Penang Hokkien

[Tang Loon Kong]

Hi

I heard over the news that Peang was hit by tidal waves and some people perished. It is a tragedy.

Hope that there would be any more tidal waves.

Is everyone in the forum alright?

Bye

Tang Loon Kong
Shanghai, China

[Tang Loon Kong]

Ladies and Gentlemen

How are you all?

There has been no action on this section since Christmas eve. I hope everybody and their loved ones are alright.

Anyway, here is another poser.

I came across thinking that the English word water "hyacinth" may come from a Chinese water-borne plant called "Hai-Sen" which is also sometimes called "Sui-Sen". Can somebody confirm this?

Tang Loon Kong
Shanghai, China

[hong]

Tang,what is this has to do with min language?This forum is about learning minnan but not to ask about which word came from in english or calling malaysian chinese are not chinese,etc.That is why no scholars are interested in this forum.

[Aurelio]

Tang Loon Kong:

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=hyacinth:

"hyacinth
1553 in this form; earlier jacinth (1230), from Gk. hyakinthos, probably ult. from a non-I.E. Mediterranean language. Used in ancient Greece of a blue gem, perhaps sapphire, and of a purple or deep red flower, but exactly which one is unknown (gladiolus, iris, and larkspur have been suggested). ..."

In Greek (2000 years ago), it would have been pronounced as Hoo-ah-keen-thoss which is much less like haisen than the modern English pronunciation.

Hong:

With all due respect: Who made you the "Master of the Hokkien Web"? I, for my part, appreciate your contributions a lot but have been more than once put off by your tendency to tell other people what they are allowed to discuss, do, etc. The whole miserable mp3-thread started by you telling somebody off just because he wanted to make some recordings of Hokkien. Please consider you attitude on this.

Have I 'eaten wisdom in spoonfulls' as they say in German, can I tell people what to do? Most certainly not. But I've been around in this forum longer than many and I must say, your constant judging of other people is becoming aggravating. Please keep as active as before but don't always discard what others want to say. This forum is not exclusively for scholarly discussion and thesis-exchange.

Regards,
Aurelio

[%sig%]

[hong]

Aurelio,
There are enough misleading web sites with wrong theories about minnan.We don't need another guy who doesn't even know what is the word for lang in minnan to make a web site. I only say there are enough books and web sites around ,we don't need misleding web site.Alo is insulting malaysian chinese but I don't even bother to insult hongKong people in here.
If you go to other web site lika yalon.com ,many posts will be taken off because it has nothing to do with minnan.I think it is fair to do so in here.How the hell posts like Alo is considered correct.
I not going to active in this forum anymore.I have done enough.

[Eng Wai]

O Hong, don't be that upset. Some are here to promote Minnan some are here to know more about Minnan and perhaps some are here to question the status of Minnan, whatever. Different people have different views and approaches to different stuffs. You want every Penangite to speak proper Hokkien while I prefer Penangite to speak Penang Hokkien. Fair enough, we had a debate and at some point we decided to stop. We can still talk about everything else about minnan, or that we share in common. Not everyone is a scholar, or a someone professionally interested in Minnan. Take me as example, I want to know more about Minnan, I tried to ask questions here. If I receive no response, no links at all, I might simply get frustrated and divert my attention to other non-minnan stuff. You, as someone who knows more minnan than me, should try to encourage me to acquire more knowledge and perhaps help in those. I have time to stop by here once in a while, to spend half an hour browsing the Minnan net, but ultimately, after all, I am not a professional, I am not a linguist, and I am not that hardworking, I won't be really bothered to research which hanzi is appropriate for which word, etc. When I have no idea where could I gather the information, I would rather just drop a line here and wait for the reply from you, sim, niuc, andrew yong, or aureiro, or whoever passing by. Out of 10 links you supply, perhaps I read only one. But I do find some intriguing and I am grateful to you. I, and most of the forum users, will hope that you could continue to contribute to this forum.

And to Alo, why not you continue to stay in this forum and provide us a good reference and knowledge on Hong Kong Minnan? If you could kindly help us on Hong Kong minnan language, culture, history etc, I, as a Malaysian Chinese will be able to have a firmer grasp on Minnan knowledge. When you first appeared, everyone must be very delighted to have this forum added another member, though the later on disputes are always regrettable. See, you posted a new idea that receives positive feedbacks from the majority.

Hope you two could remain here.

Best wishes

Eng Wai

[%sig%]

[Tang Loon Kong]

Hi Ladies and Gentlmen

Lu Lang Ho Bo! Tjiak Pah Ah Boey! U Ua Ban Ban Kong!
Sin Ni Kwai Lok, Tai Ke Keong Hi Huat Chai

I have forwarded my arguments and several other words which have not even received decent replies from obvious detractors / challengers in this forum. The words are "kamkak", "sukak", "beca" and "cucok". Hence humbly, that there is no doubt that these Hokkien words are original per se.

The replies that I received were 'brush-offs' which has no meaningful contributions to this forum except for the explosion of angst.

I rememeber writing to tell that total reliance on dictionaries is a very dangerous thing. And some contributors to this forum have proven my point quite clearly by espousing angst which reflects a 'cule-de-sac' situation. We sometimes need to break out of the dangerous envelope because it gives us a certain false sense of security.

"You know, when a person reads a thick story book, and spends a lot time reading, the reader will finally believe that story because he has committed so much time to the reading". And, this person will defend the text with his life if necessary because of his commitment. That is the danger from too much reading and no thinking or assessment of the stories.

The European countries have always claimed the ancient Greek civilization as the bedrock for their culture. Can you imagine any connection between let us say "Norway and Greek" or "Scotland and Greek", other than the Greek alphabets? Honestly, I have always doubted this because I know that the European history is relatively short, not to say not too glorified as when compared to others, and they need the validation and congruency from a convenient and non-competitive source for which I think is the reason why Greek was chosen. It does not mean there is no chance of other influences from other places eventhough there is no official records.

My idea or purpose in making the links to other parts of the world is to challenge so-called 'official history' which are mostly subtly recorded in many dictionaries from different countries. In my earlier writings, I have claimed that the history of the Hokkiens have been either destroyed, officially mothballed or ignored, or destroyed in China. It is necessary that we find the Hokkien history outside China mainland, in other cultures, civilizations, and langauges. One of the quickest ways, is to scan for strange similarities, and then work backwards with factual but cautious imagination.

And what is proper Hokkien? You won't find this solely in China for sure. There are many pockets of Hokkiens in many parts of the world, each locked in their own time of migration to that pockets, and if carefully assembled or arrayed, will show the changes of the Hokkien language and culture, and hence suggets a Hokkien history.

Readers must appreciate sometimes why there are so many versions of the same event. I know that I am breaking 'glass houses' because I have in fact shaken the beliefs of some. This is part of the game in the forum, in addition to presenting facts for clarity.

All others and Hokkiens should feel free to join in the discussion, no matter which part of the world you come from (I have came across Hokkiens in the former Yugoslavia). Getting excited is part of the game in this forum. We should all divert our energy into useful discussion - not explosive verbal combat. For those who are in now, I suggest that we put in greater effort. But for those who think this forum is too "debilitating", stay away from fixation on "official histories" and you should be alright. Everybody is needed for the forum's succeess. I mean everybody.

Thanks

Tang Loon Kong
Shanghai, China

[Aurelio]

Tang Loon Kong, lu ho bo?

Certain topics come again with time, and that is a good thing, as everybody will add a new stone to the building. We had this discussion some time ago, about the non-Han element in the Hokkien-language and its speakers ...

As part of this discussion, I sat down and counted all characters in 50 pages of my Xiamen Fangyan Cidian (as a statistically meaningful sample of the whole) where the phonetic form of a word could not be related reasonably to the Cantonese/ Mandarin form of the word. Example: Thi" and tian (sky) are clearly related, as its common for nasals to disappear into a nasalized vowel and for diphthongs like ie to disappear into or evolve from the simple vowel form. Moreover, this is paralleled by many other pairs of words like ni" and nian, etc. Beh and yao, however, are not related by any such regular development and not by any phonetic rules that apply in any other language I know.
By tracking this page after page, I came up with an estimate of 10% of the Hokkien character vocabulary to come from non-Han origin. This includes the words 'it' (one), 'bah' (meat), 'cabo' and 'tabo', 'beh' (to want) and many others. I might be wrong on one word or the other, but I guess that the overall number of words that do no have a proper middle Chinese character to writen them with (i.e. a proper link to the rest of the Han lanugages) is about 10%.

Now, coming back to the points you alluded to: Where should they come from? If they are not Han, then they clearly must be from some other people, and since they are very basic words it is well possible that they are left-overs from the original inhabitants of the Xiamen-area.

Instead of guessing, if one really wants to gain some firm ground here, one needs to continue the count that I started, i.e.: make a list of all Hokkien words that do not seem to correspond phonetically to the common Han vocabulary, then compare these words carefully to whatever other non-Han languages are left in the whole area (South-China, Thailand, Taiwan indigenous languages and potentially Malaysia etc.) and see whether there are firm correspondences. That's a rather monumental task, although do-able.

If you have the spirit for such an academic endeavor, go for it. It's a lot of hard work, though, and cannot be done by guessing. If I had to bet on most of these aforementioned words being from a pre-Han substrate, I'd say I'd give it a 95 in 100 likelihood.

On a different note, concerning the 'Greek' element in European culture: Europe is an enormous melting pot of different influences. There is, however, a firm tradition from the days of Homer carried on to the day of today: The Romans carried on the literature and philosophy of the Greeks (Caesar spoke Greek quite often and my namesake, Marcus Aurelius, wrote his 'meditations' in Greek, just to give you an idea). The 'barbaric' Northerners, in turn, copied art, literature and philosophy from the Romans when the mediterranean empire collapsed. Of course, they all added their own elements to the mix, but the core-traditions were built strongly on Graeco-Roman and Judeo-Christian values. The Renaissance resurrected Greek and Roman art and literature in their more pure form, and since the age of humanism, it was common for educated Europeans to be able to read both Latin and Greek with some fluency - this has only disappeared after the disastrous wars of the last century. In other words: Nordic culture has a lot more to do with Greek culture than with its own Viking beginnings, as most of its philosophical, judicial, religious, political and cultural values are based in the common European humanist-renaissance culture that in turn is based on Graeco-Roman and Judeo-Christian ideas.

Hope that this is sufficiently clear. I do however see your point that apart from this common root there are many other influences from (1) all the other peoples in Europe and (2) many of the other cultures of the world. I guess that your point was that the same holds true for Minnan, which is more than just Han with an ancient pronunciation (although, see above, certainly 90% Han linguistically).

As far as the history of Europe goes: I don't intend to go into a 'pissing contest' here, but roughly 3000 years of a civilizational continuum are not too bad for starters (sure, Sumer and Egypt had a much earlier start, but those cultures have been largely cut off from their successors today by the rise of Islam that pretty much eliminated anything Babylonian or Egyptian). Not that this proves much of anything but if I remember correctly, the Shang dynasty is not that much older (I know that I'm going to piss off some people by saying that).

Regards
Aurelio

[%sig%]

[hong]

I think it is very clear daboo for man is a chinese word at least 2400 years ago by now,taiwanese also agree it is 丈夫 except for some scholars like wushouli.Both taiwan and China agree cit for one is also chinese 蜀.Prof Chiu from China has mentioned sukha is a malay word among Malaysia and singapura,it certainly has nothing to do with minnan.The web page interview from him about sukha I gave above is down.We cannot know for sure which word is from non chinese in china or just non chinese learn it from chinese.See Prof.Pan 's article in eastling.org.

[Aurelio]

Hi, Hong!

Looks like we're both online right now! Thanks for the information on daboo (tabo).

Regards,
Aurelio