Applied Languages

Cambodia’s “jungle woman”, whose story gripped the country after she apparently spent 18 years living in a forest, has begun speaking normally instead of making animal-type noises, her father said.

Rochom P’ngieng, now 28, went missing as a little girl in 1989 while herding water buffalo in Ratanakkiri province around 600 kilometres (400 miles) northeast of the capital Phnom Penh.

In early 2007 the woman was brought from the jungle, naked and dirty, after being caught trying to steal food from a farmer. She was hunched over like a monkey, scavenging on the ground for pieces of dried rice.

She could not utter a word of any intelligible language, instead making what Sal Lou, the man who says he is her father, calls “animal noises.”

Cambodians described her as “jungle woman” and “half-animal girl” and since rejoining society Rochom P’ngieng has battled bouts of illness and was hospitalised in October after refusing food.

But Sal Lou said late Wednesday that this month his daughter had started to understand Cambodia’s Khmer language and could even speak the language of his ethnic Phnong tribe.

“She is becoming a normal human being like others. She has been starting to speak out now — she speaks the language of Phnong,” Sal Lou told AFP by telephone. “She can ask for food, water and so on when she feels hungry,” he said.

The apparent breakthrough happened after Rochom P’ngieng’s hospitalization, when doctors gave her injections to treat a nervous illness for a few days, Sal Lou said. “She is very gentle and I am very happy with her progress,” he said adding that her condition appears to be improving from day to day.

Sal Lou said his daughter had stopped trying to flee into the jungle as she had in the past. “Even though we tried to take her into jungle, she wanted to stay at home,” he said, adding that she is able to eat food now.

The jungles of Ratanakkiri — some of the most isolated and wild in Cambodia — are known to have held hidden groups of hill tribes in the recent past. In November 2004, 34 people from four hill tribe families emerged from the dense forest where they had fled in 1979 after the fall of the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime, which they supported.

Read more: AFP

The word ‘simples’ is poised to gain an entry in the Oxford English Dictionary thanks to a television advertising campaign starring an animated meerkat. The slogan has been named word of the year by the compilers of the OED.

The wordsmiths admitted the campaign by meerkat Aleksandr for a price comparison website helped push the word ‘simples’ into everyday conversation in Britain. Susie Dent, of Oxford University Press and a regular on Dictionary Corner on Channel 4 series Countdown, selected her pick of the year for 2009. She said: ‘One word that seems to have captured the public’s imagination in 2009 is the word “simples”.

‘It has appeared on the ‘compare the meerkat’ TV adverts and has quickly become a catchphrase said by anyone when they mean something that is very easy to achieve.’

Elsewhere in 2008, the world economic crisis provided the phrase ‘credit crunch’ and this year it has been followed up by ‘the great recession’ said the OED. It has also given rise to the phenomenon of the Zombie Bank, a financial institution whose liabilities are more than its assets but can keep going thanks to taxpayer bailouts.

Lack of money also created the ‘staycation’ which means a holiday in the UK rather than abroad. This was boosted by the Met Office promising a ‘barbecue summer’ which failed to materialise, yet the phrase itself has ended 2009 as one of the words or phrases of the year.

Social networking has provided the language with the verb to ‘defriend’ – or ‘unfriend’ to Americans – which means to take someone off a list of friends on Facebook.

And then there is ‘Tweetup’, a play on ‘meet up’ where people get together physically after contacting each other on the social networking site Twitter.

The words will not immediately get in to the next edition of the Oxford English Dictionary but go on a ‘waiting list’ with other phrases like jeggings – a mix of jeans and leggings. Compilers from Oxford University Press, publishers of the OED, wait to see if the new words and phrases become permanent fixtures in the language or if they simply disappear again.

Others on the waiting list include ‘paywalls’ – part of a website which is not accessible without paying a subscription’. And from the great MPs’ expenses scandal comes ‘redact’, an old word meaning to censor or obscure and resurrected to describe the habit of blocking out ‘sensitive’ information on what politicians bought with taxpayers’ money.

Miss Dent added: ‘Only a tiny percentage of words will ever gain entry into an Oxford dictionary and the waiting list of words is long.’

Top 10 words of 2009:
1. Simples
2. Unfriend/defriend
3. Great Recession
4. Staycation
5. Tweetup
6. Zombie Bank
7. Barbecue summer
8. Jeggings
9. Redact
10. Paywalls

Read more: Daily Mail Online