Hokkien books, anybody?

[Sim Lee]

Hi Johan,

I'm another Hokkien living in the Netherlands! Not many of us here - mostly Cantonese from Hong Kong, especially in Amsterdam.

Which city are you in?

-Sim.

[alaxieniye]

Are there any foreigners that can speak Hokkien,( Minnan) well? can somebody explain me the tones of Taiwanese? where can I find a course on internet? I learn Mandarin for 4 years, Japanese for 1 year & Malay for 2 month:)) I wanna learn Cantonese, Hakka & Minnan:))
Thanks.

[Guest]

Hi Niuc:

I'm really happy that you like the dictionaries. I was overjoyed myself when I found them because I had already spent several weeks searching for books on/ in Hokkien in both Malaysia and Singapore and had found virtually nothing.

Luckily this seems to change: When I entered "Hokkien" into the search engine three years ago, only one or two short word lists would come up. This has improved dramatically, mainly due to the efforts made in Taiwan.
Yesterday, I found some references to modern books in Hokkien on the edutech website, maybe they are interesting to you, too:

http://www.edutech.org.tw/January-2001-T.htm
http://www.edutech.org.tw/Publn/Liim-KH-2.htm

I do not have a Chinese web-browser yet, so I cannot say anything about the quality of the material presented there (the romanization is kind of queer but you can't be too picky). There are also some links from the taiwanese course at Berkeley:

http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~taioanoe/

I share your hope that efforts like these will one day lead to Hokkien receiving the same appreciation as Mandarin and Cantonese, not necessarily confined to Taiwan. ":-)" is definitely right that the strong economic advantages that speaking Cantonese, Mandarin or English offer, will prompt a lot of Hokkien to give up their language. I think, however, that this might be even more so because a lot of native speakers (I might be wrong there) don't even seem to regard Hokkien as a proper language in the first place (in the sense of a heritage that you would be proud of). Whenever I indicated that I wanted to learn Hokkien I got this deeply puzzeled expression accompanied by the invariable: "You want to do WHAT?". I personally think that Hokkien is not only a proper language but also a very intersting one ...

This disdain for Hokkien, however, is not too surprising, as it has never been taught in schools (at least that I know of) and most people would not know how to write it, at least outside of Taiwan. This might not necessarily be a recent problem: I once read a very interesting book by a German translator who had travelled all over China in the mid 1800s and spoken to many people (including the emperor himself). He gives a detailed description of the different fangyan and if I remember correctly he notes that in all Xiamen area he had not found "two scholars who would agree on how to <b style="color:black;background-color:#ffff66">write Hokkien</b> in Chinese characters" ... Whether pinyin or Hanzi or whatever, a solid stock of written materials might change that negative perception of Hokkien.

Niuc, my name is indeed Italian but I was born in Germany (my father is South-American). Right now, I live and work in the United States. I'm afraid my knowledge of Chinese is nowhere close to where you think it is but I'll keep on trying What kind of business line are you in?

Best regards,
Aurelio

[Guest]

Right now I'm struggling with the old Anglo-Saxon in the Beowulf.

The story of Beowulf with the customs were very similar the living of old time in the southern Hokkian. Some old Hokkian words can find in this epic.

SaxonLeorf

[timluo]

towel = 浴巾 'ik kun'
bathroom = 浴間 'ik king'
bath = 'cang ik', some write it as 沖浴, it 廈門方言詞典 as (水on石) 浴.

I don't know if there is another word for soap except the loan word 'sap bun'. Both 廈英大辭典 and 廈門方言詞典 have 'sap/sat/siap/suat bun', written as 雪文 or 澀文.

Indeed the soap is also called tê-kho˙in Minnan and Douglas' Amoy dictionary has that entry as well. In that Amoy dictionry, it also has the entry bâ-bui. And it says it's a Zhangzhou expression and the definition is "a fruit used as a soap." This expression seems to be obsolete now.

Tim

[Mark Yong]

I have heard the term pŭi chô 肥皂 used among some Malaysian Hokkiens.

[ong]

a rare minnan thesis from Hongkong
http://sunzi1.lib.hku.hk/hkuto/record/B31948728

[ong]

http://sunzi1.lib.hku.hk/hkuto/resultDe ... =20&disp=f

[ong]

https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/15071

[ong]

sorry,bad link
https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/15971