Hi, Niuc,niuc wrote:I think there are still quite a number of people especially in Taiwan and Fujian who still can recite classical works using literary reading. Unfortunately most young people are not able to do that. Indeed literary quotes like those won't be easily understood by most native Hokkien speakers. Even in the old times, I think only those who went to school or were rich enough to have private lessons [私塾 sy1-siok8] that could easily understand those quotes.
Something a little closer to home - would you reckon that many native Hokkien speakers in Malaysia/Singapore/Indonesia can understand the Hokkien news? Most of the terms used in the Hokkien news are actually modern terminologies as used in Mandarin, but using Hokkien pronunciation.
The irony is that for the educated people today who understand these modern terms, they would most likely have learnt them first in Mandarin form, not in Hokkien - which is the opposite of the common everyday words, which native Hokkien speakers first learn in Hokkien before transferring them to Mandarin during schooling life.
I doubt there are many native Hokkien speakers alive today who still belong to the generation that learnt the Chinese written language using Hokkien as the base, since Mandarin became the medium of Chinese instruction around the 1920's to 30's, which would put them above the age of 90 (my maternal grandmother falls under this category - she's a native Hakka speaker, reads the Chinese newspapers regularly, but knows no Mandarin).