Extortion is the practice of obtaining benefit (e.g., money or goods) through coercion . In most jurisdictions it is likely to constitute a criminal offence ; the bulk of this article deals with such cases. Robbery is the simplest and most common form of extortion, although making unfounded threats in order to obtain an unfair business advantage is also a form of extortion.
87-495: Svay Pak ( / s w aɪ ˈ p ɑː k / ; Khmer : ស្វាយប៉ាក ; also called Kilometer 11 and K-11 ) is an urban commune of overseas Vietnamese in Cambodia , north of Phnom Penh . The commune has been renowned as a destination for adult and child prostitution , and while the latter has been cracked down upon, its prevalence as of 2017 was disputed. Svay Pak is located eleven or twelve kilometres (6.8 or 7.5 mi) north of
174-403: A federal crime across a computer system, phone, by mail, or in using any instrument of interstate commerce . Extortion requires that the individual sent the message willingly and knowingly as elements of the crime. The message only has to be sent (but does not have to reach the intended recipient) to commit the crime of extortion. In England and Wales extorting property and money by coercion
261-646: A minor (fully unstressed) syllable. Such words have been described as sesquisyllabic (i.e. as having one-and-a-half syllables). There are also some disyllabic words in which the first syllable does not behave as a minor syllable, but takes secondary stress . Most such words are compounds , but some are single morphemes (generally loanwords). An example is ភាសា ('language'), pronounced [ˌpʰiəˈsaː] . Words with three or more syllables, if they are not compounds, are mostly loanwords, usually derived from Pali, Sanskrit, or more recently, French. They are nonetheless adapted to Khmer stress patterns. Primary stress falls on
348-522: A minor syllable . The language has been written in the Khmer script , an abugida descended from the Brahmi script via the southern Indian Pallava script , since at least the 7th century. The script's form and use has evolved over the centuries; its modern features include subscripted versions of consonants used to write clusters and a division of consonants into two series with different inherent vowels . Khmer
435-648: A November 2019 fire, the Vietnamese embassy in Phnom Penh , local businesses, and philanthropists contributed 150,000,000 Vietnamese đồng to rebuild houses for affected Vietnamese Cambodians in Svay Pak. The Vietnamese expats in Svay Pak are unique as part of neither Cambodian society nor the Vietnamese diaspora . They are served by the Mary Magdalene Church, a local Catholic church established in 1998. In 2006,
522-402: A business in Svay Pak was raided by police, and found to be have an underage girl offering sexual services. Khmer language Khmer ( / k ə ˈ m ɛər / kə- MAIR ; ខ្មែរ , UNGEGN : Khmêr [kʰmae] ) is an Austroasiatic language spoken natively by the Khmer people . This language is an official language and national language of Cambodia . The language
609-469: A dialect. Western Khmer , also called Cardamom Khmer or Chanthaburi Khmer, is spoken by a very small, isolated population in the Cardamom mountain range extending from western Cambodia into eastern Central Thailand . Although little studied, this variety is unique in that it maintains a definite system of vocal register that has all but disappeared in other dialects of modern Khmer. Phnom Penh Khmer
696-654: A final consonant. All consonant sounds except /b/, /d/, /r/, /s/ and the aspirates can appear as the coda (although final /r/ is heard in some dialects, most notably in Northern Khmer ). A minor syllable (unstressed syllable preceding the main syllable of a word) has a structure of CV-, CrV-, CVN- or CrVN- (where C is a consonant, V a vowel, and N a nasal consonant). The vowels in such syllables are usually short; in conversation they may be reduced to [ə] , although in careful or formal speech, including on television and radio, they are clearly articulated. An example of such
783-455: A fire sweep through Svay Pak. Approximately 300 houses and a Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) clinic were burnt down, but the only loss of life was a local dog. Non-governmental organizations Concern and MSF committed to helping residents (the latter promised to rebuild its clinic) alongside local philanthropists . While some locals accused the fire brigade of extorting them for firefighting services, local official Hou Samon said that
870-691: A result of decreasing demand, there were only 17 brothels and around 279 sex workers. Clients included local Vietnamese, Khmer , Chinese , Japanese , Australians , North Americans , and Europeans . The Southern Vietnamese teens and 20-somethings working in these brothels followed established migration routes into Svay Pak after intermediaries, sometimes the girls' and women's families, were paid US$ 50–3,000 (equivalent to about $ 81–4,839 in 2023). Servicing 14 clients per week, workers could repay this debt in 6–24 months, resulting in high turnover —half of Svay Pak's sex workers had been there for six months of less. The Phnom Penh Post reported that in 2005
957-426: A security leak or launch an attack that will harm the company's network. The message sent through the email usually demands money in exchange for the prevention of the attack. In March 2008, Anthony Digati was arrested on federal charges of extortion through interstate communication. Digati put $ 50,000 into a variable life insurance policy by New York Life Insurance Company and wanted a return of $ 198,303.88. When
SECTION 10
#17330862342201044-432: A threat used to elicit actions, money, or property from the object of the extortion. Such threats include the filing of reports (true or not) of criminal behavior to the police, revelation of damaging facts (such as pictures of the object of the extortion in a compromising position), etc. In law extortion can refer to political corruption , such as selling one's office or influence peddling , but in general vocabulary
1131-492: A typical Khmer declarative phrase is a steady rise throughout followed by an abrupt drop on the last syllable. Other intonation contours signify a different type of phrase such as the "full doubt" interrogative, similar to yes–no questions in English. Full doubt interrogatives remain fairly even in tone throughout, but rise sharply towards the end. Exclamatory phrases follow the typical steadily rising pattern, but rise sharply on
1218-448: A word is មនុស្ស mɔnuh, mɔnɨh, mĕəʾnuh ('person'), pronounced [mɔˈnuh] , or more casually [məˈnuh] . Stress in Khmer falls on the final syllable of a word. Because of this predictable pattern, stress is non- phonemic in Khmer (it does not distinguish different meanings). Most Khmer words consist of either one or two syllables. In most native disyllabic words, the first syllable is
1305-457: A young woman (Sephak) who was prostituted out of Svay Pak as a child. In response to these stories, Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen accused the non-governmental organization of exaggerating the sex trafficking in Svay Pak, announced a police investigation into AIM, demanded that US ambassador William A. Heidt do the same, and ordered—with "the force of law"—the charity group to leave Cambodia. Cambodian official Huy Vannak suggested that
1392-429: Is a zero copula language, instead preferring predicative adjectives (and even predicative nouns) unless using a copula for emphasis or to avoid ambiguity in more complex sentences. Basic word order is subject–verb–object (SVO), although subjects are often dropped ; prepositions are used rather than postpositions. Topic-Comment constructions are common and the language is generally head-initial (modifiers follow
1479-632: Is a classification scheme showing the development of the modern Khmer dialects. Standard Khmer , or Central Khmer , the language as taught in Cambodian schools and used by the media, is based on the dialect spoken throughout the Central Plain , a region encompassed by the northwest and central provinces. Northern Khmer (called Khmer Surin in Khmer) refers to the dialects spoken by many in several border provinces of present-day northeast Thailand. After
1566-517: Is a member of the Austroasiatic language family, the autochthonous family in an area that stretches from the Malay Peninsula through Southeast Asia to East India. Austroasiatic, which also includes Mon , Vietnamese and Munda , has been studied since 1856 and was first proposed as a language family in 1907. Despite the amount of research, there is still doubt about the internal relationship of
1653-399: Is also known as shakedown , and occasionally exaction. Extortion is distinguished from robbery . In robbery, whether armed or not, the offender takes property from the victim by the immediate use of force or fear that force will be immediately used. Extortion, which is not limited to the taking of property, involves the verbal or written instillation of fear that something will happen to
1740-549: Is also widely spoken by Khmer people in Eastern Thailand and Isan , Thailand , also in Southeast and Mekong Delta of Vietnam . Khmer has been influenced considerably by Sanskrit and Pali especially in the royal and religious registers , through Hinduism and Buddhism , due to Old Khmer being the language of the historical empires of Chenla and Angkor . The vast majority of Khmer speakers speak Central Khmer ,
1827-416: Is common, and the perceived social relation between participants determines which sets of vocabulary, such as pronouns and honorifics, are proper. Khmer differs from neighboring languages such as Burmese , Thai , Lao , and Vietnamese in that it is not a tonal language . Words are stressed on the final syllable, hence many words conform to the typical Mon–Khmer pattern of a stressed syllable preceded by
SECTION 20
#17330862342201914-423: Is contrastive before a vowel. However, the aspirated sounds in that position may be analyzed as sequences of two phonemes : /ph/, /th/, /ch/, /kh/ . This analysis is supported by the fact that infixes can be inserted between the stop and the aspiration; for example [tʰom] ('big') becomes [tumhum] ('size') with a nominalizing infix. When one of these plosives occurs initially before another consonant, aspiration
2001-521: Is missed, or an example needs to be made of someone". In 2003, Svay Pak saw up to 50 clients per night for child prostitution. After two years of pressure from Women's Affairs Minister Mu Sochua , women's rights groups, and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations , action was taken on the problem of child prostitution on Svay Pak. On 22 January 2003, Svay Pak's child brothels were raided by police . Dozens of pimps and clients were present during
2088-586: Is no longer contrastive and can be regarded as mere phonetic detail: slight aspiration is expected when the following consonant is not one of /ʔ/, /b/, /d/, /r/, /s/, /h/ (or /ŋ/ if the initial plosive is /k/ ). The voiced plosives are pronounced as implosives [ɓ, ɗ] by most speakers, but this feature is weak in educated speech, where they become [b, d] . In syllable-final position, /h/ and /ʋ/ approach [ç] and [w] respectively. The stops /p/, /t/, /c/, /k/ are unaspirated and have no audible release when occurring as syllable finals. In addition,
2175-409: Is often used metaphorically to refer to usury or to price-gouging , though neither is legally considered extortion. It is also often used loosely to refer to everyday situations where one person feels indebted against their will, to another, in order to receive an essential service or avoid legal consequences. Neither extortion nor blackmail requires a threat of a criminal act, such as violence, merely
2262-460: Is primarily an analytic , isolating language . There are no inflections , conjugations or case endings. Instead, particles and auxiliary words are used to indicate grammatical relationships. General word order is subject–verb–object , and modifiers follow the word they modify. Classifiers appear after numbers when used to count nouns, though not always so consistently as in languages like Chinese . In spoken Khmer, topic-comment structure
2349-436: Is sometimes called the " protection racket " because the racketeers often phrase their demands as payment for "protection" from (real or hypothetical) threats from unspecified other parties; though often, and almost always, such "protection" is simply abstinence of harm from the same party, and such is implied in the "protection" offer. Extortion is commonly practiced by organized crime . In some jurisdictions, actually obtaining
2436-566: Is spoken in the Se San , Srepok and Sekong river valleys of Sesan and Siem Pang districts in Stung Treng Province . Following the decline of Angkor, the Khmer abandoned their northern territories, which the Lao then settled. In the 17th century, Chey Chetha XI led a Khmer force into Stung Treng to retake the area. The Khmer Khe living in this area of Stung Treng in modern times are presumed to be
2523-421: Is spoken in the capital and surrounding areas. This dialect is characterized by merging or complete elision of syllables, which speakers from other regions consider a "relaxed" pronunciation. For instance, "Phnom Penh" is sometimes shortened to "m'Penh". Another characteristic of Phnom Penh speech is observed in words with an "r" either as an initial consonant or as the second member of a consonant cluster (as in
2610-572: Is the offence of blackmail which covers any "unwarranted demand with menaces" including physical threats. See section 21 of the Theft Act 1968 plus sections 29 and 30 of the Larceny Act 1916 . A group of people may also be committing conspiracy . Extortion is a common law crime in Scotland of using threat of harm to demand money, property or some advantage from another person. It does not matter whether
2697-540: The Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh , in the district of Russey Keo , at coordinates 11°38′48″N 104°52′17″E / 11.646719°N 104.871515°E / 11.646719; 104.871515 . As of December 2021, the urban commune had a square footage of 5.675 square kilometres (2.191 sq mi); in January 2003, Svay Pak had a diameter of 150 metres (490 ft). The afternoon of 20 August 1995 saw
Svay Pak - Misplaced Pages Continue
2784-460: The Federal Bureau of Investigation and Digati was apprehended. On February 15, 2011, Spanish police apprehended a man who attempted to blackmail Nintendo over customer information he had stolen. The man stole personal information about 4,000 users and emailed Nintendo Ibérica, Nintendo's Spanish division, and accused the company of data negligence. He threatened the company that he would make
2871-537: The Khmer Empire . The Northern Khmer dialect is spoken by over a million Khmers in the southern regions of Northeast Thailand and is treated by some linguists as a separate language. Khmer Krom, or Southern Khmer, is the first language of the Khmer of Vietnam , while the Khmer living in the remote Cardamom Mountains speak a very conservative dialect that still displays features of the Middle Khmer language. Khmer
2958-484: The Post published a contrasting op-ed by AIM's Donald J. Brewster. Writing from Svay Pak, Brewster claimed that the commune's criminals have simply adapted to the government's efforts, and continued to prostitute children aged 6–16. Agape International, Brewster wrote, had rescued 32 children from sex-trafficking in the preceding year, and "[t]he highest levels of Cambodia's anti-trafficking police agree" with his evaluation of
3045-511: The Southeast Asia Globe said in March 2021 that "all signs suggest that the open trade practiced in the village […] has been all but stomped out". Furthermore, both the illegal drug trade and tensions between the different ethnic groups have lessened over recent years. Locals also reported that the commune's once-earned reputation leads to their discrimination outside of town. In June 2022,
3132-470: The [r] is dropped and the vowel begins by dipping much lower in tone than standard speech and then rises, effectively doubling its length. Another example is the word រៀន [riən] ('study'), which is pronounced [ʀiən] , with the uvular "r" and the same intonation described above. Khmer Krom or Southern Khmer is spoken by the indigenous Khmer population of the Mekong Delta , formerly controlled by
3219-421: The elision of /r/ . Intonation often conveys semantic context in Khmer, as in distinguishing declarative statements , questions and exclamations. The available grammatical means of making such distinctions are not always used, or may be ambiguous; for example, the final interrogative particle ទេ /teː/ can also serve as an emphasizing (or in some cases negating) particle. The intonation pattern of
3306-651: The time — or the stolen patient data would be published. The extorters published 100 patient records a day on a Tor message board to add pressure for their demands. The leaked patient records contained patients' full names, home addresses, social security numbers, and the therapists' and doctors' notes from each session. After the extortion of the company failed, the extorters sent victims an email demanding they pay either 200 euros within 24 hours or 500 euros in 48 hours in order to avoid publishing their sensitive personal data. The company's security practices were found to be inadequate:
3393-457: The world's wealthiest people , accused the National Enquirer and its parent company American Media, Inc ., of attempting to extort him by threatening to reveal nude pictures of him unless he publicly stated that he "[has] no knowledge or basis for suggesting that AMI's coverage was politically motivated or influenced by political forces." This threat was in response to Bezos investigating
3480-505: The "vice president of government relations and advocacy for [IJM]." Burkhalter pushed back against the narrative that IJM and Dateline exposed in 2003, and proclaimed that Cambodian law-enforcement had rid the nation of child sex tourism (CST) in the face of international embarrassment and US Ambassador Charles A. Ray 's threat of discontinuing United States foreign aid . Burkhalter detailed government efforts and statistics to back-up her claims of CST eradication. Thirteen days later,
3567-451: The 9th century until the 13th century. The following centuries saw changes in morphology , phonology and lexicon . The language of this transition period, from about the 14th to 18th centuries, is referred to as Middle Khmer and saw borrowings from Thai in the literary register. Modern Khmer is dated from the 19th century to today. The following table shows the conventionally accepted historical stages of Khmer. Just as modern Khmer
Svay Pak - Misplaced Pages Continue
3654-542: The Cambodian government shut down the commune for a film production and simultaneously excised the brothels; by 2006, "prostitutes no longer operate[d] with impunity." Gary Haugen of International Justice Mission (IJM) wrote that in 2000, Svay Pak was a lawless commune where "tiny, elementary-school -age girls" were prostituted to the public in broad daylight. One or more girls shared individual 6-by-8-foot (1.8 m × 2.4 m) cubicles where they served Western child-sex tourists . In 2002, child prostitution
3741-497: The Cambodian law requiring 100% condom -use for brothels, resulting in a 19% rate of HIV for workers in 2000. Though prostitution in Cambodia was not illegal in 2004, other factors contributed to " de facto criminalization" of the industry. In March 1999, there were about 300 migrant sex workers in 25 brothels. In May 2000, there were 24 brothels employing approximately 320 women on two main Svay Pak streets. By March 2002, as
3828-455: The English word "bread"). The "r", trilled or flapped in other dialects, is either pronounced as a uvular trill or not pronounced at all. This alters the quality of any preceding consonant, causing a harder, more emphasized pronunciation. Another unique result is that the syllable is spoken with a low-rising or "dipping" tone much like the "hỏi" tone in Vietnamese . For example, some people pronounce ត្រី [trəj] ('fish') as [tʰəj] :
3915-591: The Khmer Empire but part of Vietnam since 1698. Khmers are persecuted by the Vietnamese government for using their native language and, since the 1950s, have been forced to take Vietnamese names. Consequently, very little research has been published regarding this dialect. It has been generally influenced by Vietnamese for three centuries and accordingly displays a pronounced accent, tendency toward monosyllabic words and lexical differences from Standard Khmer. Khmer Khe
4002-614: The Standard Khmer system and that of the Battambang dialect on which the standard is based. In addition, some diphthongs and triphthongs are analyzed as a vowel nucleus plus a semivowel ( /j/ or /w/ ) coda because they cannot be followed by a final consonant. These include: (with short monophthongs) /ɨw/ , /əw/ , /aj/ , /aw/ , /uj/ ; (with long monophthongs) /əːj/ , /aːj/ ; (with long diphthongs) /iəj/ , /iəw/ , /ɨəj/ , /aoj/ , /aəj/ and /uəj/ . The independent vowels are
4089-409: The ages of six and 13, girls' virginity was sold for "hundreds of dollars"; prostituted repeatedly, the price diminished until reaching a low of £3 or US$ 4.5 (equivalent to £6.16 or $ 8.2 in 2023). At the turn of the 21st century, clients of child prostitution in Svay Pak expressed little fear of authorities because the police were compensated by the brothels; foreigners were only arrested if "a bribe
4176-490: The benefit is not required to commit the offense, and making a threat of violence which refers to a requirement of a payment of money or property to halt future violence is sufficient to commit the offense. Exaction refers not only to extortion or the demanding and obtaining of something through force, but additionally, in its formal definition, means the infliction of something such as pain and suffering or making somebody endure something unpleasant. The term extortion
4263-480: The child-sex industry remained; volunteers with Agape International Missions (AIM) were still rescuing girls from the now-underground trade. In 2011, a documentary was made about the problem in Svay Pak; named The Pink Room after a special room for the virgin girls, the film claimed that the child prostitution remained under a new veneer of legitimate businesses like bars or coffeehouses. In May 2015, The Washington Post published an op-ed by Holly Burkhalter,
4350-469: The church ran a school to assist second-generation Vietnamese Cambodians in assimilating (such as by teaching Khmer ). Prostitution has been prevalent in Svay Pak since at least 1995, and was once "one of the most notorious places in the world for sex slavery ." Locals reported that brothels first opened in 1985, but they proliferated in the years following the Cambodian–Vietnamese War , in
4437-414: The clusters consisting of a plosive followed by /ʔ/, /b/, /d/ , in those beginning /ʔ/, /m/, /l/ , and in the cluster /kŋ-/ . After the initial consonant or consonant cluster comes the syllabic nucleus , which is one of the vowels listed above. This vowel may end the syllable or may be followed by a coda , which is a single consonant. If the syllable is stressed and the vowel is short, there must be
SECTION 50
#17330862342204524-527: The consonants /ɡ/ , /f/ , /ʃ/ and /z/ occur occasionally in recent loan words in the speech of Cambodians familiar with French and other languages. Various authors have proposed slightly different analyses of the Khmer vowel system. This may be in part because of the wide degree of variation in pronunciation between individual speakers, even within a dialectal region. The description below follows Huffman (1970). The number of vowel nuclei and their values vary between dialects; differences exist even between
4611-436: The continuing crime in Svay Pak. ABC News traveled to Svay Pak in 2017 and found much the same situation as described by Brewster two years prior: though the number of children in sex work has dropped to 1–2% from 35% of those so working, Western men still solicited preteens for sex and the local SWAT equivalent continued to raid underage brothels. Later that year, CNN collaborated with AIM for an article that caught-up with
4698-423: The demand itself is legitimate (such as for money owed) as the crime can still be committed when illegitimate threats of harm are used. Cyber extortion is when an individual or group uses the internet as a mean of demanding some sort of material gain. The group or individual usually sends a company a threatening email stating that they have received confidential information about their company and will exploit
4785-463: The descendants of this group. Their dialect is thought to resemble that of pre-modern Siem Reap. Linguistic study of the Khmer language divides its history into four periods one of which, the Old Khmer period, is subdivided into pre-Angkorian and Angkorian. Pre-Angkorian Khmer is the Old Khmer language from 600 CE through 800. Angkorian Khmer is the language as it was spoken in the Khmer Empire from
4872-635: The dialect of the central plain where the Khmer are most heavily concentrated. Within Cambodia, regional accents exist in remote areas but these are regarded as varieties of Central Khmer. Two exceptions are the speech of the capital, Phnom Penh , and that of the Khmer Khe in Stung Treng province , both of which differ sufficiently enough from Central Khmer to be considered separate dialects of Khmer. Outside of Cambodia, three distinct dialects are spoken by ethnic Khmers native to areas that were historically part of
4959-566: The fall of the Khmer Empire in the early 15th century, the Dongrek Mountains served as a natural border leaving the Khmer north of the mountains under the sphere of influence of the Kingdom of Lan Xang . The conquests of Cambodia by Naresuan the Great for Ayutthaya furthered their political and economic isolation from Cambodia proper, leading to a dialect that developed relatively independently from
5046-511: The family. Khmer is spoken by some 13 million people in Cambodia , where it is the official language. It is also a second language for most of the minority groups and indigenous hill tribes there. Additionally there are a million speakers of Khmer native to southern Vietnam (1999 census) and 1.4 million in northeast Thailand (2006). Khmer dialects , although mutually intelligible, are sometimes quite marked. Notable variations are found in speakers from Phnom Penh (Cambodia's capital city),
5133-456: The federal Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, 18 USC In blackmail , which always involves extortion, the extortionist threatens to reveal information about a victim or their family members that is potentially embarrassing, socially damaging, or incriminating unless a demand for money, property, or services is met. In the United States , extortion may also be committed as
5220-400: The final syllable, with secondary stress on every second syllable from the end. Thus in a three-syllable word, the first syllable has secondary stress; in a four-syllable word, the second syllable has secondary stress; in a five-syllable word, the first and third syllables have secondary stress, and so on. Long polysyllables are not often used in conversation. Compounds, however, preserve
5307-566: The firm did not comply, he threatened to send out six million spam emails . He registered a domain in February 2008 that contained New York Life's name in the URL to display false public statements about the company and increased his demand to $ 3 million. According to prosecutors, Digati's intent was not to inform or educate but he wanted to "damage the reputation of New York Life and cost the company millions of dollars in revenue,". New York Life contacted
SECTION 60
#17330862342205394-478: The government reaction against AIM may have stemmed from CNN accidentally implying that Sephak was ethnically Cambodian as opposed to being overseas Vietnamese (CNN issued a clarification). Hun Sen relented after locals spoke up in favor of the group's work and Brewster apologized for their faux pas; though Brewster later returned to California, AIM was still providing services in Svay Pak as of March 2021. After interviewing locals, clergy, and visiting workers,
5481-404: The government sponsored Cultural Committee to define and standardize the modern language, they championed Khmerization, purging of foreign elements, reviving affixation, and the use of Old Khmer roots and historical Pali and Sanskrit to coin new words for modern ideas. Opponents, led by Keng Vannsak , who embraced "total Khmerization" by denouncing the reversion to classical languages and favoring
5568-554: The information public and complain to the Spanish Data Agency if his demands were not met. After Nintendo ignored his demands, he published some of the information on an Internet forum. Nintendo notified authorities and the man was arrested in Málaga . No information has been revealed as to what the man demanded from Nintendo. On February 7, 2019, Jeffrey P. Bezos , owner of Amazon and The Washington Post and currently one of
5655-465: The language of higher education and the intellectual class. By 1907, the French had wrested over half of modern-day Cambodia, including the north and northwest where Thai had been the prestige language, back from Thai control and reintegrated it into the country. Many native scholars in the early 20th century, led by a monk named Chuon Nath , resisted the French and Thai influences on their language. Forming
5742-554: The languages of Austroasiatic. Diffloth places Khmer in an eastern branch of the Mon-Khmer languages . In these classification schemes Khmer's closest genetic relatives are the Bahnaric and Pearic languages . More recent classifications doubt the validity of the Mon-Khmer sub-grouping and place the Khmer language as its own branch of Austroasiatic equidistant from the other 12 branches of
5829-511: The last syllable instead of falling. Khmer is primarily an analytic language with no inflection . Syntactic relations are mainly determined by word order. Old and Middle Khmer used particles to mark grammatical categories and many of these have survived in Modern Khmer but are used sparingly, mostly in literary or formal language. Khmer makes extensive use of auxiliary verbs , "directionals" and serial verb construction . Colloquial Khmer
5916-558: The midpoint of the Middle Khmer period. This has resulted in a distinct accent influenced by the surrounding tonal languages Lao and Thai , lexical differences, and phonemic differences in both vowels and distribution of consonants. Syllable-final /r/ , which has become silent in other dialects of Khmer, is still pronounced in Northern Khmer. Some linguists classify Northern Khmer as a separate but closely related language rather than
6003-491: The modern Khmer language dictionary that is still in use today, helping preserve Khmer during the French colonial period. The phonological system described here is the inventory of sounds of the standard spoken language, represented using the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). The voiceless plosives /p/, /t/, /c/, /k/ may occur with or without aspiration (as [p] vs. [pʰ] , etc.); this difference
6090-502: The presence of the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia 's peacekeeping forces. Post-war, Svay Pak's political corruption and instability led to local authorities extorting brothel owners, while the sex workers themselves "experienced raids, arrests, and rape from armed military and civil police forces operating under loose governmental control." Furthermore, managers in Svay Pak subverted
6177-542: The prostitution industry had "tenuous citizenship status". The population in 2008 was 16446 people, a 3.03% increase from 1998's population of 12197. By 2019, the population was 19042, a 1.3% increase in eleven years. In late 2019, Svay Pak had one of the four primary schools ( Vietnamese : Trường tiểu học Svay Pak , lit. 'Svay Pak Primary School') built by the Khmer-Vietnam Association for Vietnamese populations living in Cambodia. After
6264-490: The raid, but none were arrested; the raid was "widely advertised in advance", and all but a few of the children had been moved to the towns of Siem Reap and Sihanoukville beforehand. By 29 January, Svay Pak was described as "a ghost town " by the Asian Human Rights Commission ; by March, however, a joint Dateline NBC –IJM investigation found that Svay Pak was " the place to go if you're looking for
6351-565: The rural Battambang area, the areas of Northeast Thailand adjacent to Cambodia such as Surin province , the Cardamom Mountains , and southern Vietnam. The dialects form a continuum running roughly north to south. Standard Cambodian Khmer is mutually intelligible with the others but a Khmer Krom speaker from Vietnam, for instance, may have great difficulty communicating with a Khmer native of Sisaket Province in Thailand. The following
6438-417: The start of a syllable are /str/, /skr/ , and (with aspirated consonants analyzed as two-consonant sequences) /sth/, /lkh/ . There are 85 possible two-consonant clusters (including [pʰ] etc. analyzed as /ph/ etc.). All the clusters are shown in the following table, phonetically, i.e. superscript ʰ can mark either contrastive or non-contrastive aspiration (see above ). Slight vowel epenthesis occurs in
6525-628: The stress patterns of the constituent words. Thus សំបុកចាប , the name of a kind of cookie (literally 'bird's nest'), is pronounced [sɑmˌbok ˈcaːp] , with secondary stress on the second rather than the first syllable, because it is composed of the words [sɑmˈbok] ('nest') and [caːp] ('bird'). Khmer once had a phonation distinction in its vowels, but this now survives only in the most archaic dialect ( Western Khmer ). The distinction arose historically when vowels after Old Khmer voiced consonants became breathy voiced and diphthongized; for example *kaa, *ɡaa became *kaa, *ɡe̤a . When consonant voicing
6612-527: The tabloid for publishing details about his relationship with Lauren Sanchez , which led to Bezos and his wife Mackenzie announcing their divorce on January 9 of that year. Bezos refused and posted the threat on Medium . On October 21, 2020, the news sources reported that roughly 40,000 patient records had been stolen from the Finnish private health care provider Vastaamo . The extorters demanded 40 bitcoins — roughly 450,000 euros at
6699-463: The use of contemporary colloquial Khmer for neologisms, and Ieu Koeus , who favored borrowing from Thai, were also influential. Koeus later joined the Cultural Committee and supported Nath. Nath's views and prolific work won out and he is credited with cultivating modern Khmer-language identity and culture, overseeing the translation of the entire Pali Buddhist canon into Khmer. He also created
6786-410: The victim if they do not comply with the extortionist's will. Another key distinction is that extortion always involves a verbal or written threat, whereas robbery may not. In United States federal law, extortion can be committed with or without the use of force and with or without the use of a weapon. Violation of many state extortion statutes constitutes "racketeering activity" under Section 1961 of
6873-438: The village roads were too narrow to accommodate the fire engine ; Samon said that the local government planned "to discuss letting the home and brothel -owners resettle in the same area, but first all the roads would have to be widened." In 2000, the only industry in Svay Pak other than prostitution (and the support thereof) was fishing . As of 2004, the commune's residents were Vietnamese Cambodians , and those not working in
6960-470: The vowels that can exist without a preceding or trailing consonant. The independent vowels may be used as monosyllabic words, or as the initial syllables in longer words. Khmer words never begin with regular vowels; they can, however, begin with independent vowels. Example: ឰដ៏, ឧទាហរណ៍, ឧត្តម, ឱកាស...។ A Khmer syllable begins with a single consonant, or else with a cluster of two, or rarely three, consonants. The only possible clusters of three consonants at
7047-426: The word usually first brings to mind blackmail or protection rackets. The logical connection between the corruption sense of the word and the other senses is that to demand bribes in one's official capacity is blackmail or racketeering in essence (that is, "you need access to this resource, the government restricts access to it through my office, and I will charge you unfairly and unlawfully for such access"). Extortion
7134-411: The words they modify). Some grammatical processes are still not fully understood by western scholars. For example, it is not clear if certain features of Khmer grammar, such as actor nominalization , should be treated as a morphological process or a purely syntactic device, and some derivational morphology seems "purely decorative" and performs no known syntactic work. Extortion Extortion
7221-430: The youngest girls." That year, IJM founder Gary Haugen worked with Cambodian officials to mount an operation to rescue children and arrest perpetrators; despite problems arising from police bribery, "a dozen suspected pimps and madams are in custody, and 37 girls [were] rescued, many under the age of 10." Upon returning to Svay Pak six months later, Dateline members were again offered prostituted children; Minister Sochua
7308-506: Was bustling in Svay Pak, driven by child sex tourism from the Western world after child prostitution in Thailand was cracked-down upon. The Daily Telegraph supposed that any sex tourists in Svay Pak were there for the children, for if "a man wants an older girl then there are plenty on offer in the brothels and bars of Phnom Penh." The majority of the children were overseas Vietnamese , sold into prostitution by destitute families. Between
7395-438: Was emerging from the transitional period represented by Middle Khmer, Cambodia fell under the influence of French colonialism . Thailand, which had for centuries claimed suzerainty over Cambodia and controlled succession to the Cambodian throne, began losing its influence on the language. In 1887 Cambodia was fully integrated into French Indochina , which brought in a French -speaking aristocracy. This led to French becoming
7482-407: Was lost, the distinction was maintained by the vowel ( *kaa, *ke̤a ); later the phonation disappeared as well ( [kaː], [kiə] ). These processes explain the origin of what are now called a-series and o-series consonants in the Khmer script . Although most Cambodian dialects are not tonal , the colloquial Phnom Penh dialect has developed a tonal contrast (level versus peaking tone) as a by-product of
7569-593: Was not surprised by the reversion, blaming "extreme poverty and widespread corruption". When Dateline followed-up in 2008, the show reported that "Svay Pak is a changed place. […] Many of the brothels have closed their doors and moved out of town, replaced by restaurants, a phone store, even a children's community center serving children, some of the same children who were once exploited here." However, in 2011, CNN reported that while pimps no longer swarmed every foreign man who came into town, and children were not to be seen prostituting themselves from streetside windows,
#219780