Hello duaaagiii and ong. Thank you for helping me out. The reason I was asking for slang terms is because I'm writing a comic bokk, and I'm using these terms as nicknames for my characters.
Are you guys here?
Is is easier to post the terms I would like tranlsations for and post sentences using these terms? Should I be more descriptive? Please let me know. Thasnk you.
Tie Han Rou Qing means strong guy with a soft heart. Is this a Taiwanese Hokkien term?
"Han Rou Qing" is definitely not Hokkien. It is most likely Mandarin. You can tell because a) it looks like PinYin b) it has an "r" at the start of a word which (as far as I know) never happens in Hokkien.
Also sometimes there might not be Hokkien terms for the English slang.
"Han Rou Qing" is definitely not Hokkien. It is most likely Mandarin. You can tell because a) it looks like PinYin b) it has an "r" at the start of a word which (as far as I know) never happens in Hokkien.
Also sometimes there might not be Hokkien terms for the English slang.
Hello jilang-thank you for responding.
I know how to say "lone wolf" in Taiwanese Mandarin, like when you call someone a "lone wolf", an independent person. Do you know how to say "lone wolf" in Taiwanese Hokkien?
It is nice to learn that you are going to use Hokkien to name the characters in your comic book, but I am curious to know how people would be able to understand (thus appreciate) them if they do not know (Romanized) Hokkien?
From your example of "lone wolf", it means just "孤狼" only. It does not imply "wilderness" as in "荒野". Translated in Hokkien it is "hong1 ya2 goo1 long5". I wonder how many people would understand?
Duaaagiii is correct, it is difficult to translate the individual terms correctly without any context because there is a deviation in the meaning after going through the process of translation, especially when you have translated (hence deviated) once from Chinese to English. Since you are more familiar with the Mandarin terms perhaps it is better for you to use the terms in Mandarin in your comic book.
By the way, Mandarin is Mandarin, there is no such thing as "Taiwanese Mandarin".
Another thing, can you pass duaaagiii's test?
I heard them called gangsters lo5-mua5 [written as 流氓]. I don't know why the characters are read as lo5-mua5 but that's what I usually heard. May be Duaaagiii or Heruler can help to explain further.
kanoo wrote:I heard them called gangsters lo5-mua5 [written as 流氓]. I don't know why the characters are read as lo5-mua5 but that's what I usually heard. May be Duaaagiii or Heruler can help to explain further.
鱸鰻 (loomuaa) (anguilla marmorata) originally is the name of a fish. It is probably a coincidence that it sounds close to 流氓 and acquired the same meaning (gangster). Anybody can make up stories on the precise etymology, but it will be hard to verify any of the claims, I think.
Coincidences do happen in languages. For instance, typhoon is a word with two separate origins, one from Arabic/Greek, another one from Hokkien/Chinese. If two languages are totally un-correlated with each other, and let us say there are 10,000 common words, then there will be around sqrt(10,000)=100 coincidences. That is, coincidences usually happen at ~1% level. Given any two languages, it will not be hard to find ~100 words with similar sounds and similar meanings.
