Philippine Hokkien

[hong]

I am not sure yet why Taiwan people say chiongchiu and chionghua for chiang until they are shocked when they heard china's radio with chiang pronunciation.I see this in yalon.com.tw

[hong]

I heard clearly penang people say HongKong as hiong kang because I recently have a trip to Hongkong with people from Penang.
You cannot think that every penang speak same sound for each word regardless they have the knowledge or not.With so many old chuanchiu people still alive in Penang,there must be a lot of people saying png,tng,etc.
Again regardless Penang baba hokkien or whatsoever,a person who wants to start learning his dialect in a better way by books,he must start with the sect of his ancestor first.
After that go into sub sects .The is no reason for penang chuanchiu to start leaning chiangchiu as you mentioned in another post.It will be very embarrassed.
This is true for other chinese dialect even for hailam,teochiu with many sects too.And beijing people should learn beijing fangyan after that to tianjin fangyan,shanghai to hangzhou wu language,etc.

[Andrew Yong]

Hong: Also the problem is the difficulty in finding materials in Chiangchiu Hokkien. Certainly, if you want to improve your Hokkien by watching movies, listening to the news etc. you will normally get either some form of Taiwanese or Amoy Hokkien. Even books are not easy to find, especially if you cannot read Chinese.

I am sure there are people speaking all kinds of dialects in Penang. Which form of Hokkien you learn depends on why you want to learn it.

Sim and Yisheng: do you say siang-sin or siong-sin for believe? Perhaps I am remembering wrongly.

[Yisheng]

Hi Andrew:

My immediate family and I say siang-sin, I use siong-sin when speaking to people here in JB and Singapore. Same thing goes for the word for injury, I use siang, people here use siong. I would like to ask you a question regarding the ru tone in chiangchiu because I have never heard it before. How does it sound like? I think my ru tone is either flat or goes down a bit from a high point, 4 or 43. I have observed that people in JB and Singapore have the same kind of ru tone as I do.

[Andrew Yong]

I would put yangru as either |4| or |5|.

[hong]

Dear Andrew,
Looking at the papers by Mazhongqi on Chiangchiu,I find that there are many strange things on chiangchiu never heard before in North Malaysia.I think it is because there are not enough sects and population of Chiangchiu came to Malaysia to make a living.

[hong]

Dear Andrew,
I think we already have a comprehensive book on chiangchiu in Dutch by Schlegel in 4 vol.It is not only a dict but also talk about grammar of chiangchiu.But it is out of print.

[Sim]

Hi Yisheng,

Thanks for your kind words .

>> Strangely, never once did he say anything deragotory about the
>> minnan vernacular spoken in Singapore or Malaysia both in his
>> publications and in my short interaction with him.

Well, that's the "scientific approach" - to just examine what's there, as an interesting (fascinating even) object of study.

I've been away for a week's Easter holiday, so this is one of the first few postings I've seen. Busy catching up! I'm DELIGHTED in the number of postings here after just 10 days away!!!

Cheers,
Sim.

[%sig%]

[Sim]

Hi Andrew,

Like you, I'm most interested in Penang Hokkien because it's the variant which I speak best. But I was lucky that the maternal side of my family spoke Amoy Hokkien, so I can "turn on" that accent when I need to (possibly a bit like how Yisheng does when he lives among people in the South of the Malay Peninsular). Nevertheless it remains a slightly "foreign" accent to me, something I have to make myself do, instead of coming naturally.

I like all forms of Hokkien, and one of the things which I find most interesting is the huge variation (for example the nasalization and non-nasalization in some very common words). I too don't believe that there is a "better" or "correct" form, just what people use.

I acknowledge Hong's point that it does hinder communication when Malay words are adopted. My solution however would be to promote greater awareness of these words among the speakers of Hokkien varieties which don't have them, so that they will understand them passively. [ My analogy would be that no British person should be trying to force Americans to say "lorry", and no American should be trying to force a British person to say "truck". They should just use the terms they are familiar with, and just be aware of the existence of the other person's term. ]

>> pan1-gi5 instead of phi*1 for cheap

I only heard phi*1 when I was 40 (shows my lack of experience in Hokkien!). Fortunately, I could work out from context that my friend meant "cheap". How does one write "pan1-gi5" in characters?

Sim.

[%sig%]

[Sim]

>> When I tell them we use 'thau-kiong' they look disappointed.

I say "khau-kiong", but maybe it's an individual aberration on my part. Possibly and association with "khau1" as in "to scrape".

Sim