Nā…nā 若…若 and Jû...Jû... 愈...愈....

[aokh1979]

Sadly I am not very familiar with all the numbering of tones.

Simple test. How do you pronounce the following words ? I use spoken tone in below.

ùt-saⁿ = iron clothe
út-tshāng = the "wake up" baby word I describe in previous post

If you can pronouse 七八六 correctly in Cantonese, you will be able to understand what I mean by the 3 entering tones.

[niuc]

In TW, there's lú ... lú ..., jú ... jú ..., and ná ... ná ... ... and I think that's in order of most to least frequently heard.

Ah my bad! Thank you, Amhoanna. I must be tired yesterday, I failed to notice that my variant is also lú/dú and not lû/dû! That's why I always assume that lú/dú and ná are both 愈, and felt a bit puzzled yesterday when I saw 若!

[Ah-bin]

Sadly I am not very familiar with all the numbering of tones.

It's super easy! The pitch numbers are from one to five, one being the lowest and five the highest. The first number is the pitch where the tone starts, and the last number is the pitch where it ends. Often when describing entering tones where the pitch stays level, only one number is used.

Mandarin tones (according to PRC standard) are:
1 = 55
2 = 25
3 = 312 - most Taiwanese pronounce this as 31, and even Chinese make it 31 in front of tones 1,2, and 4
it sandhis to 25 in front of a tone 2
4 = 52

Cantonese
陰平 開 = 55 or 54
陽平 人 = 21
陰上 好 = 35
陽上 買 = 12
陰去 去 = 33
陽去 賣 = 11
陰入 北 = 5 variant 中入 百 = 3
陽入 白= 1

As far as I can tell the citation tones (minus this one we are discussing) in PGHK are as follows:

陰平 = 33 (same as Cantonese 陰去) *Amoy and TW have 44 or 55 (higher)
陽平 = 24 (not as high as Mandarin second tone, but not as low as Cantonese 陰上) *same in Amoy/TW
上 = varies with the speaker, some say 55 (Mandarin first tone) some make it fall slightly 54, some make it rise 45 *Amoy/TW has 53 (sounds angry...that is why PGHK speakers find Taiwanese a bit "rough", I think)
陰去/陽去 21 (same as Cantonese 陽平) *Amoy/TW has 21 for 陰去 33 for 陽去
陰入 1 (same as Cantonese 陽入) *same in Amoy/TW
陽入 3 (same as Cantonese 中入) *Amoy/TW has 5

The extra tones are the one in the particle me•, which is constantly pronounced 55 no matter what (even by speakers who have different contours for 上) and this high entering tone 5 (same as Cantonese 陰入）, which seems never to occur in an isolated morpheme but is part of certain words. Does it ever occur in words like 實在 and 此款? Or only as part of the unwritten colloquial compounds?

Just edited this to add a tone contours map - a picture is better than a description. N.B. I haven't added the high entering tone, and the 陽入 could be 44, I am not sure, I always though it was a bit higher


And I've edited again to add the POJ tones below as a reference
陰平 = 33 kun
陽平 = 24 kûn
上 = (varies) kún
陰去 21 kùn
陽去 21 kūn
陰入 1 kut
陽入 3 kút

[SimL]

i lim nā chē i nā ài-khùn 伊啉若儕伊若愛睏 the more he drank the sleepier he became;

Hi Ah-bin,

You asked whether this type of na-construction doesn't allow a "liau" at the end.

My opinion is that there is nothing "grammatical" which specifically forbids it, only that the situation in which one would want to say it doesn't arise that often. [And I agree with others in their replies, that these should be jú ... jú ..., and ná ... ná.]

"i lim nā chē i nā ài-khùn liáu" could mean something like: "(It didn't use to be the case, but nowadays) the more he drinks, the sleepier he becomes". Similar meanings could be given to "liau" after your other examples.

I use [`] for iôⁿ-jìp because there are 3 types of jìp-siaⁿ in Penang Hokkien.

國 kok
國家 kòk-ka (where o follows similar tone from lòo to loo)
國家 kók-ka (where o sounds higher, like in lóo)

Hi aokh,

I have to say that I think my variety of Penang Hokkien doesn't distinguish -h from -p, -t, -k in its sandhi behaviour. I may be wrong, but that's my first reaction. This is with the qualification that one often doesn't think about things which one says "natively", so (as has recently been brought up in another thread), I'm not sure how true it is that the contours of my sandhi/running tones are similar to the contours of my (other, existing) citation/standing tones. It's just something I once read about, and it seemed to make sense to me***. Only detailed measurement would really be able to tell.

Let me have a few weeks to think about it. (I know I've had a few weeks to think about it already, as your reply on this matter is already some time ago, but I really will make an effort soon.) I'll have to study your examples in more detail, and also try and think up some examples of my own to check. I sometimes can't test my own usage against your examples, because I don't have those particular items in my vocabulary. For example, I never say "kok-ka", so I can't check using that item.

***: I guess that's how most people approach the world: they read something asserted in a "scientific" (or other respected) source, compare it (perhaps not very carefully) to their own experience, and, if it matches, they "accept" the assertion as being "correct", "accurate" etc.

[siamiwako]

it's also read as 若=diok (文言?)
若一日、若二日、若三日、...、若七日，一心不亂
diok yit dit, diok di dit, diok sa dit, ..., yit sim put duan