More Chinese characters for Hokkien words

niuc · Post by **niuc** » Tue May 10, 2005 4:04 pm

Hi Sim

I learned a lot from your postings & responses too, thanks!

天公蟹 thi*1-kong1-hue7 fiddler crabs I saw were like the 1st, 3rd & 6th pics. I never saw one like the 2nd pic - it's a toy, isn't it? I didn't really remember how a 土猴 tho`5-kau5 mole cricket in our hometown looked like, but it should be similar to those pics.

Indeed your postings show that you have been a very keen "amateur biologist"

! I like some animals but generally I don't like insects and reptiles.

You mentioned about millipede with dark red colour and curled up into a spiral when threatened. We also used to play touching them to see them curled up. I am not sure about its name in Hokkien but I think we called it ang5-thang5 紅蟲 (i.e. red "worm/bug").

Talkative in our Hokkien is 鳥牙 ciao2-ge5 (bird's tooth) i.e. keep "chirping" like a bird. I am not sure but kind of familiar with the term 象牙蕉 chiu*7-ge5-cio1 "elephant tusk banana". There is also 牛角蕉 gu5-kak4-cio1 (bull horn banana) - may be they are the same kind of banana i.e. "pisang tanduk" in Malay.

Sim, it seems that Indonesians - at least most - do not really take time to differentiate toad from frog. May be katak is toad and kodok is frog but most say katak and kodok are synonyms (ref. kamus.net). Do cicadas fight (like cock fighting)? If not, then jangkrik should be cricket in Indonesian as there is "adu jangkrik" (cricket fighting). Btw kamus.net says jangkrik/jangkerik is cricket and cicada is "semacam jangkrik" (a kind of cricket).

Casey · Post by **Casey** » Wed May 11, 2005 4:50 am

Cicadas do not fight and its size is bigger than crickets.

niuc · Post by **niuc** » Wed May 11, 2005 2:08 pm

Thanks Casey

, then jangkrik is cricket in Indonesian. I don't remember it clearly but I ever saw cicada in my hometown, quite "fat" and kept "singing". When I learned that it's called a1-i5, it sounded funny as it's the homophone for auntie.

Casey · Post by **Casey** » Thu May 12, 2005 6:22 am

Niuc

Hmm... "a1 i5" does sound interesting. We call cicadas "am7-pO1-ce5" (sandhi) but I do not know what are the Hanzi for it. Some years ago, when I visited Weihai, Shandong, the host treated us with deep fried cicadas as an apetitizer. It did not have much taste. Other delicacies included deep fried scorpions which tasted a little like dried prawns. Quite tasty, I should say.

Sim · Post by **Sim** » Thu May 12, 2005 7:39 am

Casey wrote:...Cicadas do not fight and its size is bigger than crickets...
and
...We call cicadas "am7-pO1-ce5" (sandhi) ...

Hi Casey & Niuc,

Quite right. I read from a couple of sources that some Chinese keep "fighting crickets". They feed them on a mixture of flour and water, and they meet in village / town squares, bringing their crickets with them, and then people gather round and watch them fight. They even live for a couple of years, and some of the "champions" are very prized indeed.

Niuc: as a little boy in school, we used to keep "fighting spiders" in the same way. They were very beautifully coloured animals (basically black, but with small streaks/highlights of blue or green). We kept them in matchboxes and let them fight during recess.

Casey: nice to see that you and I have almost identical pronunciations for "cicada". I say cE5 instead of ce5.

Sim.

Sim · Post by **Sim** » Thu May 12, 2005 8:00 am

niuc wrote:...cicada in my hometown, quite "fat" and kept "singing"...

[ APOLOGIES FOR TURNING THIS INTO A BIOLOGY FORUM

]

Hi Niuc,

Yes, one of the distinctive feature of the cicada is its "fatness". Crickets are "slim" and "agile", and will hop away quickly if you try to catch them. Cicadas are very "calm" and "docile", and you can play with them in your hand - they'll just sit there, staring with their bug-eyes (and, as you say, "singing")!

Cicadas have a very unusual background actually. Apparently they live as larvae/grubs in the ground for 7-17 *YEARS*, and then emerge suddenly in huge groups, turning into the familiar "cicada". I don't remember how long they survive once they come out of the ground, but it's only on the scale of days or weeks, very much less than the years which they have spent in the ground.

The interesting thing is that each species of cicada has a different cycle. That is to say, species X emerges once every 11 years, species Y emerges once every 13 years, and species Z emerges once every 17 years, etc. When they emerge, the *whole group* (for that species) emerges, they breed, lay eggs, and the eggs hatch out, and they burrow into the ground and we don't see that species for the next 11, 13, 17, etc years.

One of the mysteries is that, apparently, the length of the cycle is almost always a prime number (a number which can't be divided by other numbers). The standard explanation for this is that this is nature's way of making sure that different species don't overlap in the time they come out of the ground. If the numbers were *not* prime, e.g. species X every 4 years, and species Y every 6 years, then once they came out in the same year, then they would keep overlapping every 12 years (the lowest common multiple of 4 and 6). They would then compete for food every 3rd time that X emerges and every 2nd time that Y emerges. When the period of emergence is a prime number, then the lowest common multiple of two prime numbers is very much larger (you have to multiple both numbers together), miminizing the number of times they overlap.

Here are some pictures from the net, some of cicadas themselves, and some of the empty shells they leave behind on tree trunks and on the ground, when they hatch out.

Cicadas:
http://www.1000plus.com/Charleston%204t ... a_6286.jpg
http://www.cirrusimage.com/homoptera/cicada_2.jpg
http://www.chefscott.com/recipes/cicada14.jpg
http://www.carinemily.com/cicada/images ... lt-014.jpg

Shells:
http://www.zentropolis.com/2004_cicadas ... 20Tree.jpg
http://www.thepotters.info/archives/cicada.jpg
http://nfg.2y.net/grafx/family/Cicada_Shell.jpg

Only the first 2 pictures of cicadas look like the ones I know from Malaysia. The others are also very clearly cicadas (they have that "fat" look), but still look quite different from the Malaysian ones.

Sim

Casey · Post by **Casey** » Sat May 14, 2005 7:52 am

Thanks for the biology lesson and those beautiful pictures.

niuc · Post by **niuc** » Sun May 15, 2005 3:31 pm

Hi Sim

Thanks a lot for the wonderful biology lesson & pictures. So cicada is indeed an amazing insect! The cicadas I saw should be the same kind as yours, not the ones with red wings.

Sim · Post by **Sim** » Wed May 18, 2005 8:49 am

Casey & Niuc,

Niuc>> Thanks a lot for the wonderful biology lesson & pictures

Casey>> Thanks for the biology lesson and those beautiful pictures.

You're very welcome! It's not often that people want to listen to what I have to say about bugs

.

BTW, one last point about fiddler crabs Niuc:

>> I never saw one like the 2nd pic - it's a toy, isn't it?

I looked at the pic again, and yes, I agree with you that it looks like a toy. I went back to the pictures from the search engine, and found the original pic and the website it came from. I even found a photograph from another site with a very similar looking fiddler crab (which ALSO looks like a toy). In this second site, it talks about ordering them "eggs with expire date: 21/8, 22/8 or 5/9/99". Strange.

These are the links (sorry that they are so long):
http://images.search.yahoo.com/search/i ... 8&ei=UTF-8

http://images.search.yahoo.com/search/i ... 8&ei=UTF-8

I'm afraid I really can't decide it these are real crabs, toys, or chocolates!

Regards,
Sim.

niuc · Post by **niuc** » Thu May 26, 2005 4:20 pm

Sim wrote:Niuc: as a little boy in school, we used to keep "fighting spiders" in the same way. They were very beautifully coloured animals (basically black, but with small streaks/highlights of blue or green). We kept them in matchboxes and let them fight during recess.

Sim, I was not aware of "fighting spiders" before. It sounds interesting and also puzzling for me

So you guys were not afraid of those spiders? I read in "Today"(free newspaper in Singapore) yesterday regarding Samurai Spiders on National Geographic but I didn't watch it. It mentioned that Kumo Gassen (cannibal spiders fighting/wrestling festival) is a centuries-old Japanese tradition. Were the spiders you used also cannibal?