Old-fashioned Vocabulary in Penang Hokkien

[xng]

飲 is the right character which is also used by the cantonese. It has the right meaning and the colloquail sound is 'Lim' and literary sound is 'Im'. Some of these original characters can be found by just comparing with cantonese which is an older language than mandarin. I believe hakka also use 飲.

How do you get the pronunciation "lim" from 飲?

Coming from a cantonese background, I thought it's obvious that it's the same character used by the cantonese and maybe hakka.

The "Y" consonant in cantonese usually translate to either the "L" or the "I" consonant in minnan eg.

人 - Lin
忍 - Lim/Lun

[Mark Yong]

xng wrote:
Coming from a cantonese background, I thought it's obvious that it's the same character used by the cantonese and maybe hakka.

The "Y" consonant in cantonese usually translate to either the "L" or the "I" consonant in minnan eg.

人 - Lin
忍 - Lim/Lun

We have to be specific here. Not all y- initials in Cantonese map to l- initials in Minnan. The other two (2) cases are:

1. y- initials in Cantonese mapping to i- initials in Minnan. In this case, the corresponding initials in Hakka and Mandarin would both be y-. Examples would include 煙, 燕, 用, 由.

2. y- initials in Cantonese mapping to g- initials in Minnan. In this case, the corresponding initials in Hakka and Mandarin would be ng- and y-, respectively. Examples would include 玉, 月, 銀.

Now, in the case of y- initials mapping to l- initials in Minnan (and correspondingly ng- in Hakka and r- in Mandarin), they actually also map to j- initials, depending on which sub-dialect of Minnan you are referring to. For instance, 日 can be either jit or lit, and 乳 can be ju or lu.

In the case of 飲, it would fall under the category (1) above, i.e. it would come out as im in Minnan. Now, I will not dispute the possibility of the intrusion of an l- initial over time (perhaps someone else can comment), but for certain it does not fall under the same class of words as 人 and 忍, otherwise, 飲 could very well be either lim or jim, and we know that there is no Minnan sub-dialect that has jim for 'drink'.

[Andrew]

standard ? Try speaking chi cui to people in southern malaysia and singapore (or even taiwan) who has not visited penang and you get blank stares.

Douglas compiled his dictionary in Amoy in 1873, not in Malaya or Taiwan. Variants are usually marked C.=Chiangchiu, Cn.=Chuanchiu, A.=Amoy, T.=Tangua*, E.=Engchhun, R.=literary, P.=Changpoo, etc. As Ah-Bin has already said, chi-tsui is now considered an archaic expression in Amoy.

Douglas could have made a mistake because the colloquail and literary sound of 是 is Si and not chi. And we are talking about the colloquail sound here which is obviously Si.

There is not just one colloquial and one literary sound for words in Hokkien - see e.g. 大 which can be tai, toa or ta depending on context. 囝 is kien in literary, but according to Douglas (who is admittedly not always right in these matters) kia*, a, kan, or gin depending on context in colloquial.

[xng]

xng wrote:

In the case of 飲, it would fall under the category (1) above, i.e. it would come out as im in Minnan.

In the absence of a better character, 飲 is still the best in terms of meaning and closest sound. Furthermore, It is understood by both cantonese and mandarin speakers.

We also have another unique original character which we expect as having 'T' consonant but turns out to be 'K' consonant ie. 到.

Many original characters can be gleamed by examining other southern chinese languages that are not commonly used in mandarin eg.講, 行,毋 etc.

[Mark Yong]

xng wrote:
In the absence of a better character, 飲 is still the best in terms of meaning and closest sound.

Okay, I can accept that we use 飲 as the closest character that can be used to represent for lim in terms of sound and meaning. Now, I am not saying that lim is not 飲. But we have to be careful not to jump to what appears to be the 'nearest' or 'most convenient' character, and state unequivocally that that is the correct character. I mean, quite frankly, I personally wish I knew for certain that lim was 飲 for certain, as it would certainly be really convenient, rather than 啉, which makes no more sense for 'drink' than 喝 was in its original meaning ('to shout').

To be conservative, whenever I encounter a word in which I cannot be certain what the character is, I would (by my own convention) mark the nearest chosen approximation in square parentheses, e.g. [飲].

Admittedly, there are grey areas. Is lang (person) simply the 俗讀 for 人 or is it really 農/儂? I don't know. But in this instance (and here I do confess double standards on my part), I would be tempted to just go for 人 without the square parentheses, even though I know that strictly speaking, 人 is read jin, but I do not know for certain whether lang is really the colloquial reading. So, xng - in the case of lim, I personally would use 飲 and drop the parenthesis, but reluctantly so.

xng wrote:
Furthermore, It is understood by both cantonese and mandarin speakers.

Again, intelligibility by other dialects as a basis for correct character identification has to be taken with caution. 跟 is understood by virtually all the major dialects for 'follow', the exception being the Min dialects, which use de/due. But here I stand firm: de/due is not 跟, it is 綴. If one wanted to choose another word that has the direct meaning of 'to follow' and has a closer pronunciation to de/due, he/she might well have opted for 隨 - which, again, is not the correct character.

xng wrote:
We also have another unique original character which we expect as having 'T' consonant but turns out to be 'K' consonant ie. 到.

While in the absence of a confirmation that kau is an alternate reading for 到 (note: it is not a total change in initial consonant per se, as the literal reading for 到 is still tau) I would settle for [到], I would be interested if someone could quote a rhyming dictionary or any other source that demonstrates and proves the t- to k- shift for [到].

[xng]

Furthermore, It is understood by both cantonese and mandarin speakers.
Again, intelligibility by other dialects as a basis for correct character identification has to be taken with caution.

While in the absence of a confirmation that kau is an alternate reading for 到 (note: it is not a total change in initial consonant per se, as the literal reading for 到 is still tau) I would settle for [到], I would be interested if someone could quote a rhyming dictionary or any other source that demonstrates and proves the t- to k- shift for [到].

I am not saying that intelligibility alone is sufficient but a combination of many reasons posted earlier that confirmed this character is most probably the original.


The 'kau' 到 is confirmed as colloquail in the UCLA website, what does your minnan dictionary says ?

Another example is 分 Pun (colloquail), Hun (literary)

Sometimes we have exception to the rule that changed one of the consonant or vowel or tone so that it is unrecognizable from the norm. A good example is 毋 "M" in cantonese that changed to "Mou".

[Ah-bin]

I think the situation in Hokkien goes beyond the simple "colloquial" and "literary" divisions that dictionaries and websites contain. I think these are more in the line of attempts to provide a written standard of Hokkien linked to characters than actual etymological study. Although it is a good idea, I don;t think all of their conclusions can be taken so seriously.

By the way the Hokkien terms for colloquial and literary are kong-wa-im 講話音 and thak-chheh-im 讀册音, so no need to use the Mandarin terms "baidu" "wendu" any more.

There are many different time periods and many different old dialects of Sinitic in the Hokkien vocabulary. As in English where you have "regal" and "royal" which ultimately came from the same root but through different directions.

From what I remember from linguistics studies of MIn (mostly written in Chinese) most of the thak-chheh-im vocabulary reflects the Hokkien attempt at the spoken vocabulary of Tiong-an 長安 in the eighth or ninth centuries, whereas the older kong-wa-im is descended from the speech of the earliest Sinitic-speaking colonists in the area from the third to sixth centuries. These people came mainly from what is now the Shanghai area. Their language mixed with whatever it was that was spoken before and with other varieties of Sinitic to create a stratum of vocabulary that does not fit into the later rhyming schemes that date mainly from the T'ang. I read a lot of this in 閩客方言史稿 can't remember the author's name at the moment. The result is that there are sometimes three or four different Sinitic-derived pronunciations from a single root. like 大.

I dug this up from some notes I made on the late colonisation of Fukien compared to other parts of Chinese Empires (including northern Vietnam!) Chiang-chiu was especially late in becoming a Chinese county. It wasn't until the seventh century that it was founded

The T'ang Dynasty Poet 劉禹錫 Liu Yu-Hsi wrote:
閩有負海之饒，其民悍而俗鬼，居洞砦，家桴筏者與華言不通．
Min has the abundance of a land on the coast, its people are violent and their customs devilish (?) those who dwell in grottoes and stockades and in rafts do not understand the speech of the Hua.

[Mark Yong]

Ah-bin wrote:
...whereas the older kong-wa-im is descended from the speech of the earliest Sinitic-speaking colonists in the area from the third to sixth centuries. These people came mainly from what is now the Shanghai area.

This is interesting. The Shanghai dialect (or should I say, the Wu 吳 dialects in general) have lost most of their consonant endings, except for -ng and the glottal stop. For instance, 三 is se, and 天 is t'i - similar to the 講話音 readings in Min.

[Andrew]

The 'kau' 到 is confirmed as colloquail in the UCLA website, what does your minnan dictionary says ?

Douglas-Barclay uses 到 (文:to3) as does the 廈門方言詞典. As Mark has already said, the 閩南方言與古漢語同源詞典 uses 告.

I too find the shift from to to kau difficult to accept, but am willing to use it if there is no better character.

[SimL]

Has anyone ever heard "ong-ke" 王家 for "government" ...

I asked my parents about this the other day, and here are some pieces of information which you might find interesting.

1. My father (Penang Baba Hokkien, born and grew up in Penang) says that he never uses/used this word, but is quite familiar with it: the people in his parents' generation used it occasionally. In his own generation, the two normal words were "ceng-hu" and "kong1-pang1-ge5" ('pseudo-sandhi-tones' written for the first two syllables of the latter). This latter is a "bastardization" of the English word "Company", and (I presume) derives from the very early colonial period, when the British "administration" was the "English East India Company" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_India_Company), before the colonial office officially took over the governing of Penang.

2. My mother (from a Sin-khEh family with Hui-uaN roots, born and grew up in Seremban) says that it wasn't a very common term in her youth, but that she's familiar with it because (among other reasons), the Botanical Gardens of the city of Seremban (capital of the state of Negri Sembilan, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seremban) is called in Hokkien "ong5-ke1-suaN1" 王家山, due probably to its being located in a hilly part of Seremban.