Mark Yong wrote:Ah-bin wrote:
I finally got to look in William Gwee Thian Hock's Baba Malay dictionary for the word, and he had glossed it as "important" or "vital" . I wonder how it ended up like that?
Unfortunately, Baba Malay is not exactly the best reference point for correct definitions of Hokkien words. Over successive generations of mixture with the Malay language, coupled by the fairly limited number of Hokkien words absorbed into the vocabulary, and no written Chinese language education, this has resulted in some words being incorrectly used for multiple, sometimes-unrelated meanings. It could be that somewhere along the way,
險 hiam 'precarious' may have been mistaken for
嚴 giam 'serious'.
Hi Mark,
I get the feeling that there are two different "schools of thought" in these discussions of usage and meaning. As you are no doubt aware, there is the "prescriptivist/purist" school and the "descriptivist/practical" school. I think that you and xng are of the former group, and I (and, I suspect, Ah-bin) are of the latter group. The former believes that there is a "correct" form and usage (often based on the past), and the latter believes that whatever the speech community says is "by definition" correct. I.e., if a large enough (sub-)group of people use a word in a particular way, then it becomes -
for that sub-group - "correct".
I find being a descriptivist to be a good attitude to have with regards to language for the sole reason that language is constantly changing. I find it difficult to support the prescriptivist line because I find it impossible to determine what is the "originally correct" form or meaning. For example, "to starve" in English now means "to die of lack of food", whereas its original meaning in the Germanic languages is "to die" (in any way), as in German "sterben" or Dutch "sterven". If one takes a purist line, then one would spend all one's time trying to persuade English speakers to stop saying "die" and to start saying "starve", when someone passes away or losses his/her life: "Oh, twenty people starved in that bus accident". This clearly isn't going to work. So, I "accept" (not very difficult in this case) that -
in English - "starve" means specifically to die of hunger (sometimes even weakened to "very hungry", as in "I'm starving, let's eat"!).
This is a basic stance on language, and can sometimes cause problems, even for myself. For example, for many years, I resisted the use of "disinterested" in English to mean "
uninterested". In the (educated) English of up to the mid 20th Century, there was "uninterested" - meaning "not interested", and "disinterested" - meaning "impartial", "not having a (hidden or otherwise) advantage in, not liable to gain from". Hence "a disinterested party" was a group or individual who might be considered to be able to provide a fair decision, when asked to arbitrate on an issue or conflict between two people or groups, because they didn't stand to gain from the outcome of the decision. Over the course of the 20th century, "disinterested" shifted in meaning from "impartial" to "uninterested". I didn't like this shift. I grumbled about it for years. I considered people who used it to mean "uninterested" to be "stupid, ignorant, wrong, insensitive to language nuance, etc, etc". But, somewhere in the 1990's, I finally accepted the new usage. What's the loss? Instead of two synonyms for "impartial" - with slightly different nuances - we now have two synonyms for "uninterested" - also with slightly different nuances: "uninterested" is more passive, simply "having a lack of interest", whereas "disinterested" expresses (for me, with its new meaning) "actively showing a lack of interest, causing the person who is trying to stimulate the interest to be frustrated", as in: "I tried to explain my system of transcription to him, but he was completely disinterested". [What I'm trying to say here is that despite my claiming to be a descriptivist, I was being very prescriptivist, in (for many years) not accepting that the usage had changed, but eventually I accepted the change, because 1) I got used to the new usage, 2) It was in line with my considering myself to be a descriptivist, who, by definition, accepts the usage of the speech community.]
Anyway, I only wrote the preceding paragraph - a long side-track - to illustrate that I myself sometimes have difficulty with a "descriptivist" position. But, for intellectual consistency, it's the only position I feel that I can take, for the reasons that I explained in the paragraph before that. To give one last concrete example related to this forum: when the first Han settlers in coastal Fujian first started speaking differently from the place where they came from further up north, a (say) Amoy prescriptivist could say to his/her fellow Amoy villagers: "Hey, stop pronouncing it like that, that's not how it's said by the grandchildren of the people in the village our grandparents came from!", or "Don't use this word in this way, it's not how it's used in the home village", whereas an Amoy descriptivist would say "Hey, this is the new usage", it's becoming a language-form which will eventually be called "Hokkien". Conversely, back in the home village up north, the northern prescriptivist could say to his/her fellow villagers: "Hey, stop dropping those '-p', '-t', '-k' at the end of the syllables. These are ru-tones, which our grandparents used, and those people who migrated to Fujian are still using them", whereas a descriptivist would say "Hey, this is the new usage, it's becoming the language-form which will eventually be called "Mandarin". So, to sum up, the prescriptivist harks back to some perceived ideal, past, situation, and tries to preserve/restore it, whereas the descriptivist looks at what the situation actually is, and tries to understand/describe it.
To get back to the original point: it seems that a lot of argument on this (and many other language-related) forums involves these two schools of thought being unable to understand (and/or accept) one another's viewpoint. This has come up so many times in this forum, where someone from the prescriptivist school says "this is wrong", "stop saying it like this", "this isn't what it means", and someone from the descriptivist school saying "but that's how it is said in variant X". I have seen this over and over again, in the past few weeks, when the discussion involves Penang Hokkien. The prescriptivist says "this is wrong, this is not what they say in Amoy, etc", and the descriptivist says "this is Penang Hokkien".
I have slowly come to believe that this difference is one of "basic personality" (like being a conservative vs. being a liberal, or liking "change and excitement" in one's life, vs. liking "stability and regular routine"), and no amount of argument produced by either side is ever going to change the other person's point of view. My only hope in writing all of the above is to focus attention on the difference, so that when a descriptivist sees a prescriptivist position, he/she can think "oh, right, that's the prescriptivist position", and, conversely, then a prescriptivist sees a descriptivist position, he/she can think "oh, right, that's the descriptivist position". This could (well, probably won't) save a lot of needless argument on both sides
(I use
instead of the standard smiley because the standard smiley doesn't display properly on this PC).
Hope this all makes sense!
