Many phrases featured in the book continue to be useful and up-to-date, including the sections on measures and weights, on months according to the traditional Khmer calendar, on illnesses, city tours, and the human body. Others, less so. Anachronistic as they are, though, they offer a window into the socialist late 1980s, or at least onto a small, largely unknown, and, to me, profoundly weird aspect of that time, international socialist solidarity and cooperation.
In the first section, for instance, Ngen Yos explains the intricacies of greetings in Khmer culture, listing factors such as age, gender, type of relationship and degree of familiarity which determine the usage of greeting forms and the choice of the appropriate first person pronoun.
But should a good socialist even learn these terms? Socialist culture everywhere was quite concerned with transforming rituals that represented and reproduced traditional social hierarchies, be they feudal or capitalist. In Cambodia, these concerns were carried over from the Khmer Rouge years to the non-genocidal variety of socialism after 1979. Thus, the translator explains that “samamit” and “samamit neri”, the male and females form of “comrade”, “are not only the official greeting forms among members of the Revolutionary People’s Party of Kampuchea, but they are also used quite frequently among people without party membership. Guests from socialist countries and members of other (i.e. international, Mo.) communist parties should also be addressed in this manner.”
Significant chunks of the book are dedicated to agricultural and industrial production, where the GDR specialists or party delegates were expected to provide advice.
Marx’s central categories are listed, such as “means of production” and “relations of production”, as are really-existing-socialism’s inventions like the “five-year plan”. The focus on “heavy industry” and the “nuclear power plant” documents ambitions for industrial development; concepts of rationalization and efficiency get represented in phrases such as “we have developed a new machine which does the work of three people” or “Is your factory output in accordance with the plan?” If the visiting socialist professional seeks to find out about the progress of Cambodia’s working class, the phrase book suggests – scripts – a brief conversation:
“The workers spend their vacation time in the country’s most beautiful resorts”, “Who pays for this?” “The company”. (Other options are not given, resorts are not specified). One thing is clear: Shame on you, on-looking capitalist, whose workers pay for their vacations, if they get any at all.
However little these phrases may have to say about Cambodian life in the 1980s during civil war, post-genocide trauma, chaos, and extreme poverty (and I assume it is very little), and however flawed the concept of socialist internationalism and solidarity turned out to be, maybe we should also take this example of anachronistic phraseology and think of what a future reader, say 35 years from now, will make of the language used by today’s agents of international cooperation, cross-cultural exchange, and global commodity production, whether it’s the neoliberal, the journalistically brief and sober, the legal, the snotty blogger, or the morally-well-intended-neo-paternalism variety.
And now that Cambodia is beginning to have a larger industrial working class (laboring in a small but not completely insignificant part for German corporations such as Adidas, Puma or Beiersdorf/Nivea), maybe some workers will actually be able to fight for things like paid vacation days. And not just be allowed to go home over Cambodian New Year, like the garment factory workers we spoke to.
Nowadays, however, they can probably expect little linguistic assistance from their foreign employers’ phrase books. If they even have phrase books.
One more thing that I found useful on my travels:
“I did not order this. I ordered Schweinebraten” (Schweinebraten = German pork roast).
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