Benzi/Original character

[Ah-bin]

Why, oh why do you do this to me xng? I really don't want to be a bitch, and I try not to be a bitch, but you just bring out the bitchiness in me every day!

First on a serious and non-bitchy note to answer the question from Mark:

Are you referring to 林寶卿's 閩南語與古文同源辭典? She says cit (quantity 'one') is 禃, citing: 禃、【集韻】丞職切、音值、專一也。

I must have my source wrong. It was definitely 蜀 in that source. Not that I would use any of the characters like these when we already have 一 that is perfectly easy to write.

Now for the fun..... I am a beeee-arch!

xng wrote:

The northerners create 'Lang' character because that's how it sounds to them with a 人農 sound but that's not the original character. At that time in middle chinese, the sound has changed to 'Yin'. The original character is a simple 人, that's how 'man' was written 5000 years ago.

Where was this written 5000 years ago? Do you own some amazing early oracle bone script in your possession that pre-dates the earliest known oracle bone script (14th century BC) by 1500 years? I doubt it. Why do you make things up out of your own head? 知之為知之，不知為不知，是知也

then he wrote:

The consistent definition notwithstanding, the problem is in the fanqie - the initial ch'- for 丞 is aspirated, whereas cit is non-aspirated. I shall defer this to the members with better knowledge on tonal shifts for comment.

This has nothing to do with tonal shift....do you actually know what tonal shift is? It is different from a shift in initials. The tone for 丞 is yang-p'ing meaning the initial was voiced in Old Chinese. The Hokkien reading is sêng，where is the aspiration? The Old Chinese initial was probably a z-. Chit for "one" is also a yang tone (yang-ju 陽入)

then:

Characters don't change their form often but they do change their sound often as evidenced by thousands of dialects.

Words change their phonological form, characters only chang their graphic form.....you still don't understand the difference between spoken and written language, and how they can be completely separate?

then:

PS: I do know middle chinese have their influence in forming the literary sounds.

Late Middle Chinese....not Early Middle Chinese....

then:

I have seen 我和/跟/同/共你 but not 我及你. Note: Considering Mandarin, cantonese, classical chinese.

I'm sure the people who wrote the dictionary I quoted meanings from have "seen" or read more Classical Chinese than you have.

then:

If there is a possibility of change in sound , it usually falls under its own tone class (as you say), Kap, Kat -> Kah but possibility of Kip changing to Kaⁿ is too remote ie. jumping both tone class and vowel.

Did everyone else understand what I meant in what xng is replying to here, or did I phrase it incorrectly?

This one was funny:

Hokkien was the language based on the time of the zhou dynasty which is written in classical chinese. So at that time, the written and the spoken language was very close unlike today where the written language is based on mandarin.

You're just making stuff up again, aren't you?

and finally:

I forgot that this forum has only linguistic experts reading.

This is an obviously false statement!

[xng]

I don't make up stories, so don't insult my intelligence and character integrity.

I am waiting for aokh and mark yong to reply as they are more civilised people.

[Mark Yong]

xng,

I will try to get directly to the points of discussion, and hope that there are no further ambiguities.

My questioning 之 as a candidate 本字 for ci (note: question, not refute or even challenge) is not because I think it should be 玆. I am taking it a step backward (and technically beyond the topic of 本字, if you like) and asking whether, fundamentally, it is cit or ci-it fused together? If it is cit (i.e. a single morpheme), then we need to look for a candidate character that historically has a -t ending. If it is ci-it (i.e. two separate morphemes that have fused and treated as a single "word" today), then fine, 之 is a candidate on the basis on your citations quoted - this is not an "I support 即, you support 之" contest, and my aim is to get to as correct a character as is etymologically- and historically-possible.

If you need examples/analogies of what I am trying to get at, consider the Mandarin characters 別 bie, 甭 beng and 孬 nao - which are fusions of 不要, 不用 and 不好, respectively. Is cit an example of this or not? (By the way, I think you will be happy to know that I personally do not support characters such as 別, 甭 and 孬, on the basis that since Southern dialect characters are not accepted as standard, then in principle, neither should these "Northern-isms".)

While I can accept your point about 玆 having an -er ending in the 泉州腔 Chuan Chiu sub-dialect (someone with a copy of 周長楫《閩南方言大詞典》 may want to verify the 廈/漳/泉 differences in pronunciation), I beg to differ on your argument that 假借字 are disqualified from consideration as 本字. If I recall correctly from Weiger's Chinese Characters (which, itself, draws from the 說文解字 as a primary reference), there are many examples of 假借字 that date back as far back as the 秦 Qin era, which in turn pre-dates the estimated commencement of the development of 閩 Min as a dialect (circa 1st century CE - ref. Michael A. Fuller's An Introduction to Literary Chinese, under the chapter on "A Sketch of Literary Chinese"). Some examples from memory (I do not have my reference materials on-hand at the moment) include 萬 (originally representing a scorpion, borrowed to represent 10,000 as they are homonyms) and 哥 (borrowed from the original word for 'song', being the homonym for 'elder brother', hence the replacement character 歌 had to be created for 'song', with the 欠 radical added for re-clarification). So, do we say that because 哥 is a 假借字, it is not the character for the Hokkien word ko, or that ban is not 萬? What you have referred to are specifically those 假借字, 方言俗字 and 自創字 that came later with the dialectal diaspora. As much as we would like to have it the ideal way, Chinese characters ceased being ideal a few centuries before the development of 閩 Min.

[SimL]

I don't make up stories, so don't insult my intelligence and character integrity.

Hi xng,

Please try not to be upset. . I don't think Ah-bin was trying to insult your intelligence or integrity. I think one of the things Ah-bin was referring to was:

Hokkien was the language based on the time of the zhou dynasty which is written in classical chinese.

From what I can see (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_history), in very rough terms, in the time of the Zhou Dynasty, Fujian was quite devoid of people speaking a Han-based variety of language. Even in the Han Dynasty, the maps still show that Fujian wasn't really very much sinicized - only from the Tang Dynasty onwards. So it's difficult to see what you meant by your statement. Perhaps the maps are wrong, or perhaps you meant something different...

[Ah-bin]

I don't think Ah-bin was trying to insult your intelligence or integrity.

In this case I must strongly disagree with you Sim! I certainly was intending to insult xng's integrity in particular, and for a very good reason that I shall explain below.

Fabrications, especially the outrageous kind like the 5000 year-old character for person, and the Chou people speaking Hokkien (if they weren't made-up, who were they copied from?) need to be nipped in the bud as soon as possible, otherwise they end up with a life of their own just through being read and repeated, like the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, or that silly story that still floats around about the Japanese being the descendents of the people the Ch'in Emperor sent into the sea to look for P'eng-lai. No-one who actually studies the history of anti-Semitism or of ancient Japan actually believes these stories, but they are passed on unquestioned by word of mouth.

Some people like POJ, some people like the de Gijzel style of POJ, and some people think Hokkien should be completely written with as many punji as we can find. I have no problem with differences of opinion. But the "Chou Hokkien and 5000 year old character" claims do not fall into the category of differences of opinion, and I feel it would be irresponsible for me to let something pass by that is obvious unsubstantiated rubbish.

The first forum that comes up if you Google "Hokkien Forum" is this one. Other people do read it apart from those who post here, and often they are people looking here for the first time for information and guidance about things Hokkien. I think they need to have access to reliable information, so when the information is unreliable to the extreme, I feel it is important to make an example of it.

[AndrewAndrew]

Well, I'm not saying that I think xng is correct in his very certain rejection of 及, or that I think that Ah-Bin is correct, though I do think Mark's reply is probably a preferable way of countering xng's argument to Ah-Bin's.

But I would like to address this bit of the xng's posts:

Since aokh is in Xiamen, he is the best person to tell us whether Ka spoken in China is with a glottal or non glottal stop.

Well, not really. I would have thought that any of the many published and online Hokkien dictionaries that exist would be the best source for this information. Most of them give ka7.

I think aokh is the best person as he is in China to determine whether you can use 我及你.

I have seen 我和/跟/同/共你 but not 我及你. Note: Considering Mandarin, cantonese, classical chinese.

I have seen 以及 to mean conjunctive 'and' but 及 alone doesn't mean 'and'.

But like what I said, maybe my Chinese is not as good as aokh.

Again, a cursory search of the online 國語詞典 gives the following:

[及] 與﹑和。書經˙湯誓：「時日曷喪？予及汝皆亡。」唐˙李白˙蜀道難：「蠶叢及魚鳧，開國何茫然？」

Is it really so difficult to look things up in a dictionary?

[Ah-bin]

It wasn't the 及/共 thing I had a problem with, and I would have been happy to stick to the subject if that were the the only thing posted. If someone is going to post made-up nonsense as evidence, I'm definitely going to respond to it.

The main question that needs to be answered as regards the probability of 及 as opposed to 共 is how many examples there are of elided glottal stops as opposed to elided nasal endings.

The question of the vowel is more problematic. Endings in -ek in the literary stratum do sometimes do correspond to -ah in the colloquial stratum, 歷 for example is lek/lah. i haven't found any examples for ip/ah yet, though, although I haven't been looking very hard.

[aokh1979]

Since aokh is in Xiamen, he is the best person to tell us whether Ka spoken in China is with a glottal or non glottal stop.

I never heard Ka (and) with a glottal stop anywhere, and like what Andrew said, I never read it anywhere that it came with a glottal stop. The reason I questioned this argument was that, xng, it was your post that told me Ka DOES have a 入聲, see below. I started keeping a more open mind, that Ka might have lost its glottal stop as you claimed so.

http://chineselanguage.org/forums/viewt ... t=甲#p28237

I am happy to use 共 as "and" but 及 was brought up as a sharing, like what Andrew tried to show. 共 is very possible, this is what I think:

共 is きょう
唐 is とう
送 is そう
望 is ぼう (might even be the very original character for 欲 as in "desire, wanting")

All of the nasal "ng" is pronounced with an う in Japanese, many many more. I am not expert, but what do you think ?

[Ah-bin]

On the way home I thought of an example of a syllable that lost its -ng or nasalisation entirely, the sio 相 in sio-phah and sio-me (fight and argue)!

[amhoanna]

Well, just for the record, since this is the the go-to Hokkien forum , at least for anglophones... I think most of the frequent flyers already know this, or else have heard this and strongly disagree: maybe some of these words, kah, kā, etc., don't have púnjī. Period.

1) Maybe they're not "Sinitic". "Sinitic" is obviously a key definition, but so is "púnjī"! Sinitic morphemes usually have a púnjī by the time they reach the age of consent.
2) Not that many "non-Sinitic" words have púnjī. Kiáⁿ 囝 is one that does.

Hó ah. Back to the original programming.

p/s Kah/kap is right there in my unsolved mysteries bin, not for lack of a púnjī, but b/c a lot of the old-timers in TW write it with a -p, and I don't think anybody says it like that. And usually they do tend to spell things the way people say it.