Classical Chinese and Hokkien

[Mark Yong]

[] ai-LIN vs. simmih-LANG []
What is 'Ai-lin' in Character?

I believe the 'lin' (or 'jin') is 人. I do not know what the 'ai' is. I would have thought that 何 would be the closest, but phonetically it does not match.

[Mark Yong]

In Michael A. Fuller's "An Introduction to Literary Chinese", the author examines (pages 262-263) the close relationship in the pronunciations of the following triplets of words:

I/me: 吾, 我, 余, 予, 卬
You: 汝, 你, 爾, 若, 而, 乃

The re-construction of the Middle Chinese and tentative Old Chinese pronunciations show that the words in the same classes (1st person, 2nd person) tended to have very similar pronunciations which are now no longer preserved in modern Mandarin (but still detectable in some dialects).

[ong]

汝 =you in minnan is actually from 女。

[Andrew]

In Michael A. Fuller's "An Introduction to Literary Chinese", the author examines (pages 262-263) the close relationship in the pronunciations of the following triplets of words:

I/me: 吾, 我, 余, 予, 卬
You: 汝, 你, 爾, 若, 而, 乃

Indeed. Focussing too much on the written characters can detract from an understanding of the development of the language. The search for 本子 can be misleading, since people have always borrowed characters with other meanings to represent the spoken word - it is the spoken language which has primacy.

[NgKY]

汝 =you in minnan is actually from 女。

Yes, "汝" was used for substitute of "女". "汝" should be something with j- in Hokkien. (hm... isn't it a name of a river?)
Hokkien avoided to use "女" as "female" because it will confuse with "you".

[Aurelio]

Hm,

Looks like I created some confusion with the 'ailin' Don't forget I learn half of my Hokkien from Karaoke VCDs. That's 愛人 la! The point was that 人 is sometimes pronounced jin/ lin and sometimes lang5 (depending on whether it's literary or colloquial). Have seen, though, a different character used for lang5 - which makes quite a lot of sense, as otherwise hujinlang (= furen, spouse) would otherwise require two 人 behind in sequence ...

Regards,
Aurelio

[Aurelio]

Ahem,

Thou shalt not write posts and talk at the same time. I meant: "because it would require two 人 behind one another in sequence".

About the personal pronouns: Wouldn't be surprised if those different forms with similar initials were actually different case forms of an older stage of the Chinese language that still knew inflections, like in French: Tu, te, toi.

About the classical language not being used as a spoken language because of not writing all particles necessary - nope, don't think so. From what I've seen, Classical Chinese has it's own set of particles, auxilliary verbs, markers etc. just like any language. It's not some sort of abstract system to write down ideas that needs 'translation' into a real language - looks pretty much like a real language to me, so I did never quite get why some people claim it was never a spoken language ...

Best regards,
Aurelio

[Mark Yong]

Hm,
Looks like I created some confusion with the 'ailin' Don't forget I learn half of my Hokkien from Karaoke VCDs. That's 愛人 la! The point was that 人 is sometimes pronounced jin/ lin and sometimes lang5 (depending on whether it's literary or colloquial). Have seen, though, a different character used for lang5 - which makes quite a lot of sense, as otherwise hujinlang (= furen, spouse) would otherwise require two 人 behind in sequence ...

I believe the character for 'lang5' that you are referring to is 儂. In the Wu dialect, it is the equivalent of the 2nd person, i.e. 你. In Old Chinese, it used to refer to the 1st person.

The term I have heard used for 'spouse' in the local Malaysian Minnan news at 3pm is simply 'hu jin' 婦人, without the 'lang5'. Possibly because the literal term does not require the suffix -lang5. At one time, I used to think that the Hokkien term for wife "bO" was the colloquial pronunciation of 婦, but somewhere along the way I found out that I was wrong.

Regards,
Mark

[ong]

The news said hujin simply because she is followed the mandarin version.It must be hu jin lang.
prof.Ang book ,闽南语 ang boo 由公母转注而来，wendu for 母 is boo.
husband is kang 公 becomes ang .
司馬遷﹐韓信 。。。。。信釣於城下﹐諸母漂﹐有一母見信飢﹐飯信。
這裡諸母是一群女人之義。

[Mark Yong]

Hi, Hong (I am guessing it is you! ),

Thanks for the insights. The 本字 you use for 'bO' (wife) 母 is interesting. The two Minnan books I have (廈門方言志 and 閩南研究 by 陳章太&李如龍) use the character 媒, which is also the same character they use for cha bO (woman). Correspondingly, ang (husband) is written as 翁 in these two books. Hmmm...

Is the bO (wife) and cha bO the same bO? If so, is it 母 as mentioned?

Regards,
Mark