Old-fashioned Vocabulary in Penang Hokkien

[Ah-bin]

This is one of my favourite things about Penang Hokkien, all those nice old words that are cherished in Penang but almost forgotten in China and Taiwan.
two that immediately spring to mind are:

ang-mO 红毛 "westerner" current in Vietnam, Japan and Korea, as well as South China from the Ming onwards, but seldom used outside Chinese communities in Southeast Asia

pe-koan 批关"post office". At least I think that's how to write it.

Then there is tong-kim 当今 is understood in Amoy but seldom used any more, so I was told.

Someone tried to test my knowledge in Amoy once by telling me "I bet you don't know what chi-chui means". He said it was a word only older people used, and was surprised when I pointed out to him that it is still alive and well in Penang. I think they say siaN-lang there a lot now.

I've picked up "kha-kho" for "prison" off this forum, and I don't think that is used any more.

风车 hong-chia for "car" is another nice one. I think they still say that in Singapore too.

Has anyone ever heard "ong-ke" 王家 for "government" or 衙门 ge-muiN for "government office". These are examples of Chinese vocabulary from imperial times that survived into the first half of the twentieth century outside China (the second one in American Cantonese) but I don't know if they manageed to make it into this century.

So even though some people get annoyed with rojak Hokkien, they can still be grateful to Penangites for taking good care of some nice old words.

[SimL]

Hi Ah-bin,

Besides "ang-mO" and "tong-kim", the only other one which is familiar to me is "kha-kho", and in that particular case, I use it with two differences. 1) Pronunciation: I say "kha7-ku1" - so there is the non-aspiration of the initial in the second syllable, and the "-u" instead of "-o", and 2) I don't use it on its own, to mean "a prison", but only in the phrase "ce7-kha7-ku1" (= "to BE in prison"), as in "i tioh-be saN ni ce7-kha7-ku1" (= "he has to go to / be in prison for 3 years").

But thanks for posting these. I agree that it's very nice when a "remote" variant of a language/dialect preserves forms which have otherwise been lost in the "main" language/dialect.

[Mark Yong]

Ah-bin wrote:
Then there is tong-kim 当今 is understood in Amoy but seldom used any more, so I was told.

Strange... I thought 當今 tŏng-kīm was the standard word for 'now' in most of the Hokkien variants.

There is another version of 'now' that I often hear in Penang, but nowhere else, i.e. th'ān-ā (趁仔?), though I suspect that it should specifically mean 'right now/at this very moment'.

Ah-bin wrote:
pe-koan 批关"post office". At least I think that's how to write it.

Could it be 批館 instead?

Can anyone tell me if the more common term for 'hospital' in Penang is 醫館 ī-kŭan or 老君厝 lō-kūn-ch'ŭ? (Note that I am making a very gross assumption here on the benzi for lō-kūn, which I am aware is very likely of non-Sinitic origin!)

[Ah-bin]

In Taiwan they use chit-ma and in Amoy chit-chun instead of tong-kim.

I won't pretend that I have ever heard "kha7-ku1" as "Kha-kho", I just couldn't remember exactly how to say it....

The tone for the koan in phe-koan was definitely a first tone, making it more likely to be 关 (apologies for the ugly simplified characters, I am in China at the moment)

Another one was tng-lang 唐人 for "Chinese" but I think the combinations like tng-lang-ji 唐人字 and tng-lang-cheh 唐人册 for "Chinese characters" and "Chinese education" are made in Malaysia. The old word for Chinese character was just ji 字 by itself, because most people didn't come into daily contact with other types of writing in old China.

By the way, how would one say the "most people" in the last sentence in Penang Hokkien?

te-ce is "the most", but is there a saying toa-po-hun 大部分 in PGHK?

I think I would try to express the whole sentence as：

In-ui Ko-ca-si toa-ti Tng-soaN e toa-po-hun e lang m-si tak-tak jit e khoaN-tioh pa-le-khoan e ji e.
因为古早时toa-ti唐山个大部分个人m是逐逐日会看着别le款个字。

[Mark Yong]

kh'ā-chĕ 較[多]

So, your sentence (character-for-character) would be:
因為古早時蹛佇唐山較[多]儂* [不]是逐逐日會去看別[ ]款[之]字.

Notes to my syntax:
1. [X] means in the absence of the actual benzi, I am using a commonly-accepted synonym.
2. [ ] means a commonly-accepted synonym does not exist, and the morpheme is peculiar to the dialect under consideration.
3. A * following the character means the character is the most likely benzi, but its validity is still questionable.

[Andrew]

Someone tried to test my knowledge in Amoy once by telling me "I bet you don't know what chi-chui means". He said it was a word only older people used, and was surprised when I pointed out to him that it is still alive and well in Penang. I think they say siaN-lang there a lot now.

Interesting. Do they still use to2-loh8 for where and la5-sam5 for dirty? Those were the Penang words I recognised in an article on the influence of the Amoy Bible in Taiwan.

[Andrew]

Ah-bin wrote:
Then there is tong-kim 当今 is understood in Amoy but seldom used any more, so I was told.

Strange... I thought 當今 tŏng-kīm was the standard word for 'now' in most of the Hokkien variants.

There is another version of 'now' that I often hear in Penang, but nowhere else, i.e. th'ān-ā (趁仔?), though I suspect that it should specifically mean 'right now/at this very moment'.

As you say, than-a is more like now at this moment and tong-kim is more like nowadays.

Can anyone tell me if the more common term for 'hospital' in Penang is 醫館 ī-kŭan or 老君厝 lō-kūn-ch'ŭ? (Note that I am making a very gross assumption here on the benzi for lō-kūn, which I am aware is very likely of non-Sinitic origin!)

No idea. But 病厝 pEN-chu is another option.

[Ah-bin]

To-loh is the common term in Amoy but not Taiwan, there they use to-ui.

I heard Lap-sap for dirty in Taiwan, but I wasn't in Amoy long enough (or in dirty enough places) to hear what they said there

Also thanks Mark for the character transcription and grammr correction

[SimL]

Ah-bin's sentence:

In-ui Ko-ca-si toa-ti Tng-soaN e toa-po-hun e lang m-si tak-tak jit e khoaN-tioh pa-le-khoan e ji e

Mark's amendment:

In-ui Ko-ca-si toa-ti Tng-soaN kha ce lang m-si tak-tak jit e khi khoaN pa-le-khoan e ji

Sim's amendments:

In-ui ku-ca toa-ti Tng-soaN kha ce lang m-si (kong) tak-tak jit u khoaN-tioh pa-le-khoan e ji

or

In-ui ku-ca toa-ti Tng-soaN kha ce lang bo (kong) tak-tak jit khoaN-tioh pa-le-khoan e ji

Comments:

1. I'm not sure about the capital "K-" in "Ko" in Ah-bin's original sentence. Was it perhaps a typo for "kO"? I have "ku-ca" 舊早 "former (times)" and "kO-ca" 古早 "ancient (times)". Perhaps in this context, "ku-ca" is better? [BTW, I'm only talking about my daily usage of Hokkien as a spoken language - I'm guessing at the hanzi here.]

2. I say 有看着 rather than 会看着 because here we're speaking of people "co-incidentally" (rather than "wanting to / intentionally") coming into contact with other scripts, but this is very small difference in nuance, hardly significant.

3. I tend to use "kong" in these cases a lot: "m-si kong" (= "it's not the case that"), "si kong" (= "it's the case that"). To me, it's very colloquial usage, and I'm not sure how much of it is influenced by English. But this "kong" is always optional, which is why I put it in brackets.

4. I would be tempted to write "pa(t)-le" as 別之 or 別的, and leave it up to the reader to work out from context that, in combination with "別", the 之/的 is read as "le" in PgHk.

---

醫館 ī-kŭan or 老君厝 lō-kūn-ch'ŭ

I didn't know 醫館, not even passively, and 老君厝 is what I say, so that might suggest that (in certain segments of the PgHk speaking population, at any rate), the latter is more common.

SimL

[Mark Yong]

Hi, Sim,

As always, well-spotted!

SimL wrote:
I have "ku-ca" 舊早 "former (times)" and "kO-ca" 古早 "ancient (times)".

That is also my understanding based on my personal exposure to Penang Hokkien. There is another term that I hear only in Penang Hokkien - tēng-păng or tēng-băng (頂 [?]), which I nornally hear used in the context of "in the past / back then".

SimL wrote:
I didn't know 醫館, not even passively, and 老君厝 is what I say, so that might suggest that (in certain segments of the PgHk speaking population, at any rate), the latter is more common.

I tend to hear lō-kūn-ch'ŭ 老君厝 significantly more often than ī-kŭan 醫館, too. The reason I brought up ī-kŭan 醫館 was because when I first heard it in Penang, I often wondered whether it was because it was a way to get around the problem of pronouncing 醫院 in Penang Hokkien, as the two characters would end up quite ambiguously as i-i. This probably explains why Penang's 南華醫院 off Green Lane is called Lam Wah Ee (it is Romanised as such on the signboard outside the hospital) - could it be that the 'Ee' is a gradual fusion of what really are two separate words 醫院 i-i?

Similar 'word substitution' phenomena exist in other dialects - e.g. the word for 錢 is never used in Shanghainese for 'money', as it sounds exactly like 賤 ('cheap', but in the derogatory sense) in Shanghainese - instead, they use the colloquial term tong-di 銅鈿.

It does appear that in general, Penang Hokkien tends to avoid the use of the word 院 i, possibly for disambiguation purposes. As another example, an old folks' home is referred to as 老人間 lău-lăng-kēng, rather than the standard term 老人院 lău-lăng-i.

PS. Speaking of 老人 lău-láng... anyone recall this one: 老人麥 lău-lăng-bæk for good ol' Quaker Oats (a bit off-topic, I realise... given that this thread is supposed to address old-fashioned vocabulary)?

Ah-bin wrote:
To-loh is the common term in Amoy but not Taiwan, there they use to-ui.

I have heard all the above variants plus some more combinations in Penang Hokkien... to-lo, to-ui, to-lo-ui, and occasionally to-peng. No idea what the benzi for 'to' is, though. Usage-wise, it appears to be a synonym for the Classical Chinese 孰 'which one (usually out of several known options)', as in "to-(lo)-jit-le?" - the equivalent morpheme in Modern Standard Chinese being 哪.

Ah-bin wrote:
Do they still use ... la5-sam5 for dirty?

Yes, they do. That, and a more colloquial term 'æk-æk'.