Re: Data and Musings...

I wrote:
>David Peterson wrote:
>><snip a godless amount of language books>
>>
>>     Has anyone every heard of a language called Cham ([tSAm], I imagine)?
>>Before I was introduced to its script, Sinhala had my favorite; now I can
>>definitely say that the best script on Earth is that of the Cham language.
>>If you go to www.omniglot.com and go to the scripts part you can see it.
>>It's related to other Indian languages (languages of India, that is), but
>>I'm
>>not sure how closely, or anything like that--they just show the script.
>>They
>>say it's spoken in Southern Vietnam (hee, hee...  That's like saying
>>"South
>>South Carolina").  Anyone heard of it?  I want to learn it just because of
>>the script.
>
>I know nothing of the language, but the Cham people used to have an empire
>called Champa in what's now soutern Vietnam (roughly what was South Vietnam
>minus the Mekong delta). Eventually got conquered and assimilated by the
>Vietnamese - the realm lasted from the 200s to the early 1800s, with the
>golden age in the later middle ages.
And judging from the notoriously unreliable IPAoid pronunciation guide in my
outdated encyclopaedia, it's [tSam] with front "a".

The above seemed so unreliable that I checked a usually more reliable web
encyclopaedia. Remarkably, it gives [tSam] for the people name, and ["Sampa]
for the country name ...

I wrote "assimilated by the Vietnamese" above, should've been "mostly
assimilated ..."


                                                Andreas

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