Anyway, I had a look at an interesting thread here on body part names - some were similar to words she told me and some were different, but it's hard to tell if I'm just picking them up wrong.
The ones I can remember are...
ear - niyang
nose - pei (sounded like the 3rd tone in Mandarin Pinyin)
eye - mizhou or yuanqing (not sure which, as she was giving me the words in both Mandarin and her language, and I didn't write any of them down
so I'm just going on memory and trying to express it in mandarin pinyin)breast - ne ne (the second ne seemed to have an emphasis and falling tone)
I had a few others but since I didn't go over them afterwards, I'm after forgetting them for the nonce.
Hokkien seems to be the closest bet from what I can find, but I've not had a very deep look - it certainly seems surprisingly different from Putonghua, more than I would merely call a "dialect" - sounds like a totally different vocabulary and sound-set to me (like it seems to contain a "th" sound I haven't heard in Mandarin).
Anyway, thanks in advance to anyone who can shed some light (and if anyone knows of some kind of geographical map with an overlay of which languages/dialects tend to be spoken in which areas, I'd like to see it!)
Oisín
