Hokkien words in Thai

[niuc]

From the link posted by Andrew, the first "kepah" is what we call kap4-pa1, the third is lai5-a0 (lala). There the second one is named as "siput", but "siput" is snail in Malay.

Amhoanna, glad to know that! So it is indeed Hap8-cai1. I wasn't sure because it is spelled Hatyai in English and also 合艾 in Mandarin.

[SimL]

There the second one is named as "siput", but "siput" is snail in Malay.

I don't know how I could have forgotten "si1-put8". One of the most wonderful memories of my childhood: on many weekends, my parents and we three kids would go to one of the famous Penang beaches - Tanjong Tokong, Tanjong Bungah, or Batu Ferringhi - and picnic, swim, AND DIG FOR SIPUT. Once we got back home, they would be left in sea-water overnight, so that they would extrude all their sand, and the next day (or later), they would be fried with light soy sauce and ginger strips. Absolutely delicious! In those days, of course, these three beaches were just quiet, secluded affairs: the whole coastline was just low trees and bushes, with some 1- or 2-storey (beach-)houses or bungalows among them. From anywhere along the coastal road, you could see the sea sparkling behind the vegetation. NOT the multi-storey hotel complexes of nowadays.

In Penang Hokkien (at least, in my family), "si1-put8" meant specifically these colourful bivalves. The way the picture of them is captioned in the link provided by Andrew would imply that the author used the word in this specialized sense also.

[Ah-bin]

The La-la are very close to what I would call pipis. My brother and I went digging for them as well, looking for the tell-tale holes in the sand they made in the wet sand after the tide had gone out. We didn't live by the sea, and were a bit ignorant about these things we didn't leave them to soak long enough unfortunately the first time, so they made for rather a gritty meal.

MacGowan had "than" for mussels and the character 蟶 with a little circle beside it to show that it was not the original character.

[SimL]

Hi Ah-bin,

The term "pipi" is also known in Australia (well, in Darwin, in any case). We used it there to indicate one of the local clam-shaped shellfish, about 1.5 to 2 cm across. However, they had a considerably thicker shell than the shellfish in the la-la etc photos.

[amhoanna]

Just came across this entry in the Tâi-Ji̍t Toā (http://taigi.fhl.net/dict/index.html):

chio̍h-pà [石壩] 石原。

Related:

chio̍h-po͘ [石埔] 石原。

BTW the TJT is a Hoklo-only (Hoklo to Hoklo) online dictionary based on a major colonial Hoklo-Japanese dictionary... Every entry links to a scan of the corresponding page in the Hoklo-Japanese original.

[SimL]

Hi Ah-bin,

The term "pipi" is also known in Australia (well, in Darwin, in any case). We used it there to indicate one of the local clam-shaped shellfish, about 1.5 to 2 cm across. However, they had a considerably thicker shell than the shellfish in the la-la etc photos.

On my most recent visit to my parents, they cooked pipis for me. Apparently, they are now available from commercial fishshops (and fisheries) in Australia.

I learnt of an interesting linguistic snippet regarding pipis. For as long as my parents have been in Australia, they've known this shellfish by the term "pipi", but nowadays, there's a new term "vongole". Putting this into Google yields hundreds of images of pipis. I venture the opinion that the use of this term "vongole" in Australia is a marketing ploy, to give the shellfish a more "upmarket", "sophisticated" sound. It's probably from the Italian "vongola", plural "vongole", but from the Italian Wikipedia, it would appear - I clicked on lots of 'vongola-related' links - that "vongola" in Italian means *any* sort of bivalve-ish shell fish (or at least, a whole lot of different, only distantly related ones). [But perhaps "pipi" does the same in Australian English...]

http://www.google.com.br/images?um=1&hl ... 4&aql=&oq=