Hi Stifven,
> Bo la bo sa = tasteless Tagalog lasa = taste
> Pa la = to pay Spanish paga
> Sar sa = sauce Tagalog/Spanish salsa = sauce
> Pe ro = but Tagalog/Spanish pero = but
When we met on the chat we spoke a bit about the famous Philipine nationalist Jose Rizal, and the fact that he was "Peranakan"/"Baba" (sorry I don't know the Tagalog term, is it "Mestizo"?). i.e. about the fact that he was a descendent of Chinese who had lived in S.E. Asia for many generations (with possibly/often a mixture of local blood).
The dialect of Malaysian Babas has a huge number of local words. Other long term readers of this forum will know that I'm a Baba myself, and my own dialect is full of Malay words. Co-incidentally, we also use a borrowed word for "but": "tapi", from Malay "tetapi".
If you do a search on "Baba" or "Malay" on this site, you might see various postings which Andrew, I, and others have written regarding Malay words borrowed into Malaysian Hokkien.
[ In connection with borrowed words, I would like to report an extraordinary "linguistic incident". Well, *I* found it extraordinary, in any case.
I once went to listen to a Buddhist sermon in Penang, at the Penang Buddhist Association, preached by a monk. This was sometime in 2000 I think.
He was quite young (mid-20's) and the entire audience (excluding myself) consisted of about 10 rather old (60-70 year old) women. The sermon had been advertised as the weekly Hokkien sermon, which is why I went along.
What surprised me initially was how pious these women were. We were all seated in the hall before the monk came in, and when he came in and walked down the central aisle, about half of the women came towards him, kneeled / grovelled on the floor, and kissed the hem of his robe.
Now for the linguistic part. The first point was that he preached in colloquial Penang Hokkien, which surprised me a bit. Even in Penang, "formal" Hokkien communication is often in the Amoy variety. But my surprise really peaked when he used the English conjunction "although". He was preaching (almost) exclusively in Hokkien, and suddenly, this word "although" popped up! Something like: "AL3-THOUGH2 i1 mai1 khi3, i1 pun1 tioh4-be1 khi" (= "although he didn't want to go, he still had to go"). "pun" is also a borrowed word from Malay, meaning "also", but this did not surprise me that much, because everyone uses it.
Now, what's surprising about this incident is that usually, nouns are the words most commonly borrowed from another language. This occurs for example when the object the noun refers to is not (originally) known in the one culture, so it's simple to borrow it from the language that has the object. (For example, we say "tai1-a2" for the "tyre" of a bicycle or car). I think adjectives are the next type of word, in the order of ease of borrowing. (For example we use the English words for the colours "orange" and "brown" in my Penang Hokkien, rather than say "kam-sek" or "chiah-sek"). Finally, verbs, conjunctions, and pronouns are almost never borrowed from one language to another.
That's why I found the use of "al-though" so surprising. He even pronounced it with tones which I somehow instinctively recognized as 'correct'.
I keep promising to post a list of borrowed words in Penang Hokkien, but I haven't got around to it yet. The list is quite long!
>> My thesis mate would say t@ (@=schwa) for pig
Hmmm... are you absolutely sure of this? I am not aware of a Hokkien variant which uses a pure and simple schwa. The common forms of pig are: "tu", "ti", and "ty"/"ter", where the last ("ty"/"ter") is a convention used to transcribe IPA upside down "m", the back closed unrounded vowel.
See
http://www.chineselanguage.org/forum/re ... #reply_978 and
http://www.chineselanguage.org/forum/re ... =991&t=922 . Somewhere, there is also a posting explaining that some people transcribe it "-er", but I can't find it at the moment.
Of course, I would never contradict any native speaker. If you say that there is a variant with a genuine schwa, then of course I'm prepared to accept this. It's just that upside-down-m is a very well known variant for "pig" and "fish", and it sounds quite a lot like a schwa, but is sort of "darker". Physically, the mouth is more tense. If one "exaggerates" the way one says it, one has to tense up the face, as if one was trying to force oneself to smile in an unpleasant situation
.
>> schools will always insist that we must speak "correct" Hokkien
and
>> But I only hear these 2 examples from them and those old Chinese in Chinatown
Wow! From these two statements, I gather that the Philipines is one of the few places in the world (besides of course Taiwan) where Hokkien is actually being promoted, and even becoming consolidated in the direction of a "purer" form. How amazing, and encouraging to hear. [ Not that I'm against "mixed" forms, seeing as Baba Penang Hokkien is the only form of Chinese I speak. ]
Please tell us more about this. Particularly the situation in schools, and in what way "correct" Hokkien is being promoted?
Cheers,
Sim.
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