Orthographic Consonants

There are 33 orthographic consonants (Um and Seng 2012:5) in Khmer, and they are organized as shown in the table below. Students who study Khmer have to recite them in that exact order--counting from left to right and top to bottom. They are divided into six verses (or groups) according to their place of articulation--from the back to the front part of the mouth, in other words, velar to bilabial (Huffman 1970:13). The last verse is called an 'Odd' verse because consonants in this verse have different place of articulation. There are five approximants (យ /j/, រ /r/, ល /l/, វ /w/, ឡ /l/), two fricatives (ស /s/, ហ /h/), and a glottal stop (អ /ʔ/). Consonants with a gray background are in the second series which bear /ɔɔ/ as their inherent (embedded) vowel; others are in the first series which bear /ɑɑ/ as their inherent vowel. This means that when a consonant stands on its own, they are pronounced with their respective inherent vowel as long as there is no dependent vowel attached to them.

For example,

·         ក is pronounced as /kɑɑ/,

·         ខ is pronounced as /kʰɑɑ/,

·         គ is pronounced as /kɔɔ/,

·         ឃ is pronounced as /kʰɔɔ/,

·         ង is pronounced as /ŋɔɔ/, and so on.

Velar	ក /k/	ខ /kʰ/	គ /k/	ឃ  /kʰ/	ង /ŋ/
Palatal	ច /c/	ឆ /cʰ/	ជ /c/	ឈ /cʰ/	ញ /ɲ/
Alveolar[1]	ដ  /ɗ/	ឋ /tʰ/	ឌ  /ɗ/	ឍ /tʰ/	ណ /n/
Alveolar[2]	ត /t/	ថ /tʰ/	ទ /t/	ធ  /tʰ/	ន  /n/
Bilabial	ប  /ɓ/	ផ /pʰ/	ព  /p/	ភ /pʰ/	ម  /m/
Odd	យ /j/	រ /r/	ល /l/	វ /w/	ស /s/	ហ /h/	ឡ /l/	អ /ʔ/

Khmer-national scholars assume that the aspirated plosives are in fact a combination of the unaspirated plosive /p, t, c, k/ and the glottal fricative /h/ (Ieu 1967:42-43). In the table above, every second and forth orthographic consonants are originated from the combination of the first and the third orthographic consonants of each row and the glottal fricative /h/ (as shown in the table below).

The Aspirated Plosive Orthographic Consonants

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[1] Huffman (1970:14) called these 'Retroflexes', but they are actually not retroflexes. There is no retroflexes in Khmer.

[2] Huffman (1970:14) called these dentals, but they actually are alveolar.