Final Particles

[SimL]

Hi niuc,

Very interesting. I don't know any other sentence-final particles in Malay besides "lah" either. I'll ask my native-speaker Malay friend about this the next time I meet him on the net. Unfortunately, he doesn't come on the channels I hang out on much these days. As a native, he might be able to confirm that they exist in colloquial varieties of Malay on the West coast, (or something like that), for example.

[Ah-bin]

I thought I should dig out this thread again because I have come across another particle (actually I came across it a while back) and it has been bugging me. It is "le", and when I was talking to Mr. Tan back in Penang, I remembered he had said he doesn't use "ni", but uses "le" instead. This was in relation to a suggestion I had about explaining particles in future books.

He said he uses "le" in the "what about" sense. "Lu le?" Insted of "Lu ni?" I wonder if that is a variation between speakers, and whether the "le" has all the meanings of "ni" described by Sim above?

[Mark Yong]

I have not done an in-depth empirical study on this, but based on my off-hand experience, I would be inclined to say that ni and le are interchangeable, and simply a matter of usage.

That said, I find that the 'purer' Penang Hokkien speakers (by that, I mean those whose Penang Hokkien has limited to no intrusions of other dialects, e.g. 粵) tend towards ni. le is the equivalent in Cantonese and Hakka.

An example of usage would be 無呢 bó-nî, the colloquial equivalent of 否則/不然 ("if not / otherwise..."). It is probably the short-form of 若是無呢 nă-sĭ bó, nî...

[Ah-bin]

Great, thanks Mark. I was thinking they were probably interchangeable in certain situations, but perhaps not it others.

[SimL]

Hi Ah-bin,

This is my third attempt to post a reply on this topic: it kept losing my reply, saying that I needed to log in, even though I already had. Anyway, I'll keep it short. I'm familiar with "le", and use it interchangably with "ni", but only in usage 1 of the 3 usages I gave as an initial reply. For usage 2 and 3, it has to be "ni".

PS. I noticed that niuc gave"le" as a pronunciation of "ni" in the last of his examples when he responded to your initial posting: "汝个呢? ly2 e5 le1? How about yours? (or: Where is yours?)". The only difference is that I think PgHk has "le2" (high, very slightly falling), rather than "le1".

[Yeleixingfeng]

Er, in 是汝乎 (si lu hor), wouldn't 乎 be the 本字 of hor? They are both phonetically and semantically related to 乎, as seen:

汝食去乎新年糕? (Lu jiak ki hor sinjia kuih?)
汝食去新年糕乎? (Lu jiak ki sinjia kuih hor?)
Sorry, I know my transcriptions are weird. >.< But its usage matches nearly exactly as that of Classical Chinese. Just wondering....

[amhoanna]

It's possible.

Is "hor" nasal in Penang, like it is in Taiwan? (Just out of curiosity.)

Iu2-koan soa2-ui7 hounnh*, I think it'll be a great idea, when it becomes possible. My biggest problem with this forum is how hard it is to log in and stay logged in. I get taken back to an empty login screen at the drop of a hat, inc. just after keying in username and pswd and hitting enter. Then I have to go fish for the thread I was working with, all over again. (Or hell, just post off-topic. Post it while the posting's good. ) And hope that I don't somehow get logged out on the way. I think Sim mentioned login problems too.

* My "hor".

[Yeleixingfeng]

Actually I still have trouble differentiating nasalised and non-nasalised ones. Anyway I found the real word for hor. It is 歟. Since 與 is read as hor (give), then naturally 歟 would follow the trend. Besides, 歟 is a combination of 也 and 乎, which fits perfectly into our current usage of hor.

As far as I know, hor is not nasalised.

[SimL]

Hi am-hoanna,

No, PgHk "hO" is not nasalized.

[AndrewAndrew]

Hi am-hoanna,

No, PgHk "hO" is not nasalized.

I'm not so sure. I think it can also be nasalised.