Do sy guan - Library question

[jilang]

Thanks, duaaagiii, for clearing that up and giving info in such detail. Im assuming that when you said 书 was su that it depends on your type of Hokkien because I seem to think it's sy though I might be wrong.

jilang,is it that hard to answer what kind of minnan you are?

Sorry, ong, I've never being asked that and especially not in the way of asking about my grandfather!

But now I'd wish to know, do people use 书 as much as 册 or is 册more common and 书 just for particular phrases such as 图书馆?

[duaaagiii]

You're welcome. Yeah, I am not familiar with the dialectical variations of su1.

In my previous post, there were two different prounciations for 書 / 书: the colloquial chu1 and the literary su1. chu1 and chheh4 are generally interchangable--which term one prefers depends on the dialect. For example, the following two terms are used for "backpack":

書包 / 书包 : chu1 pau1
冊包 / 册包 : chheh4 pau1

However, su1 and chheh4 (and chhek4, the literary pronunciation of 冊 / 册) are generally not interchangable.

圖書館 / 图书馆 : too5 su1 koan2, library
書法 / 书法 : su1 hoat4, calligraphy


There is a saying that people who prefer chu1 over chheh4 like to say:

traditional: 讀「冊」，讀「冊」；愈讀愈慼。
simplified: 读“册＂，读“册＂；愈读愈戚。
thak8 chheh4, thak8 chheh4; ju2 thak8 ju2 chheh4
"The more one reads/studies, the more fed up one gets."

[jilang]

Thanks, duaagiii, that was very helpful.

[niuc]

Happy Chinese New Year to all! 新年快樂 Sin1-ni5 khuai3-lok8 [It's a bit late, but it's not 上元 Siong7-guan5 yet, so it's still 新正 Sin1-cia*1]

Duaaagiii, glad to have you in this forum.

In my variant, colloquial pronunciation for 書 is cy1 (POJ: tsü1/chü1) so it doesn't rhyme with 朱 cu1 (tsu1/chu1). The interesting thing is that in my variant, its literary pronunciation is su1 instead of sy1. According to Douglas' dictionary, Cuanciu variant has cy1 and sy1 respectively.

Regarding 書 and 冊, my variant uses both 讀書 and 讀冊. And... my folk pronounce 圖書館 as to`5-cy1-kuan2 [instead of to`5-su1-kuan2].

[SimL]

Hi Old and New Friends!

Jilang and Duaaagiii: I would really like to welcome you both to this Forum. It's great to see a bit more life here the last few days: lots of interesting questions and discussions. May I ask what your backgrounds are? Duaaagiii, you seem particularly knowledgeable about Chinese in general and Hokkien in particular. Where are you both based?

I grew up in Penang, and migrated with my parents to Australia when I was 14. Being from an English-educated family, my Hokkien is very limited. Until 2 years ago, I only knew about 100 Chinese characters (from a private tutor, 1 hour a week for 1 year, at the age of 12 or 13). Since then, I've done about 1.5 years of Mandarin evening classes, and now know about 900 characters. Nevertheless, I've always been very interested in Hokkien, and knew about POJ even in my teens. I love all the interesting aspects of Hokkien, like the fact that it has post-vocalic stops, its (reasonably) complex tone-sandhi, and the large numbers of characters with both a literary and colloquial pronunciation.

Niuc: lovely to see you here again too. As I mentioned in my mail, the "fish" topic will soon be getting more input.

Cheers,
Sim.

[duaaagiii]

Thanks for the warm welcome!

About myself: I am Taiwanese American, born and raised in the U.S. Perhaps I should warn people in my posts that my knowledge of the language is limited to the dialects spoken in Taiwan... so please excuse me for referring to it as "Taiwanese".

Here is a list of my self-perceived strengths and weakness, to give an idea of how I may or may not be able to contribute:

Strengths

• Knowledge of Chinese characters, traditional (preferred) and simplified, as well as POJ, TLPA, the recent Taiwanese romanization standard, etc.
• English and Mandarin at native speaker level
• Knowledge of bits and pieces of other Asian languages: Cantonese, Japanese, Korean
• Interest in songs, poetry, and Classical Chinese

Weaknesses

• I need more practice speaking the language
• Tones: I need to memorize more tones and figure out how tones work beyond the basic tone sandhi scheme
• My Taiwanese a blurred mishmash of northern (泉-leaning) and southern (漳-leaning) Taiwanese dialects
• My knowledge of any Hokkien different from Taiwanese is very limited
• I am not very familiar with IPA

[ong]

I think you should intoduce yourself properly .For example 连战＝龙海榜山，王金平＝龙海角美.
I find that in Taiwanese they even have associations like nanan,huian,etc.That is very strange to me.

[SimL]

Hi Duaaagiii,

Very interesting to read about your background. I guess there are 4 main areas where some basic knowledge is useful, when reading and taking part in this Forum: Hokkien, Mandarin/Knowledge-of-Characters, English, and Linguistics. Many of us are only good in at most 3 of the 4! My Hokkien is limited*, and my Mandarin/Knowledge-of-Characters very limited. I guess I'm pretty ok in the other 2.

Of all the regular participants here, I think Andrew has probably the best coverage of all 4 areas. I believe he even wrote the Wikipedia article on Penang Hokkien , which impressed me no end.

I've been a bit dormant in the last half year (most of my energy went into learning Mandarin in that period), but I should be starting up posting here more regularly pretty soon. Please feel free to mail me directly (you can easily do that via this forum by clicking on a poster's nick in the "table of contents" and then selecting "pm" (private message) if you have any questions about IPA which you feel might not be appropriate for the Forum.

Cheers,
Sim.

*: My Hokkien is Penang Hokkien (with lots of borrowed Malay and English words), and is restricted to just "street and home" vocabulary, mostly. I just bought myself a copy of the Douglas-Barclay dictionary (Chinese New Year present to myself!), and it's quite a revelation for me to see listings for terms like "election", "economic activity", "submarine" etc!

[jilang]

Hi to both of you.

I find that I can relate to you quite a lot, Sim. I find that my hokkien is somewhat limited as I also grew up outside of Malaysia where I find that everybody who is Chinese either speak Mandarin or Cantonese and people who have a Hokkien background don't know any Hokkien so I enjoy participating on these forums. My Hokkien is all from speaking to my family so I speak mainly EngChun and Huinn Huann with a slight mix of other types of Hokkien, Malay( though I'm trying to stop this habit) and English (I can't seem to help saying "and then" in English in my Hokkien). If you don't mind, which part of Australia did you grow up in?

[SimL]

Hi Jilang,

Thanks for that info about yourself.

>> which part of Australia did you grow up in?

I grew up in Darwin. My father wasn't keen on "cold climates" when we migrated to Australia, so he chose the Tropical North to go and live in .

I lived for about 15 years in Darwin the the 70's-80's (with a 4-year period studying Maths in Canberra). Then I moved to the Netherlands in the late 80's, and have lived here ever since.

Where did you grow up, and where did your parents come from in Malaysia?

Great to have you here.

Cheers,
Sim.