Need to Translate some chinese word to Hokkien

[ryantoh]

Hi, I need to translate the below chinese character to hokkien. Anyone can help..


卓芮仪

[aokh1979]

HI ryantoh:

It's a lovely name. Are you trying to name your daughter ? I will get some friends in Fujian to help you tonight. From what I understand, it should be: Toh Jue Yee. I am not using POJ in this case. Are you a descendant of Quanzhou or Zhangzhou ? The Jue will be read as Lue in Quanzhou. Her English name can even be Joy next time. It's a beautiful name.

[ryantoh]

Hi aokh1979,
Thks for the input... It is a baby girl.. What i am thinking is also toh Jue Yee. But need to confirm.. Try hard to search for it.. haha

[niuc]

Hi Ryantoh

恭喜 Kiong1-hi2 for the baby girl.

As Aokh has pointed out, 芮 in Cuanciu/Quanzhou type is "lue7". However, 仪/儀 is 'gi5' in Hokkien (most if not all variants, I believe). In Singapore it is usually spelled as "ghee".

[aokh1979]

Hi ryantoh:

Oooops, my bad. Yee seems to be Ghee, I often say Yee as I never look up for it in dictionary. I posted the question to my Hokkien group in China. Everyone voted for Jue Ghee. They say Jue is a unique pronunciation in Hokkien, you dun come across Jue very often and yet, the Chinese character 芮 reminds me of 2 very famous persons: 蘇芮 and 芮成鋼. Her name is going to mark a beautiful life ahead. Congratulations !

[SimL]

In Singapore it is usually spelled as "ghee".

Penang has the Ghee Hiang company, which I knew from my youth as being famous for its "tau7-sa1-piaN2": http://www.ghee-hiang.com/home.html

[niuc]

Hi Sim

So Penang and Singapore have the same romanization, which is not surprising as both were under British rule. "Ghee" there is 義, while for the name above is 儀. They are both 'gi', only of different tones (7 & 5 respectively).

[SimL]

Hi Niuc,

Yes, makes sense that Singapore and Penang share this. I suppose the "-h-" is present after the "g-" to show that it's not pronounced "j", as in "judge", "jim". (Stupid English spelling ).

[niuc]

Hi Sim

Yes, and thanks to your prompting, now it dawns to me that POJ uses 'ch' and 'chh' (IMHO 'c' and 'ch' are better) may be due to "c" in English is either 'k' (can, come) or 's' (cent, cinema). English spelling indeed is the most inconsistent one, isn't it? French spelling looks "chaotic" to me as well, but my friends said it was more consistent than English. Articles about English spelling always mention the infamous "-ough". However, by using more and more English nowadays, I tend to agree that current spelling should remain, because it, albeit inconsistent, does preserve the link to the original source (Germanic, Latin, Greek etc). If it is cheingzed, ai mei not andersteend waat is biiing ritern...

[SimL]

I tend to agree that current spelling should remain, because it, albeit inconsistent, does preserve the link to the original source (Germanic, Latin, Greek etc).

Indeed, I agree too. I think English spelling is a mess, but I'm in favour of preserving it as it is, despite this. In addition to preserving the link with the past (which I consider important, as in the case of Chinese, with traditional characters), there is also the issue of (more or less) uniformity in the English-speaking world. What I mean by this is that English is often referred to as an (extremely) "pluricentric" language (i.e. a language having many different countries which use it as an official language). This is in contrast to (say) Finnish, or Norwegian, which are "monocentric", or Dutch and German, which are pluricentric but much less so than English (German only in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland; Dutch in the Netherlands, Belgium, and Suriname). Getting even one country to agree to and adopt a new standard is already a very difficult process, and it's quite a bit harder for languages like German and Dutch (both of which have had spelling reforms in the last 20 years, but through an extremely laborious process of consultation of the language boards of the respective stakeholder countries). This means that if one wants to significantly reform English spelling, then a huge number of government authorities (UK, US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, India, etc, etc) would all have to agree to the new standard. If not (and that will almost inevitably be the case), then one would get a fragmentation of English spelling systems (as has happened with traditional and simplified characters in Taiwan and the PRC respectively). While there are small differences between US spelling and British spelling at the moment, this is nothing compared to the mess that would result, if spelling reform were to succeed in English, but only in one or two of the countries concerned.

So, those are my two arguments for leaving English spelling as it is.

PS. Despite my sadness as seeing a break with the 4000-year Chinese past, as a result of the simplification of characters, I'm not against simplified characters. I started out disliking them aesthetically (and also for the reason of the break with the past), but in the past few years that I've been learning Mandarin, I've got used to them, and even quite like them these days. They are much faster to write (which is pretty important when I'm writing them out in order to practice / memorize them), and they are easier to read when the fontsize is small (some of the entries in my traditional character dictionary I can't make out clearly even if I hold them under a bright light!). These days, I'm happy with both systems, and try to learn both forms when I learn a new character. It's an extra burden (Chinese characters are hard enough without this), but I just do it. For me, nowadays, the simplification is just another important step in the history of the Chinese language, like the standardization of the characters in the Qin Dynasty. I just accept it and got on with the job of trying to learn them.