龍????

[Ah-bin]

Hohomi wrote:
風 has a vernacular reading "huang" that can be found in tsuan-tsiu and tio-tsiu.

It's in Hainanese as well. The initial h- shows that this word wasnt the original one used by the earliest sinitic speakers in the south of Fukien, but was a T'ang borrowing that replaced something even older with an initial p-. I was looking for this original version, guessing it would be peng, but I didn't find it until last week. I'm just posting it here because Hohomi mentioned it.

The even older vernacular reading is png/puiN, and is used as far as I know only in a single phrase - 風時雨 puiN/png si hO meaning a squall accompanied by showers. My Chiang-chiu dictionary has it, but my other ones write it 方時雨 which is also possible, however, I think the "wind" makes more sense.

Douglas has the following about a homophone, which is marked 楓 in other dictionaries.
Png (R. hong), (C. puiN), a high tree with deeply
indented leaves, which take beautiful colours in the fall;
the Liquidambar Formosana; a sort of gum is obtained
from it.

I don't know whether this pronunciation of "wind" ever made it out of China.

[SimL]

Douglas has the following about a homophone, which is marked 楓 in other dictionaries.
Png (R. hong), (C. puiN), a high tree with deeply indented leaves, which take beautiful colours in the fall;
the Liquidambar Formosana; a sort of gum is obtained from it.

Botanical term? How could I resist !

From English Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweetgum, my italics):

"Sweetgum (Liquidambar) is a genus of four species of flowering plants in the family Altingiaceae, though formerly often treated in the Hamamelidaceae. They are all large, deciduous trees, 25-40 m tall, with palmately lobed leaves arranged spirally on the stems. The leaves turn multiple colors in the fall.
...
Liquidambar formosana - Chinese Sweetgum or Formosan Sweetgum (central & southern China, southern Korea, Taiwan, Laos, northern Vietnam).
..."

A couple of photos, illustrating the point:
http://www.pref.kyoto.jp/plant/resource ... 488419.JPG
http://farm1.static.flickr.com/26/67087 ... bad303.jpg
http://afcd.gov.hk/sc_chi/country/cou_l ... mosana.jpg

[Ah-bin]

Aha! So the word is known in Penang too? I see the trees themselves are native to south China and Taiwan, but they seem more subtropical than tropical.

The character 楓 used by itself always just suggested "maple" to me. The sort of maple with very delicate leaves that the Japanese are very fond of (kaede in Japanese).

[xng]

Thanks for supplying this, and the additional information about which "dialects" were used. I was in my early teens at the time, and didn't speak any of the other languages, so I never really watched it, but my non-Penang Hokkien grandparents would watch it on TV whenever they stayed with us, which is how I knew about it.

Wow! How much the world has changed: that there could have been such a program and Mandarin wasn't even included as one of the variant languages!

Mandarin is considered a foreign tongue and is not a mother tongue of any malaysians before the 1980s. China was poor and Hong Kong was rich, so naturally Hong Kong cantonese proved more popular.

Most chinese before 70s were english educated rather than chinese educated.