Hokkien words without written (Mandarin) characters?

[Pohlin]

Can someone enlighten me? I've just read Russell Jones' Chinese loan-words in Malay and Indonesian (University of Malaya Press, 2009) which is for me an informative book about the various Hokkien subdialects of those who migrated to the Nanyang. But Jones states there is no Mandarin/Chinese character for 'gau' (as in 'capable' - author translation) or 'sui' (as in 'pretty'). I thought 'sui' would be mei but is this not the case? And what about 'gau'?

Thanks

[tadpole]

Can someone enlighten me? I've just read Russell Jones' Chinese loan-words in Malay and Indonesian (University of Malaya Press, 2009) which is for me an informative book about the various Hokkien subdialects of those who migrated to the Nanyang. But Jones states there is no Mandarin/Chinese character for 'gau' (as in 'capable' - author translation) or 'sui' (as in 'pretty'). I thought 'sui' would be mei but is this not the case? And what about 'gau'?
Thanks

No standard Chinese character. You can consult Taiwan's Ministry of Education's on-line dictionary:

http://twblg.dict.edu.tw/tw/index.htm

sui 媠 is the recommended character, but it's also just a choice of convenience.

One thing you have to get out of your mindset is that Hokkien originally is Chinese. It's not. Original population of Fujian area is more closely related to today's Hmong people (and also the She 畲 people). DNA studies reveal that only between 10 to 20% of the genetic pool in Fujian comes from historical northern Chinese immigrants. It is not surprising that many of the daily words in Hokkien do not have Chinese character representation.

Hokkien and Malay do share some historical similarities. For instance, "to skip" in Hokkien is lank 閬, "to be loose" in Hokkien is lalng 櫳. In Malay, a lot of words that in Chinese are pronounced as /k*ng/ like (空,孔,廣,坑) have corresponding words pronounced as /l*ng/, for instance, "sky" is "langit". "To shed" in Hokkien is lut 黜, in Malay/Indonesian is lucut/luchut/lutlut. So ancient Hokkien has more connection to Malay than you may be aware of.

[Andrew]

No standard Chinese character. You can consult Taiwan's Ministry of Education's on-line dictionary:

http://twblg.dict.edu.tw/tw/index.htm

sui 媠 is the recommended character, but it's also just a choice of convenience.

Sui2 may also be cognate with 水靈 and so written 水

Gao5 is normally written 敖 over 力

[Pohlin]

Thank you very much to all for replies. I am curious about this DNA study on Hokkiens - is there a published source?

[Pohlin]

Can someone enlighten me? I've just read Russell Jones' Chinese loan-words in Malay and Indonesian (University of Malaya Press, 2009) which is for me an informative book about the various Hokkien subdialects of those who migrated to the Nanyang. But Jones states there is no Mandarin/Chinese character for 'gau' (as in 'capable' - author translation) or 'sui' (as in 'pretty'). I thought 'sui' would be mei but is this not the case? And what about 'gau'?
Thanks

No standard Chinese character. You can consult Taiwan's Ministry of Education's on-line dictionary:

http://twblg.dict.edu.tw/tw/index.htm

sui 媠 is the recommended character, but it's also just a choice of convenience.

One thing you have to get out of your mindset is that Hokkien originally is Chinese. It's not. Original population of Fujian area is more closely related to today's Hmong people (and also the She 畲 people). DNA studies reveal that only between 10 to 20% of the genetic pool in Fujian comes from historical northern Chinese immigrants. It is not surprising that many of the daily words in Hokkien do not have Chinese character representation.

Hokkien and Malay do share some historical similarities. For instance, "to skip" in Hokkien is lank 閬, "to be loose" in Hokkien is lalng 櫳. In Malay, a lot of words that in Chinese are pronounced as /k*ng/ like (空,孔,廣,坑) have corresponding words pronounced as /l*ng/, for instance, "sky" is "langit". "To shed" in Hokkien is lut 黜, in Malay/Indonesian is lucut/luchut/lutlut. So ancient Hokkien has more connection to Malay than you may be aware of.

[Mark Yong]

Pohlin wrote:
"...there is no Mandarin/Chinese character for 'gau' (as in 'capable' - author translation)..."

Andrew wrote:
Gao5 is normally written 敖 over 力

𠢕. 《集韻•豪韻》 牛刀切: "𠢕, 《說文》:健也"

Ａ pet peeve of mine (hope you don't mind my being straightforward - I need to get this out of my system): In addition to tadpole's suggestion below on getting out of the mindset that Hokkien originally is Chinese (which, I would agree to a certain extent, but only because of the key word ' originally' inserted ), I think that when discussing Chinese dialects, it is more important that you get out of the mindset that "Chinese" equals "Mandarin" (as is evident from your thread topic, as well as your reference to "Mandarin/Chinese").

One dead giveaway of this habit is directly mapping the Hokkien word sui to the Mandarin word mei. The Chinese character 美 is not read in Hokkien as sui - it has a pronunciation of its own, and it is bi. And neither is chiak (to eat) 吃, it is 食. And so on, and so forth.

Therefore, you need to understand that just because a Hokkien word has no direct equivalent in the Mandarin (or, more accurately, Modern Standard Chinese) lexicon of Chinese characters, that does not mean the Chinese character for it does not exist. However, it is true that a large number of Hokkien words do not have Chinese characters. How to represent them in written form is a point of contention that you will discover in a number of threads in this Forum. On one end, you will find supporters of the Romanised system (such as tadpole), and on the other end, you will find hanzi-obsessed nutbags such as yours truly who root for Chinese characters. Which is not to say that I do not respect tadpole's views - on the contrary, his insights and contributions have really enriched my understanding of the pronunciation and tonal aspects of the Min dialect group (something that being a visual person by nature, I shamefully neglect all-too-often). And all manner of opinions in between.

Oh... and before I forget my common courtesies - welcome to the Hokkien Forum, Pohlin.

[Ah-bin]

One thing you have to get out of your mindset is that Hokkien originally is Chinese. It's not. Original population of Fujian area is more closely related to today's Hmong people (and also the She 畲 people). DNA studies reveal that only between 10 to 20% of the genetic pool in Fujian comes from historical northern Chinese immigrants. It is not surprising that many of the daily words in Hokkien do not have Chinese character representation.

I am not sure about this. The She 畲 relationship is certainly proven for Hakka and the Sinitic languages of the mountains, but I don't think it is the case for Hokkien.
Reading Jerry Norman and Tsu-lin Mei's article "The Austroasiatics in South China" would tempt one to believe that Hokkien has words related to Vietnamese, but a recent paper by Laurent Sagart in "The peopling of East Asia: putting together archaeology, linguistics and genetics" has a good argument disproving this.

Anne Yue-Hashimoto had a good paper called "Southern Chinese Dialects: The Tai Connection" which had lots of evidence for a Tai substratum in Hokkien.

Some Chinese scholars (I think one is called 金力) made studies of certain genes and their distribution and relationship to northern and southern Han Chinese populations. I don't remember them having figures of 10/20% though.

Also remember that genetics may have nothing to do with the distribution of languages or language families. The SInhalese speak and Indo-European language (like English) but live side-by-side with Tamils, who look very similar, speak an unrelated Dravidian language.

[Pohlin]

Thanks for pointing out that there isn't necessarily an equivalent Mandarin word/ideogram or the mistake of equating mei with sui rather than bi. I thought bi was perhaps the literary as opposed to colloquial word. It isn't even a matter of reminding because I am starting from ignorance not forgetfulness.

The published info given by Ah bin - will check them out - great and thanks.

Does anyone have information on published sources pointing to Hokkien literature? How does one define Hokkien literature?! Was Hokkien a medium of instruction in the schools of Hokkien speaking districts of southern Fujian province the way Cantonese was (is?) the medium of instruction in Hong Kong?

It is nice to be formally welcomed - the forum has been thought-provoking from the start.

[tadpole]

I am not sure about this. The She 畲 relationship is certainly proven for Hakka and the Sinitic languages of the mountains, but I don't think it is the case for Hokkien.

Ethnicity-wise there is nothing to prove here. It is a fact. 漳州 was full of She people, as documented in the famous Southern Song writing 漳州谕畬. Linguistically I am the person that stands for Hokkien's 查甫 tsa-pou 查某 tsa-bou having origin from She: the /tsa/ part has the same origin as She, originally meaning "person/people". 羅美珍 has found plenty of dialects in Fujian where sa/sia/sha are still in use, standing for person/people.

Reading Jerry Norman and Tsu-lin Mei's article "The Austroasiatics in South China" would tempt one to believe that Hokkien has words related to Vietnamese, but a recent paper by Laurent Sagart in "The peopling of East Asia: putting together archaeology, linguistics and genetics" has a good argument disproving this.

This was a paper with good intentions but most of the lexicon were weak or simply not believable, except for one single word: "kriang" 江.

Some Chinese scholars (I think one is called 金力) made studies of certain genes and their distribution and relationship to northern and southern Han Chinese populations. I don't remember them having figures of 10/20% though.

There are hundreds of academic papers/studies on Southern Chinese DNA, since early 1990. I've seen these numbers. Just Google to find these things. I've spent time more than once already. Someone else can repeat the work. Or you can simply wait until this type of things get included in school curricula, which is slowly happening in Taiwan.

-----

One comment is that I observe a difference in attitudes between Westerners and Asian people. I still remember when I was in graduate school (U.S.A.), back then, there was a disdain for including multi-cultural faculty members. The students from MEChA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MEChA) and other ethnic groups would just storm into the University's President's office and occupy it, demanding hiring a tenure-track Asian Studies professor, and a full-time dean for Chicano student center. I was shocked at first, but after I paused to think about it, it did make sense: you are paying money to get education, and if you are not getting the right education, how can you just sit still and not protest? Multi-culturalism in the U.S.A. did not happen because people sat still. It happened because people were pro-active, and worked hard for it to happen. Sure, taking over the president's office is a bit too much, but at least some public protest should be in place, right?

In comparison, in Asian countries, when people don't get education (regarding their own mother tongues, or regarding the historical origin of their people), people just think that they themselves are dumb, and never think that it is the fault of their education systems or the fault of their governments. You are paying money for tuition, or your parents are paying tax, and you get no education and don't know where your mother tongues or where your people come from, and you don't complain? Asians tend to have a much more passive attitude, so things happen much more slowly there.

[Ah-bin]

Ethnicity-wise there is nothing to prove here. It is a fact. 漳州 was full of She people, as documented in the famous Southern Song writing 漳州谕畬. Linguistically I am the person that stands for Hokkien's 查甫 tsa-pou 查某 tsa-bou having origin from She: the /tsa/ part has the same origin as She, originally meaning "person/people". 羅美珍 has found plenty of dialects in Fujian where sa/sia/sha are still in use, standing for person/people.

I don't really agree that it's a fact about She. You've given one example of vocabulary as opposed to the ten or so given by Yue-Hashimoto. Added to that, you have assumed that She referred to the same group eight hundred years ago as it does now in the PRC.
The Chinese names for "barbarian" people (not really barbaric, just the people whom writers considered uncivilised) are sometimes used to refer to people who practiced the same kind of agriculture or lived in the same place or similar environments. Before Chiang-chiu was founded the people there were called 蠻獠 Man-lao (you will see "Liao" in some books but that is incorrect) they probably had very little to do with the other Man and Lao of the area that is now Vietnam, other than Chinese writers chose to use the same name for them because they lived in the hills. "She" might just have meant "people who speak another language and practice swidden agriculture" rather than "she" for the language and "minzu" group the communists recognise today. PRC scholars have a hard time writing about these sorts of issues, because they still have to write histories based on the 56 ethnic group model - one that lumps all the different Formosan aboriginals into one ethnic groups and refuses to acknowledge any separate existence for the different groups.