Hokkien words in Thai

[SimL]

Seeing as "ham1" were mentioned in this thread, this seems like a good place to post my question.

Does anyone know what "mussels" are called in Hokkien? I was speaking to a new friend of mine (who is Taiwanese), and he wasn't sure (because he says he's not very good with animal names). He ventured the idea that in Taiwan, "ham-a" (with dimunitive) is used as a generic word for "shellfish" in general (well, perhaps not all shellfish, but oysters, clams, mussels, etc: edible bivalves, so to speak). But he qualifies his statement with the fact that he's not good with animal names.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mussel

[Ah-bin]

Searching through D&B, Barclay has "sai-ti-chih, a saltwater bivalve like a mussel, considered very good eating."

and

koe-kioh (+), shell-fish, like a mussel, a bunch of them is like a tortoise foot.

So we have "like a mussel" twice....but not actually "a mussel" haha.


This is a digression (not having the answer about the mussels - I might find out tomorrow when I go back to my place and get a look at my dictionaries)

I met someone once who was doing a survey on all the different ways for saying shellfish in different varieties of English. Apparently every variety classifies and uses words such as "clam" and "shellfish" differently.

In NZ we don't even say "clam" (except in "clam up") and use pipi, a loan from Maori in its place. Abalone is also always called paua, I didn't know what abalone meant before I started learning Chinese, it doesn't exist in the normal NZ vocabulary.

I wonder what abalone is in Hokkien?

[amhoanna]

Classic thread. Hokkien, Thai... What more could U need? I've been reading up on mainland SEA since I'll be going there soon. It seems that much of Hatyai speaks fluent Hokkien? Now that's interesting...

I'm not much good with animals and plants myself, but I can tell between ô'á, hammá, and lâ'á ... b/c they show up in my soup. Sim, maybe your friend is a vegetarian? I think hâmmá and lâ'á would both translate to "clam" in English. The once-and-future Holopedia is pretty good with animals:

http://zh-min-nan.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A2-%C3%A1
http://zh-min-nan.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ham-%C3%A1
http://zh-min-nan.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%94-%C3%A1

I don't know if there's a word for shellfish in Hoklo. I might say "ô'á lâ'á hiah ê lūi". People who live in villages on the coast probably have 10x as much vocab for these things, and a richer diet too. I don't see mussels on my plate too often here. What Ah-bin said probably applies to Hoklo too, that shellfish have different names in different dialects of the same language.

And, abalone:
http://zh-min-nan.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pau-h%C3%AE

I like "paua" though, it sounds "more Hokkien" than pauhî.

[amhoanna]

I'll take the liberty of bringing up "Hokkien in Hatyai" again, since it seems to fit the thread. A lot of the Hokkien, Hat Yai search results seem to be about Hokkien mee, but there's also these "encounters with sex workers" reports written by guys from MY/SG, and apparently there's all these young whores in their 20s speaking fluent Hokkien, but not necessarily Mandarin. Now that tells U a lot: the typical scenario in SEA would be: Hokkiens shedding the language in favor of Cant/Mand/other language; young women abandoning Hoklo first; Hokkiens economically well-off, daughters not going into sex work. I wonder if any of them learned Hoklo outside the home environment, and if there's a lot of Tai-Hoklo mixing in HY, as in Kelantan?

Maybe unsavory to some, but really interesting to me b/c the web is otherwise mostly silent about language usage in HY.

[niuc]

In my variant, what we call lai5-a0 (lâ'á) is the small type with very thin shells. Wikipedia pictures for clam and lâ'á are what we call kap4-pa1. Blue mussel is chai2-luan5. Most probably chai2 is 彩 "colourful"; I am not sure about luan5. There are also kong1-tai7 and thor5-kui2 塗鬼, but I don't remember how they look like. My mom says that kong1-tai7 is pale in colour, very thin shells and smaller than chai2-luan5; thor5-kui2 is even smaller and greenish and usually has a lot of sand trapped inside. Abalone is pau5-hy5 in my variant. And we don't have a term for shellfish.

What is Hokkien term for Hatyai? I heard of hap8-cai1 but not sure if that is accurate.

[SimL]

Hi guys,

Thanks for all the responses. Many of niuc's terms didn't ring any bells for me, so I'll have to ask my parents. "thor-kui" sounds very vaguely familiar, but only as a name - I have no image, nor any memory, of eating them. We had "la1-la1", which I do remember eating, but also no longer have a clear image of them. These could well be niuc's and amhoanna's "lâ'á", though the tone is slightly different. I did a "google image search" of all the species which were listed under amhoanna's link for "lâ'á" (http://zh-min-nan.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A2-%C3%A1), and indeed they look slightly familiar. [The Holopedia articles were very useful - thanks amhoanna!]

I suddenly remembered another one called "than1" - from memory longish, with a pale white/cream shell. I'll also check that with my parents the next time I speak to them.

Abalone is "pau-hu" in my variant. I love the taste of them. My parents once had a batch which they told me they suspected had been "illegally fished" (apparently, Australia has a quota system for harvesting of abalone), so I felt honour-bound to refuse to eat them. It was such a painful experience though - knowing that they were in my parents' freezer, and knowing that my parents were very keen to cook them for me, but I stuck to my principles (same applies to turtle eggs when I'm in Malaysia)! IIRC, my parents actually visited an "abalone farm" in Tasmania a number of years ago - some enterprising Chinese man was trying to commercially farm abalone.

BTW, there's a shop in Melbourne Chinatown which ***specializes exclusively in abalone***!!! It's (unsurprisingly) not a very BIG shop, but it's full of every single abalone product one can think of: dried, canned, pickled in bottles, the shells as paperweights and ashtrays, folding wooden screens with abalone-shell inlay, etc, etc.

[AndrewAndrew]

See http://rasamalaysia.com/which-is-your-favorite-clams/ . The only ones I am familiar with eating are the la-la and the si-ham (cockles).

[SimL]

Hi Andrew,

Thanks for posting - beautiful pictures. But agonizing to look at when one isn't able to get these dishes any more .

[xng]

also ink in Thai is "mək" -> 墨 "mo, mok, bek, bik, bak, ...". Don't you think that languages from different families can be related somehow? Is it only through loanwords, or can be something more fundamental?

China invented paper and ink, so this is most probably a borrowed sinitic word.

[amhoanna]

I think our lala, lâi'á and lâ'á are one and the same. Goá oânná khah ài cia̍h ô'á.

A common 歇後語 (I forget the Hoklo word, but I think that's what they're called in Mand) in TW is: "Bong lâ'á kiam sé khò͘: it kiam jī kò͘." The second part is usually left out.

What is Hokkien term for Hatyai? I heard of hap8-cai1 but not sure if that is accurate.

Tio̍h! This is pretty cool. I found that a lot of Sg/M'sians on the web refer to Hatyai 合艾 exclusively as Hapcai or Hapchai 合斋 when speaking English and probably Malay too. To me, that just had "Hokkien!" written all over it. Pretty amazing, in this day and age, but it shows how strong the old Hokkien networks were. Seems that Hapcai Hokkiens call it Hapcai too. There's a blog post where the blogger was at the dentist's office (prob. in M'sia) and started talking about Hatyai, and her dentist, who comes from Hapcai, told her to get with the program and call it Hapcai, like everyone else