Another Way Out

[niuc]

What I mean is this: ask someone, "What's a Tnglang?" And they won't know. They might not understand the question unless U start using examples, e.g. "Is 阿妹 a Tnglang? Why / why not?" They might even think U're crazy.

I see. Thanks, Amhoanna! May be I am "poluted" by modern concept. For me, the term "Tnglang" is identical to "Han Chinese".

The word doesn't exist in Taiwan

It's very interesting that the word "Tnglang" is missing in Taiwan while "Tngsua*" is used.

The scribes definitely described the hoanná as 番, with 熟番 and 生番. Not sure if they said the magic word 入番 though.

In my variant, we hardly use 熟番. 生番 chi*1-huan1 is used to mean "uncivilized barbarian". Similar term is 山番 sua*1-huan1, which is a bit milder. For us, 入番 dib8-huan1 means to become Muslim.

Ask someone, "Oa̍tlâm lâng kám sī Tn̂glâng?" and U might get some funny looks. But ask them, "Oa̍tlâm lâng kám sī hoanná?" and if the other person is thoughtful, and is comfortable with the original meaning of the word, they might say, "You know what, they're not!"

Hmmm, you are right. May be they are 半唐番 Pua*3-tng5-huan1.

a lot of cngkhalângs and blue-collar types call it Hoalian.

Like Tai5-uan5 vs Tai5-uan1. We usually use the former, though sometimes the latter.

Btw, in my variant, 番 huan1 is also used an adjective meaning unreasonable, cannot be taught; e.g. 伊真番 i1-cin1-huan1: he is very unreasonable (like to argue, has no common sense, etc). It is also used as a verb. 伊擱再來番啊 i1-ko2-cai3-lai5-huan1 a1: here he comes again to argue/quarrel in unreasonable manner.

Referring to samples above: In my variant the subject 伊 i1 is usually pronounced as i7 or even i2 (same tone as gua2 & ly2), but not as object (i.e. still i1). How about in your variants?

[niuc]

Great history & anthropology lessons!

I actually was very happy in Amoy to be referred to as Hoan-á!

That's quite unique! May be similar to what we may feel to be referred to as Gentile?

The Yami on Botel Tobago are the clearest example. They may've arrived on Botel Tobago from the Bataan Islands around the same time the Hoklos arrived on Phêⁿ'ô͘.

Interesting! When was that? Who were the earlier people of Botel Tobago & Phêⁿ'ô? I guess Phêⁿ'ô was inhabited by 百越, same like Southern China then?

The Quemoy natives in TW seem to be mostly just "country folk in the big city" and identify with Hoklo culture and the language.

Sounds like me, or at least how I like to think!

[amhoanna]

Hans and hoannas, ta̍kgê hó. Fascinating discussion!

Interesting! When was that? Who were the earlier people of Botel Tobago & Phêⁿ'ô? I guess Phêⁿ'ô was inhabited by 百越, same like Southern China then?

As far as I know, Botel Tobago was uninhabited before (or "when") the Yami got there, and Phêⁿ'ô͘ was uninhabited before (or "when") the Hoklos arrived. Don't know for sure, though.

I actually was very happy in Amoy to be referred to as Hoan-á!

That's quite unique! May be similar to what we may feel to be referred to as Gentile?

Hehe. I don't mind being called chino in Latin America, even as if I didn't have a name. In fact I got a kick out of calling other Asians and part-Asians "chino". Don't U all be calling me no 秦仔 cînná though! I much prefer the term nguoi tau. Thanks for the hànjī, Mark.

On that topic... The "tàu" always has a long /a/ and low-falling tone for the VNese I know, but they are all southerners and I think the vowel is short up north.

In my variant the subject 伊 i1 is usually pronounced as i7 or even i2 (same tone as gua2 & ly2), but not as object (i.e. still i1). How about in your variants?

Running first tone, a.k.a. mid + level.

Btw, in my variant, 番 huan1 is also used an adjective meaning unreasonable, cannot be taught;

Ditto in TW.

It's very interesting that the word "Tnglang" is missing in Taiwan while "Tngsua*" is used.

The word "Tn̂gsoaⁿ lâng" may've been used up till the Japanese period to refer to newcomers from the Old World. "aSoaⁿ" was used after WWII to refer to Ō͘'á. I never hear it anymore, probably b/c it was kind of derogatory. Nobody understands "Tn̂glâng", but most people get "Hànjîn". BTW I use these terms interchangeably. It's just that "Hànjîn" sounds kind of bô hoeh bô ba̍ksái. Also, it's rarely used in TW (in Hoklo). "Tiongkok lâng" is the preferred word in private, non-Green settings, but it's also politically incorrect as well as ambiguous, so people will just end up saying "Tâi'oân lâng" whenever they actually mean "Tn̂glâng" or "Han".

For me, the term "Tnglang" is identical to "Han Chinese".

Same here! (although both terms have grey areas at the edges, now that I've thought about it)

It's intereseting that the Chinese in Hai Phong were mainly Hokkien

Yeah, huh? Also I think the Tn̂glâng who went to central VN were mainly Hokkien too. And didn't one of Koksèng'iâ's generals have this wild scheme to invade VN? Hey, imagine if the Hokkiens ever united... But that idea is so '90s.

Here's an interesting article about how maritime Kinh Vietnam was till recently: http://www.historycooperative.org/proce ... eeler.html

[Ah-bin]

On that topic... The "tàu" always has a long /a/ and low-falling tone for the VNese I know, but they are all southerners and I think the vowel is short up north.

I'd forgotten about that too! The short vowel one is spelt Tấu (the tone mark is still there but barely visible). This difference in vowel length is quite a common difference between north and south I believe.

Ah-bin wrote:I actually was very happy in Amoy to be referred to as Hoan-á!


That's quite unique! May be similar to what we may feel to be referred to as Gentile?

Haha, no, it wasn't that. I was happy that people were using Hokkien, and a non-Mandarinised way. If they called me 老外 in a Hokkien sentence, they would be told 汝按怎[勿會]曉講廈門話？我唔是老外，我是番仔啦！

Hehe. I don't mind being called chino in Latin America, even as if I didn't have a name. In fact I got a kick out of calling other Asians and part-Asians "chino". Don't U all be calling me no 秦仔 cînná though! I much prefer the term nguoi tau. Thanks for the hànjī, Mark.

Well I got called khon Jin (Chinese) in Laos once! Because I had been hanging around a Chinese shop speaking Mandarin for a few days. The best thing about Laos is that people still don't always associate skin colour with culture or language, why wouldn't there be some white Chinese after all?
Also, I wonder whether it is right to call 艚 a Hanji, rather than a Nôm character, it's hard to say, because a word meaning "boat" and written with this character did exist in Classical Chinese (not sure which period) but was very rare. I wonder if this rare word was borrowed into proto-Vietic, or whether it was just a happy co-incidence that the Vietnamese word for "boat" fitted neatly to the character?

Interesting! When was that? Who were the earlier people of Botel Tobago & Phêⁿ'ô? I guess Phêⁿ'ô was inhabited by 百越, same like Southern China then?

I love the name "Botel Tobago" But I should point out that 百越 was probably not the name of any real ethnic group, although Chinese and western scholars have recently applied it to archaeological cultures of the southeastern mainland that pre-date the written record. By the time the Chinese centre knew about the existence of Taiwan (they say it was the 夷洲 mentioned in the Three Kingdoms period, but this is debatable) they no longer used the name in the same way.

"Tiongkok lâng" is the preferred word in private, non-Green settings, but it's also politically incorrect as well as ambiguous, so people will just end up saying "Tâi'oân lâng" whenever they actually mean "Tn̂glâng" or "Han"

I thought they would often use "Tâi-oân-lâng" for Hokkien speakers only (this was fifteen years ago though). I was taught to say Ho-lo-ngin for these people by the thèu-kâ 頭家 (Hakka) of a second-hand bookshop I used to frequent in Tâi-tiong, he wrote it as 福佬人. The Atayal people I knew would call them 平地人 in Mandarin, or had their own name (which I once knew) that they could put into Mandarin conversations so that people wouldn't understand.

[amhoanna]

I thought they would often use "Tâi-oân-lâng" for Hokkien speakers only (this was fifteen years ago though).

Yeah, that's an older meaning of Taioanlang and possibly still the main meaning today [in Hoklo], esp. "in-group", "down-island", among the working class, and in the countryside. In the younger "educated" set this is starting to be a politically incorrect usage, esp. in Mandarin. You won't hear it much on TV. Sometimes people play on the ambiguity of the term, though, even w/o meaning to. This goes right to the heart of Taiwanese socio-politics.

My father left TW in the '70s and never really went back to stay, so when he says "Taiwanren", he usually means just the Hoklo speakers. Once he said something about how "Taiwanren" took the Japanese occupation lying down, and I said, "Well, what about Mona Rudao and the Busia Incident?" And he said, "But they're not Taiwanren!"

From a historical standpt, I think the term "Taiwan" really does belong with the Hoklo-speaking mestizo majority ethnic group on Taiwan. The island and now the semi-country were named after them, not the other way around.

The usage of Tiongkoklang/Zhongguoren has changed in the last 15 yrs too. Back then it wasn't politically incorrect yet, and it wasn't ambiguous yet either b/c people (like myself) hadn't come along and hijacked the term to refer to orang PRC. If I'm not mistaken, though, the KMT invented that word in the first place. In Singapore, "aTiong" is not ambiguous; Tn̂glâng are just Tn̂glâng, or Huaren. But I was kind of taken aback in a little stand-up bar in Madagascar when the owner, who was Mada-born Cantonese, said, "我地都係中国人丫。" The KMT did a lot of outreach in its day.

Recently one of my friends (from Taipak) seemed offended when I used the word Tiongkok to refer to Tn̂gsoaⁿ. He said, "Lí èngkai kóng 'Tāilio̍k' ciah cèngkhak." Then I dusted off the word "Tn̂gsoaⁿ" and he was cool with that.

Well I got called khon Jin (Chinese) in Laos once!

Funny, but in the future that'll be important!

I wonder if this rare word was borrowed into proto-Vietic, or whether it was just a happy co-incidence that the Vietnamese word for "boat" fitted neatly to the character?

The etymology of the word Tàu would be a good start. I recall that it's only a homophone with the word for boat in part of VN. It's possible it has nothing to do with boats.

If they called me 老外 in a Hokkien sentence, they would be told 汝按怎[勿會]曉講廈門話？我唔是老外，我是番仔啦！

U know your language is in bad shape when...

... when foreigners pat U on the back for calling them barbarians in your own language, b/c they're relieved that U're actually using your own language!!

[amhoanna]

Oh and guess what, did U know that we're all Malays now?

Tourists in East Timor are a rare breed. Simply traveling from village to village, you're likely to hear choruses of "malay" (the East Timorese word for foreigner) and folks will want to engage you in conversation. One could spend several days just enjoying the feeling of being a very welcome stranger.

(wikitravel.org)

[Ah-bin]

Recently one of my friends (from Taipak) seemed offended when I used the word Tiongkok to refer to Tn̂gsoaⁿ. He said, "Lí èngkai kóng 'Tāilio̍k' ciah cèngkhak." Then I dusted off the word "Tn̂gsoaⁿ" and he was cool with that.

I said Tn̂gsoaⁿ to a middle-aged Taiwanese Hakka here and he thought I was talking about Tangshan in China where the earthquake happened! In Mandarin I say 中國 when I'm in a green mood and 中共 when i am not! What was funny was that some Taiwanese told me that 共匪 was "old-fashioned and hardly used any more".....they obviously have never been to China (I later found out the term is alive and well there!)

The island and now the semi-country were named after them, not the other way around.

I thought the derivation of Taiwan was a local Austronesian name for the sandbanks around Fort Zeelandia?

Which reminds me, now I am in my office I can look at the children's textbook "Beginning Atayal" and I see the word for "Taiwanese" or inhabitant of the plains was "squliq kmukan" and the language "ke' kmukan", which looks familiar to me.

Medhurst (1830) has Tng-lang, but then again he was living in Batavia I think when he wrote his Hokkien dictionary. I remember reading somewhere that compounds such as 唐儂衫 (Chinese clothes) 唐儂食 (Chinese food) and 唐儂正 (Chinese New Year) were distinctive to Southeast Asian Hokkien. I have no idea what they call them in Taiwanese, probably Tiong-kok liau-li 中國料理 for the second one.

I'd forgotten about that too! The short vowel one is spelt Tấu (the tone mark is still there but barely visible). This difference in vowel length is quite a common difference between north and south I believe.

For shame......the tone mark was small and I couldn't see it...... I typed the wrong one! Should be "Tầu" strange, but now the tone refuses to go over the correct letter when I use this computer! My Tự tiển Phương ngữ tiếng Việt (Vietnamese Dialect Dictionary) says that "Tầu" is northern dialect for "boat" as well. I should really try to track down an explanation, but I don't think there are any etymological dictionaries of Vietnamese....

[AndrewAndrew]

Douglas has tng-lang and tng-soaN. Incidentally, he says the latter does not usually include Formosa.

[amhoanna]

I said Tn̂gsoaⁿ to a middle-aged Taiwanese Hakka here and he thought I was talking about Tangshan in China where the earthquake happened!

Douglas has tng-lang and tng-soaN. Incidentally, he says the latter does not usually include Formosa.

It would definitely be news to Formosans if Formosa was included in Tn̂gsoaⁿ! Tn̂gsoaⁿ has, or had, the same Old World connotations in TW that it does along "the other Straits". And TW was definitely "New World"--"the frontier". But the word is hanging by a thread in TW. There's the Hoklo saying, "Ū Tn̂gsoaⁿ kong, bô Tn̂gsoaⁿ má." I think the kids all learn it in school now... Hò͘ⁿ! Símmih tē tāng leh!

Have U guys also noticed that the word "Tn̂g" 唐 is most actively used in languages like Cantonese, Hoklo, ... and Japanese? Also the same places where tea culture is at full flower? Seems like the Tang was a high-water mark for the Deep South under central rule, and for "central" sway over the eastern seas... All the empires that followed it were either weak or rah-rah pro-North. Tongkim, we see and feel the Cantonese identification with 唐 Thong and the subtle contempt for the North. 煲冬瓜收皮! Sūnsoà kóng ci̍t siaⁿ, goá bô oànhūn pakpêng.

I thought the derivation of Taiwan was a local Austronesian name for the sandbanks around Fort Zeelandia?

Yeah, èngkai ū iáⁿ. But that was the start of something new, the start of a new tribe, the "Tâi'oân lâng", the "Han tribe of Formosa" ... in the same way that the Boers became "the white tribe of Africa". There's the same psychological split between Hoklo-speaking hâncî and Hoklo speakers elsewhere ... as what exists between modern Dutch and "Afrikaners". On the other hand, this split doesn't seem to exist between South Sea sinkheh, for example, and aTiong from Bânlâm and Kwongtung ... for whatever reason. Unless there's a disgruntled Singaporean involved. It also doesn't exist btw TW Hakka and other Han!

It all started close by that original place called Taioan or Taiouan when a hardened, "bô ke bô kah, bô pē bô bú" Tn̂gsoaⁿ pendatang kidnapped or fell in love with a Siraya squaw and decided, "I don't care if I never cross that goddamn Strait again in this life." (Not sure how to say this in Hoklo in strong-enough language. What do the native speakers think? ) And it continued when whole villages of "hoanná" started calling each other "Lîm--ê" or "Tân--ê" ... and started referring to their distant kin further inland as "hoanná".

If we look at how the name "Taiwan" started to apply to bigger and bigger swathes of Bílētó, and eventually the whole island and now even Kimbn̂g, Mácó͘, and Botel Tobago... We see that it tracks closely with the formation of a "mestizo", faux-local, yet/and intensely un-Formosan, Taiwanese psyche... And THAT ... is Taiwan.

In the past 15 yrs, there's been this whole idea of "Taiwan is the ROC, the ROC is Taiwan". And when did that happen? Precisely when "the Han tribe of Formosa" made its way into big-time politics on Formosa.

It doesn't make sense. It's not logical. It's mostly bullshit and it's probably unhealthy. But it is.

[niuc]

In fact I got a kick out of calling other Asians and part-Asians "chino". Don't U all be calling me no 秦仔 cînná though!

Indonesian Chinese usually get very offended if they are called "Cina"/"Cino", but may be nowadays the reaction is not that strong anymore. They prefer "Tionghoa". But most don't mind to be called (or refer to themselves as) "Chinese" when talking in Indonesian.

In my variant the subject 伊 i1 is usually pronounced as i7 or even i2 (same tone as gua2 & ly2), but not as object (i.e. still i1). How about in your variants?

Running first tone, a.k.a. mid + level.

Thanks, Amhoanna. How about gua2 & li2/lu2 as subject, are they in running or standing tone? In my variant they are in standing tone, unlike i1.

It's just that "Hànjîn" sounds kind of bô hoeh bô ba̍ksái.

It does give that kind of impression! However, in my variant it is usually Han3-lang5 (IMHO sounds better than Han3-jin5), and used much less than Tng5-lang5.

But I was kind of taken aback in a little stand-up bar in Madagascar when the owner, who was Mada-born Cantonese, said, "我地都係中国人丫。"

In Bagansiapiapi we used to (dunno now) call ourselves Tiong1-kok4-lang5 too! As I mentioned somewhere, most Bagan-lang still cannot believe that they are 僑生 kiau5-sing1 (a term we apply to Medan and other Chinese in Indonesia) too.

But I should point out that 百越 was probably not the name of any real ethnic group, although Chinese and western scholars have recently applied it to archaeological cultures of the southeastern mainland that pre-date the written record.

Thanks, Ah-bin, I agree with you. From my very limited reading, 百越 is just a generic (convenient?) term applied to a whole bunch of ethnic groups, thus the word 百 (hundred) in the name signifies a large number.

What I am interested to know is about languages of those Baiyue 百越. Were they part of Sino-Tibetan? Goujian the King of Yue is said to have a sword graven with "bird & insect" style of writing, which basically is a form of what we now call 漢字/唐人字. Was that Yue Kingdom really part of 百越 or they (at least the rulers) were from 中原?