help with romanisation for Penang Hokkien

[midorigreenwood]

hello, my first post.... so I'll give you some background about myself first.

I'm a chinese malaysian who emmigrated to Australia 20 odd years ago as a child and wasn't really taught how to speak my mother tongue of hokkien properly....

I affectionately refer to myself as a "brain damaged" hokkien speaker as I have enough innate vocabulary to roughly make out what is happening when my parents or other relatives are talking to each other but I don't have enough understanding of the sentence structures to speak fluently.

As it happens, I've just finished a long stint of hellish work schedule where I was toiling for 70 hour weeks and finally found a 6 month stretch of free time where I can do whatever I want (no I wasn't fired )

Being the stereotypical child of an immigrant....... I've finally reached that midlife crisis stage (mid twenties) of searching for my cultural roots and heritage so I've made it a point to belatedly learn my hometown dialect properly.

As many of you probably know....... penang hokkien isn't the easiest language/dialect to learn as a student, however I have some experience learning other languages (yes, its embarrassing.... a chinese who can't speak any chinese but can speak japanese......and even some korean).

My plan of action is to use my old language study textbooks as a guide and to follow my parents around like a paparazzi photographer to pick their brains on how to say "this and that", recording their responses with a dictaphone.

However (yes finally to the point of the post....sorry) I would like to keep a written diary to record my studies for posterity and there is the really hard part......... penang hokkien seems to be mainly a spoken dialect....how to write it down?

do any posters have suggestions on a romanisation system that I could learn....or maybe a book to help me along?

[Mark Yong]

Welcome aboard, midorigreenwood.

Some essentials: Firstly, the Hokkien dialect is part of the larger family of Chinese languages. Thus, the Hokkien dialect - like any other Chinese dialect - was historically written using Chinese characters. The reason I say 'was' is because regretfully, the Hokkien dialect ceased to be read and written using Chinese characters in the 1920's, with the advent of Mandarin as the written standard.

Having said that, it is still possible to write many Penang Hokkien words using Chinese characters. The reason I say 'many' is because:

1. To begin with, the Hokkien dialect in general comprises a significant proportion of morphemes that have no known Chinese character for them (one classic example is th'it-th'o, "to play"). Sinologists put the estimate of the number of Hokkien morphemes that can be written using Chinese characters at only around 70%.

2. The Penang Hokkien dialect, in particular, has absorbed a significant number of words of non-Sinitic origin, e.g. Malay and English. This further reduces the proportion of word that can be written using Chinese characters, and increases the difficulty of writing the dialect using purely Chinese characters.

So, to answer your question on how Penang Hokkien is written. Generally speaking, it isn't written - it is a spoken dialect. But if one had to write it down (and by that, I presume you mean word-for-word), I would imagine that it would be a mixture of 60-70% Chinese characters and 30-40% Romanised alphabet.

At this point, I am going to assume that you do not read Chinese. So, that essentially leaves only the Romanisation option. There is a so-called 'standard Romanisation' for the Hokkien dialect used by the missionaries, but this is based on the Amoy variant, not the Chiang Chiu variant (which Penang Hokkien is based upon). You can find examples of it in Nicolas C. Bodman's "Spoken Amoy Hokkien Vols. 1 & 2", available via Amazon.

I will not pull the wool over your eyes and pretend that your task to learn Penang Hokkien at this stage, especially given that you are not physically in Penang, will be an easy task. Having said that, it is not impossible (I myself am not a native speaker - I learn the dialect from scratch from my 6 years' working life in Penang), but will take some work on your part. In no particular order, I offer the following suggestions:

1. Start investing in books. Assuming you do not read Chinese, I shall limit the list to the following two for now:
i. Nicolas C. Bodman "Spoken Amoy Hokkien Vol. 1 & 2" Spoken Language Services (1987)
ii. Tan Choon Hoe "P.H.D. - Penang Hokkien Dialect"

2. There is actually a Penang Hokkien podcase at http://penanghokkien.com. Get on the Web and start listening to the programmes on a regular basis. Download the MP3 files if need be, and re-listen to them in your spare time.

3. Get your parents to speak to you in Penang Hokkien, and force yourself to respond only in Penang Hokkien. That's precisely how I learnt - just by listening and speaking without fear of embarrassment. Yes, the dictaphone is a good idea.

4. Keep a notebook or MS Word file, where you note down new words as you go along. Keep the file as a living, ever-growing document.

5. Visit this Hokkien Forum regularly! It is stock-piled with posts and articles on the Hokkien dialect. One of the advantages of living in the 21st century: The Internet. One of the senior Forum members, "Sim", is a native Penang Hokkien speaker, and has put up a large number of posts in the Forum on Penang Hokkien vocabulary - I suggest you look these up.

6. While not essential, I personally find that the knowledge of Chinese characters helps in learning the Hokkien dialect - and any Chinese dialect, in general. The other Forum members here will bear witness to my manic obsession for finding the original, etymologically-correct Chinese characters for Hokkien words - and the more obscure, the better!

7. Visit Penang. YES. Spend a couple of weeks there. And I am not talking about visiting the malls. Go out into the streets. The real streets where the real Penang Chinese community lives, where Penang Hokkien - and not English - thrives. Visit the markets, the old shops, the coffee-shops, the clan-houses, the temples, the back lanes. Buy a drink, sit down and listen to the people chatting. Keep your dictaphone and notebook with you. Do the math - listening to a whole community of speakers will enhance your vocabulary a lot faster than just listening to two speakers (i.e. your parents), right?

Hope that gets you started. Good luck.

[midorigreenwood]

hi mark

thanks for your interesting reply

I'm on the way to getting hold of Tan Choon Hoe's book but the Amoy Hokkien one seems like a useful suggestion too.

as for learning chinese characters........ is it useful that I've learnt most of the japanese (jouyou) standard kanji chinese characters already?..... there are about 2000 and there are japanese and chinese readings for each but I don't know how similar it is to hokkien or any other modern chinese language.

yeah, I've been downloading up on the penang hokkien podcast after previous googling........ its quite a unexpected listen..... I was expecting something boring......maybe like a malaysian version of talk back radio... but the episode I listened to had something to do with toliets and pooping. It was quite a fun listen in the end even if I didn't understand everything that was going on. One of the hosts sounds alittle crazy though......had a maniacal laugh like the Joker from Batman

[Mark Yong]

midorigreenwood wrote:
as for learning chinese characters........ is it useful that I've learnt most of the japanese (jouyou) standard kanji chinese characters already?..... there are about 2000 and there are japanese and chinese readings for each but I don't know how similar it is to hokkien or any other modern chinese language.

Given the nature of Chinese characters (as compared to a fully-alphabetical written language), any number of Chinese characters that you learn will help, and the more the better.

As for your having learnt most of the 2,000 常用漢字 Joyo Kanji will be useful to your learning the Hokkien language or not, I would love to say 'yes'. However, as you probably have figured out by now, 2,000 characters is barely entry level for reading Chinese, and you will probably need another 1,000-odd more in order to properly read through a page of the newspapers - without even going into character combinations to form words.

There is another complication: While many of the basic characters you have learnt will be cognates with Hokkien (e.g. the numbers, 大 big, 小 small, 人 man, 馬 horse), there are quite a substantial number that, strictly speaking, are not cognate with the Hokkien equivalents.

For example: The word for the 3rd person "he/she" in Hokkien is i (pronounced ee), whose Chinese character is 伊. In Modern Standard Chinese, which is based on Mandarin, the 3rd person is ta4, written as 他. Nowadays, no one writes the 3rd person as 伊 anymore (except in very special circumstances), and i is often just written as 他 (this character is also pronounced ta in Hokkien, but with a lower tone).

For beginning students in Hokkien who do not read Chinese (nor do they intend to embark on a serious study of the written language) and are more interested in just spoken Hokkien, Bodman does not advocate the study of Chinese characters as a tool for learning Hokkien. At least for the initial stage, I concur with Bodman. But if you are able to pick up a decent number of Chinese characters, it will help in your learning, as you will be able to quickly recognise common morphemes used in different character combinations.

For example:
Telephone is tien-ua, written as 電話
Television is tien-si-ki, written as 電視機
Converse is kong-ua, written as 講話
Short-sightedness is kin-si, written as 近視

If you can recognise the character for 'electricity', i.e. 電 tien you will be able to recognise that it is a common morpheme used for both 'telephone' and 'television', rather than memorising both tien-ua and tien-si-ki in isolation.

Similarly, recognising the character for 'speech', i.e. 話 ua and 'vision' 視 si will allow to you see the connection between the word pairs 'telephone' tien-ua/converse kong-ua and television tien-si-ki/short-sightedness kin-si.

But for now, insofar as your learning to speak Penang Hokkien is concerned, I suggest you do not burden yourself with Chinese characters yet, and concentrate on listening/speaking skills, using Romanisation as your written tool. Put it this way: Tan Choon Hoe has written a fairly neat book on Penang Hokkien, and to the best of my knowledge, he is not educated in the Chinese written language.

[ong]

Forgive me for saying how the hell we can recommed people to learn this so called Penang Hokkien
Do you suggest people to learn wrong pronunciation like John Ong in Penanghokkien?
关于 =guan he is totally wrong.
处男 =cho lam is yet another big mistake
People in North Malaysia always end their sentences with 来 lai.I can hear a penang girl use lai for ten times in just a simple conversation.Mind you this is just cantonese.
If we want to learn hokkien just learn it properly by listening to radio in China and buy some books.
(at least 50% of zhangzhou area also use ue 话 like amoy and quanzhou)

[Mark Yong]

Hi, Hong,

Being a self-professed linguistic purist myself, I fully understand where you are coming from. Admittedly, the Hokkien used by John Ong in his podcast is far from perfect, and Tan Choon Hoe's book is in no sense a 'textbook'.

The only reason I am (albeit very reluctantly) making a compromise in this case, is because midorigreenwood here is a special case of a learner who:
1. Does not read or write Chinese
2. Probably does not speak any other Chinese dialect
3. Is trying to learn the Hokkien dialect from a place where the dialect is not spoken or taught
4. Has only two sources to rely on - his/her parents, both of whom speak Penang Hokkien

In an ideal situation, of course I would advocate that midorigreenwood get proper textbooks and dictionaries from China, listen to the Minnan online news broadcast, and learn up the benzi for all the Hokkien words. But right this moment, he/she is just not ready yet.

For a non-Chinese-educated, I would have recommended that midorigreenwood get a copy of Cairstair Douglas' Amoy-English Dictionary. But we all know that dictionary went out of print more than 100 years ago, and the only copy I know on sale is going for... what, USD$1,000 at EBay?

So, imperfect as the method is (and I do admit, it is imperfect), I would rather midorigreenwood start off by picking up words and phrases by this empirical method first, and slowly correct them as he/she goes along. My worry is, if we start bombarding midorigreenwood with books and dictionaries by 李如龍, 周長揖, etc. now, he/she will give up in seven days flat.

And once he/she has reached a good-enough basic proficiency, then we can migrate him/her out of John Ong's podcast, and feed him/her with the good stuff from China!

Comments/suggestions welcome.

[Mark Yong]

关于 =guan he is totally wrong.

Yeah, I know... they mix it up with 關係. I have even heard 關係 pronounced kŭan-hŭe (i.e. the hŭe is pronounced like 貨).

Another one they always get wrong is 破病. Instead of p'ūa-păe, they always say k'ūa-păe.

I still believe that if Penang Hokkiens were educated to map Hokkien words to their proper 漢字 hanzi, they would not be in this predicament.

[Andrew]

At this point, I am going to assume that you do not read Chinese. So, that essentially leaves only the Romanisation option. There is a so-called 'standard Romanisation' for the Hokkien dialect used by the missionaries, but this is based on the Amoy variant, not the Chiang Chiu variant (which Penang Hokkien is based upon). You can find examples of it in Nicolas C. Bodman's "Spoken Amoy Hokkien Vols. 1 & 2", available via Amazon.

The standard missionary romanisation is not the same as that used by Bodman - although Bodman's is probably a better system, the missionary romanisation is the most widely used. One needs an understanding of tone sandhis to convert between the two.

E.g., the same conversation in missionary romanisation and Bodman:

早起的報紙來未？— 猶未。 毋知怎樣今仔日遮晏。
tsá-khí--ê pò-tsoá laî--bē? — á-bē. m̄-tsai tsaíⁿ-iū kin-á-ji't chiah-oàⁿ.
câ-khì+ ē poù-cuà+ laí be? — â bē. m̆ caī caî:-iū+ kīnâ-zît+ ciàq uă:

ii. Tan Choon Hoe "P.H.D. - Penang Hokkien Dialect"

Do you really recommend this? I can't find the review of this book, but I recall someone saying it had no tones and appalling romanisation.

[Mark Yong]

Do you really recommend this? I can't find the review of this book, but I recall someone saying it had no tones and appalling romanisation.

You are right, Andrew. Given an ideal situation, I would not recommend this book as a primary reference for Penang Hokkien, for the reasons you have correctly mentioned above. But also because:

1. It lacks the systematic rigour required of a reference "textbook" source for Penang Hokkien.

2. This is my personal bias - it has too many intrusions from Malay and English that forces the vocabulary to unnecessarily depart from its primarily Chiang Chiu Hokkien roots (by "unnecessarily", I mean that words which do have Hokkien equivalents are replaced by their Malay or English equivalents).

However, Tan Choon Hoe's books are the only two books available in the market for this rather-specialised topic, so for want of a better resource for our non-Chinese-educated new Forum member midorigreenwood, this will have to do for now (but to be used with a pinch of salt!). But given different circumstances, if midorigreenwood could read Chinese and wanted a more accurate reference for Chiang Chiu Hokkien, then I would have recommended 陳正統's 閩南話漳腔辭典 as a more systematic and accurate Romanised and tonal source (though, the accuracy of a sizeable number of the hanzi is questionable).

On this note, I plan to start a separate thread soon on the best way to educate people (be they native speakers or beginners) in Hokkien - taking into consideration:
1. The onslaught of Mandarin as the standard for Chinese in Malaysia and Singapore.
2. The loss of many etymologically-correct Hanzi for Hokkien words, resulting in the need for substitutes, e.g. incorrect Hanzi, Romanisation.
3. The intrusion of foreign substitute words (many of which I deem unnecessary).

** Update: Thread started at viewtopic.php?t=4021

[tadpole]

早起的報紙來未？— 猶未。 毋知怎樣今仔日遮晏。
tsá-khí--ê pò-tsoá laî--bē? — á-bē. m̄-tsai tsaíⁿ-iū kin-á-ji't chiah-oàⁿ.
câ-khì+ ē poù-cuà+ laí be? — â bē. m̆ caī caî:-iū+ kīnâ-zît+ ciàq uă:

Zalkil. e boczual. laai`veur? - Al veur, m zai znualyniur. gimn'al'rid. jiah wnuac;

I notice in your accent you say znailyniur, not znualyniur. But that's minor difference. Bodman does seem to point out the standing tone (tonal phrase-final) in your example, by using a (+) sign. That's a good thing. However, you did not show a way to mark the neutralized suffix in your "be?"

See http://www.tadpolenese.com/explanation , if you want more details on some concetps in writing Hokkien alphabetically. Romanized Hokkien is very readable (and writable,) but one has to do things correctly. There are some concepts that are independent of the romanization scheme used.

-- Little Tadpole