HO̍KLÓ, HO̍HLÓ, HŌLÓ

[SimL]

Hi niuc,

Yes, I agree very much with you that this process wasn't started and finished by LKW - we shouldn't blame the guy for *everything* connected with the poor state of Hokkien in Singapore.

It's true that his "Speak Mandarin" campaign certainly played a large part in killing Hokkien off, as did other measures he took, such as legislation which banned the screening of "dialect" films on TV and in cinemas, and the broadcasting of "dialect"-based radio programs. I read in one of the reviews that even the "888/Papaya Sisters" film that I am so enthusiastic about had X% Hokkien where X = "the highest possible amount, without going over the legal amount". Thank goodness X is quite a high figure nowadays (my very rough guess would be perhaps even 20-30%, from what I see of the film).

So yes, his actions played quite an important part, but the process had already begun long ago, and has roots far more widespread than just LKY or Singapore. The replacement of "local" language with a more widespread variety is in any case a very well known phenomenon throughout the word (German or Dutch dialects being replaced by standard German or Dutch, major European languages of the smaller countries having some of their role being encroached on by English, etc). I guess that this is inevitable, but that (and this has been pointed out before) the "mistake" in this process is to assume that the wider language should replace the local language. There's no reason why the two shouldn't live side by side, so that undoubted benefits of both can be experienced: the wider language for ease of communication and exchange of ideas with other regions or countries, and the local language for a feeling of roots and historical continuity.

[SimL]

Niuc,
Sorry, you are right. Among us youngsters, Hokkien is indeed perceived as a lower class, vulgar language. Girls speaking Hokkien were considered 'subconsciously' as being rude and disgraceful.

Yeleixingfeng, I'm sad to hear this. Are you from Penang? If so, Penang has changed a lot in the 40 years since I left.

[Mark Yong]

I remember during my high school days in Singapore in the early-1990’s, virtually all my Chinese schoolmates were indoctrinated with the concept that “Chinese = Mandarin only” and that the “dialects” (as if Mandarin was not one itself!) were some sort of pariah spoken Chinese creole that bore no relation to Chinese characters.

Cantonese has managed to survive the onslaught (so far, at least) for a few reasons. Top of the list would be Hong Kong’s unique political history insulating it from Beijing’s language policy across the bulk of the 20th century. Another factor is that lexically and grammatically, the 粵 Yue dialect is relatively closer to Mandarin than the 閩 Min dialects (ref. Jerry Norman Chinese, 1988). The bulk of Hong Kong’s inhabitants were Cantonese-speaking, which made standardisation and assimilation easier. The adoption of Modern Standard Chinese as the written standard in Hong Kong meant that Cantonese could keep abreast with the development of Mandarin, and standardise much of the later-developed techno-commercial terminologies. Hong Kong’s large population density and strong economic position in Asia gave it the muscle to assert its local language as a regional standard. And finally, there is the media.

The 閩南 Minnan dialects, regrettably, did not share the same advantages as Cantonese. They are lexically and grammatically much further removed from Mandarin. There is no one single numerically-large and economically-powerful 閩南 Minnan-speaking community (Singapore could possibly have been it, but we all know the story). All the other East Asian Chinese communities other than Hong Kong went the way of Big Brother Mandarin. Without parallel development, the 閩南 Minnan dialects struggled (failed?) to keep up with language evolution and development. Only recently has the media started to play a role in its revival, but it lags far behind Cantonese. It is almost the same with Shanghainese, though the language has managed to acquire some degree of development by absorption of some Modern Standard Chinese terminology (ref. Tang Zhixiang's 3-volume texts of Spoken Shanghainese).

The end result is that in the minds of most of today's Mandarin-educated (read: indoctrinated) generation, there is no congruence between read/written Chinese and 閩南 Minnan. That is the reason why, inasmuch as I do occasionally use generally-accepted Malay loanwords when I speak Penang Hokkien, I try to be as lexically and grammatically accurate, i.e. I aim to use proper Hokkien words (i.e. if the Hokkien term exists, I will avoid using the Modern Standard Chinese equivalent pronounced in Hokkien), by way of keeping the literal aspect of the language alive.

In answer to niuc’s question, I have read somewhere that the early Chinese 私塾 su-siòk schools in Penang did teach in Hokkien, with teachers recruited directly from China (apologies, I cannot recall the source, but will let you know once I locate it).

[Yeleixingfeng]

Yeah, I am from Penang. Just my little bio, though I am quite sure I introduced myself in another post..:
17 years old. SMJK Heng Ee. SPM November. Aiming for JPA scholarship - 8A+ (Chinese is damn hard! Bio too. So, there goes my two subjects.) Exposed to Mandarin by 6 years old - before, my whole family spoke English. My dad is a fluent Hokkien-speaker, my mum a fluent Hainanese-speaker - I inherited none. Detested everything Chinese until Form 2 (14 years old) when a devoted Christian 'advised' (= very mild term) me to be baptised, by telling me everything Chinese is cursed and damned to hell. (He himself is a Chinese.) That ignited my love of everything Chinese.
Currently, I am trying to recollect my roots - Hokkien. Hence, here I am. ^^

SimL,
40 years..? I bet a lot has changed..

Mark Yong,
Teachers imported from China? That is in the History Textbook - Form 3 I think.
Besides, in Form 5 Malay Literature, there is a poem called Dirgahayu Bahasa. (Written Bahasa Melayu (baku) is the standard with unchallenged daulat) The Bahasa Melayu teacher (a Chinese) compared the situation to Hokkien and Mandarin. She said, Hokkien is just a dialect - a small unimportant language, that its vocabulary was so insufficient that it has to loan so many words from Chinese. It has no script, no official standardisation. When I stood up and refuted her (yeah, I am recklessly brave when it comes to raising awareness of Hokkien-is-a-proper-language-too ideology, even if that means offending the teacher and risking your grades) by writing 桌頂 for toh-teng - a random request of the teacher, she snorted by saying that is Chinese, not Hokkien. She wants me to represent Hokkien in "Hokkien script". And, I admit I am a little bit VERY rude, I proceed to writing: 先生無相信福建會用唐人字寫，當今我用唐人字寫… I didn't have the time to finish it - I was called off.
Anyway, the main aim of this narration, is that Hokkien is now very despised - even by the Malay teacher, not the Chinese teacher. The image of Hokkien is greatly degraded, especially since vulgarities often creep in its speech. Cantonese-speaking communities, I supposed, don't curse that often, or they curse in Hokkien. That is why, I am trying to correct this image amongst my friends - still to no avail. I think Hokkien needs a new grammar system. Maybe the grammar of Classical could be fully used to construct this new polite language. For example, using 矣 instead of 了. Hokkien is already lexically so close to Classical, why hesitate?
By the way, Mark, why do you say that the grammar of Hokkien is more different from Mandarin than Cantonese?

[SimL]

Hi Yeleixingfeng,

Thanks for your short biography. Very interesting. And VERY impressive that you got to the stage your got to, from a basically English-speaking background, with only exposure to Mandarin at 6, and only real positive feelings about Chinese culture from 14, until your present age of 17. Wonderful!

Indeed, things have changed a lot in 40 years. When we left, the whole of Gurney Drive consisted only of the beach, the road, and on the non-beach side of the road, some houses. In the middle bit, there were fully built up houses (max 2 storey = ground and 1st floor), like pretty "urban", and at the "town/harbour" end there were only about 10 mansions (2-storey rich people's bungalows, hidden behind lots of tall trees). The Tanjong Tokong end had only Malay village huts. The condoniums and shopping plazas of today would have been unimaginable to me then (as perhaps the semi-rural nature of Gurney drive in my youth to you now)!

And of course, the change in attitudes towards Penang Hokkien are pretty dismaying to hear about . Good that you stood up to your teacher - we never dared stand up to teachers in my youth (and probably, lots of your classmates might still be quite docile today).

We have quiet different backgrounds (and very different takes on Hokkien), but I'm absolutely delighted to have you here on the Forum. It's very rare to have someone as interested and passionate about Hokkien as you are (well, there's us, but that's about it, I think!).

[niuc]

Hi Yeleixingfeng

I am happy to know that a bright young man (or do you still consider yourself a teenager?) like you care about Hokkien and interested in historical development of 漢字.

Detested everything Chinese until Form 2 (14 years old) when a devoted Christian 'advised' (= very mild term) me to be baptised, by telling me everything Chinese is cursed and damned to hell. (He himself is a Chinese.) That ignited my love of everything Chinese.

I am "offended" that you considered him devoted rather than deluded! Just kidding! But, yes, being a Christian [(Eastern) Orthodox - (東)正教會], I would say that the guy is misguided. Isn't it great that even behind the darked cloud, there is a silver lining i.e. because of his wrong belief, you were "provoked" to love your own heritage?

Besides, in Form 5 Malay Literature, there is a poem called Dirgahayu Bahasa.

Oh, so "dirgahayu" (meaning: "panjang umur" -> long live) is used in Malaysia too. From the word structure, I believe it is not a Malay word, most probably Old Javanese.

When I stood up and refuted her (yeah, I am recklessly brave when it comes to raising awareness of Hokkien-is-a-proper-language-too ideology, even if that means offending the teacher and risking your grades) by writing 桌頂 for toh-teng - a random request of the teacher, she snorted by saying that is Chinese, not Hokkien. She wants me to represent Hokkien in "Hokkien script". And, I admit I am a little bit VERY rude, I proceed to writing: 先生無相信福建會用唐人字寫，當今我用唐人字寫… I didn't have the time to finish it - I was called off.

Bravo!

[Ah-bin]

Well done Yeleixingfeng! That's a wonderful story!

Of course, if the teacher was saying things in English you could have also corrected her by noting that a dialect is by definition "a variant of a language", so Standard Mandarin must also be classed as a "dialect". Unfortunately Chinese "fangyan" is not quite so democratic, and usually excludes the state "language".

Polite Hokkien still exists in Taiwan, and it existed in China as well. Have you managed to get hold of a copy (digitised or otherwise) of Douglas and Barclay? That has many polite words and expressions in it.

[amhoanna]

I agree with most of what's just been said here. A few things I want to add:

1) Cantonese vs. Hoklo; vitality, etc. -- I agree with what Mark said. The topic also brings to mind "the tradition of southern kingship" in the Canton area. Time and again, there've been wealthy sovereign states based around here. I think this is part of the cultural DNA. I recommend Ah-bin and his colleagues' papers, for those who haven't read some of them yet. They discuss these things. Is there hope for Hokkien? Maybe a new "tradition of island rebel kingship"?

2) The effects of Mandarin -- I won't really get into this here. I just realized the other day that although most "Amoy Taiwanese" pronunciations have gone away in Taiwan in favor of Ciangciu pronunciations, there are several that are still used by lots of people: chē (SEEK), coē (MANY), etc. What do these have in common? No Mandarin cognate! Is it possible that hoé for FIRE won out over hé b/c it's more similar to the Mandarin? U heard it here first.

3) "Shallow-variant" Hokkien -- I agree, I think most Straits Hokkien and North Straits Hokkien as spoken by young people is a shallow variant. This is why even Indians and Malays in M'sia have told me that Hokkien is easier to learn than Canto, whereas the man on the street in Tn̂gsoaⁿ believes the opposite. I think this shallowness is good in one sense and maybe bad in another. It's good in the sense that it levels out the rampant exceptions and grammatical complexity of "original Hokkien". It's maybe bad in the sense that much of the "original Hokkien" vocab is dropped. Comparing Banlamese with Teochew, and then Canto, we find so much unique Banlamese vocab. This is the vocab that's been dropped, not only in the Straits of Melaka ports, but also in Tn̂gsoaⁿ contact zones like Lo̍k'hong and Lâm'ò. The result is that the vocabulary skews toward "General Old South Chinese". One last comment on this, though. There are lots of middle-aged (not old) people in M'sia/Sg that speak "deep-variant" Hokkien, right? Take for example the loan shark in MONEY NO ENOUGH (Jack Neo). He was speaking pretty deep Hokkien, right? Or maybe he just fooled this non-native?

Once again, great to hear the Malay-country perspectives.

An interesting appendix to this thread would be something I saw on the same site that hosts the Tai-Hoa dictionary: a Hokkien POJ math textbook from a hundred-odd yrs ago. It was printed in Amoy or around there. All the math terminology was pure, original, uncut Hokkien. Even the examples in the book had a Hoklospheric slant, like if a certain ship travels at a certain speed, and the distance from Ēmn̂g to "Pin'nn̂gsū" is however much, then how many days will it take the ship to arrive?

[Ah-bin]

3) "Shallow-variant" Hokkien -- I agree, I think most Straits Hokkien and North Straits Hokkien as spoken by young people is a shallow variant. This is why even Indians and Malays in M'sia have told me that Hokkien is easier to learn than Canto, whereas the man on the street in Tn̂gsoaⁿ believes the opposite

I would say it's because North Straits Hokkien is creolised to some extent, because of longer contact with Malay and longer use as a lingua franca among different groups. It's like Baba Malay compared to Classical Malay (but Hokkien grammar has changed less than Baba has from Classical)

It's also I think because NS Hokkien is inclined to express things in a simple manner constructing ideas from more common spoken words, where Cantonese takes words and expressions directly from written Chinese (usually written Mandarin) and pronounces them according to Cantonese. Hokkien makes better use of its own resources.

Example:
"cho chhan e lang" = farmer Cantonese and Amoy Hokkien prefer their versions of 農夫 農民, but I bet "cho chhan e" is what ordinary Hoklo speakers were saying 200 years ago, and Cantonese and Mandarin used to say it differently too.

Just because creole languages (n.b. distinguish from pidgins) have a smaller base vocabulary, people tend to look down on them or consider them easier, but they forget that everything can be expressed in these languages, even the individual words do not exist. Why does Hokkien have to have a word for "accommodation"? when "koe ME e ui" does just as well (and in fewer syllables)? There are subtleties in Northern Straits Hokkien expressed by particles and intonation that are incredibly hard for an outsider to learn properly. "Soah" is one example, and I was thinking today about the difference between "m-thang" and "be-sai" and I still have no idea what it is.

In my experience mostly people will say things are harder to learn when they are not used to them. Not because they are actually harder to learn. People used to tell me all the time when i was first in Taiwan and learning Hakka "Oh Hakka is so hard to learn compared to Taiwanese" - they had no idea about the complexities of tone sandhi in Taiwanese compared to the very limited changes in Hakka, and they just said it was difficult because they weren't used to speaking it themselves. Of course there are degrees of difficulty (Wenzhou tone sandhi looks impossible, and Georgian grammar does too) but people's perceptions about complexity don't necessarily reflect actual linguistic complexity.

[SimL]

In my experience mostly people will say things are harder to learn when they are not used to them. Not because they are actually harder to learn. People used to tell me all the time when i was first in Taiwan and learning Hakka "Oh Hakka is so hard to learn compared to Taiwanese" - they had no idea about the complexities of tone sandhi in Taiwanese compared to the very limited changes in Hakka, and they just said it was difficult because they weren't used to speaking it themselves.

Hear, hear! The other way round (but making exactly the same point), I met a very intelligent, artistic man in a cafe in Amsterdam once. He was a photographer and came from Taiwan. When I said Chinese characters were difficult to learn, he say "Nonsense, that's what many people think, but it's not true. It's no more difficult than learning to write Dutch."

He knew Chinese fluently, and knew no Dutch, so he felt that this was the case. But Dutch is very well spelled, with almost no inconsistencies or doubtful cases, and we have already spoken enough about the difficulties of learning (and remembering) Chinese characters. [Note: I'm not talking about the ease or otherwise of learning the Dutch or Chinese *language* (i.e. the forms, what to say, how to say them, vocabularly items, etc). I'm talking only about how, if you have learnt a Dutch or Chinese word or sentence, how hard or easy it is to remember how to write (or read) it.]

So yes, people's pronouncements on linguistic matters (especially if they have no special interest in language(s) or linguistics) are notoriously inaccurate.