Hoklo in Canto Land, reports from the field

[SimL]

In TW the general word for TO BURN is hiâⁿ.

Wow! In my usage, it's specifically restricted to boiling water, i.e. the verb of putting the kettle on. But then, I don't know if I get this from my Amoyish mother, or if it is genuine Penang Hokkien usage. Mark, Andrew, care to comment?

[Mark Yong]

Same here. The only time I have heard, and use, hiâⁿ is in 燃水 hiâⁿ-cui. But again, that is based on my limited 6 years of regular exposure to Penang Hokkien.

[niuc]

Hiâⁿ 燃 in my variant is mainly used for boiling water. It is also used to mean heating up for soup and those with gravy e.g. ló·-bah. For cooking soup, ló·-bah, etc, we say 煮 cí· or 炕 khòng.

Other words' usage are as described by Amhoanna. 'Hang' 烘 in my variant is also used for heating up. Che· 炊 is used for both cooking rice/cake and heating up by steaming. Sio-lō is used in my variant, usually repeated as sio-lō sio-lō.

[SimL]

Hi Mark and niuc,

Thanks for sharing your usage of "hiaN5".

For cooking soup, ló·-bah, etc, we say 煮 cí· or 炕 khòng.

In my family, we have a series of dishes called "<X> khong1_a3_sam1", where <X> = "hu5" (= "fish"), or "hE5" (= "prawn"), etc (or even some specific fish sort); and "a3_sam1" is simply the Malay "asam jawa" (= "tamarind"). [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamarind]

Now, I've never thought about what the "khong" might mean, because I never knew the word in any other context than with this range of dishes. For me, it's not a "free morpheme", which can be combined with other words, so I never thought of it as having any particular meaning (one only needs to think about the meaning of a word if one wants to freely combine it with a whole variety of others).

So, for all I knew, it might have meant "combined with", or "marinated in", or anything; but I never really thought about it.

Now - out of the blue, in another context - I learn that it has the meaning of "to cook" (which of course makes sense in my context). So, this is all very enlightening to me.

This is one of the reasons I love this Forum!

[SimL]

... I think you will also be disappointed to know that with the heavy industrialisation of Bayan Lepas, the number of snakes at the Snake Temple has dwindled to the point where you will be lucky to even see more than two or three (and that includes the one that is deliberately handled by the caretaker in the back room for the tourists to see). .

Hi Mark,

Thank you for sharing that. Indeed, I am sad to hear this. However, this new piece of information does actually *detract* from a theory / belief which I have had for the past 30 years.

You may or may not recall that I wrote about the Penang Snake Temple in a reply to one of Ah-bin's threads - about 白無常 - at the beginning of this year:

- viewtopic.php?f=6&t=11050

In it, I said the following:

[In contrast, I remember being probably in my late teens before it struck me as being "scientifically unlikely" that the snakes at the famous Penang Snake Temple would all crawl out of the jungle and gather at the temple on the day of the god's birthday. I was listening to a conversation between my parents and uncles and aunts, and they were talking about this annual phenomenon. One of them said: "Of course, the temple authorities place the snakes there overnight, the night before his birthday". It was only when I heard the statement that I thought "Hey, that's probably true". Up to that moment, I had cheerfully accepted the story as being true - part of my inner wish to have "magical things" exist in the universe, I guess.]

Now, your new piece of information would imply that the snakes - on non-feast days, in any event - actually do come from the surrounding countryside. So, my theory for the last 30 years (since my "eye opening" experience in my late teens) - that the temple authorities got the snakes commercially, and planted them there for gullible worshippers - might actually be wrong! For, if they could plant them for the sake of the feast day, they could plant them for the rest of the year...

So, maybe my pre-late-teens belief - that these snakes really are attracted to some spiritual aspect of the place - is not completely whacky after all.

While writing this, I realised that I actually don't know much about the background of the snakes in that temple (probably part of not being able to read Chinese, especially in my youth). My original belief (i.e. up to my late teens) - and that of my parents and uncles and aunts in the story quoted above - was that there is a "Snake God", who is the main deity of that temple (and for whom the snakes came to the temple generally, and in larger numbers during his birthday). Does this bear any relationship to what the "official" reason is for the presence of the snakes in the temple?

Perhaps even a visitor like Ah-bin could supply me with the information. Note that I'm not asking if there is a Snake God in reality(!), only whether that is the common belief / official story for the reason for the snakes in the temple.

[amhoanna]

Maybe I've taken the word "hiâⁿ" too far. I guess it is "hoé sio chù", not "hoé hiâⁿ chù". What word would U guys use for TO BURN FIREWOOD? Or TO BURN AND DESTROY PAPER DOCUMENTS? Or "Goá ê chia teh BURN MOTOR OIL"? What about "the firewood IS BURNING"?

What if an oil spill caught fire? What verbs could be used there?

Much like Sim, to this pt I've only known khòng as part of khòngbah STEWED SAMCÂN PORK. On Bílētó this shows up on menus and walls as 焢肉, kong4 rou4 in Mandarin.

Good to hear that siolō is used in real life, somewhere.

[SimL]

Maybe I've taken the word "hiâⁿ" too far. I guess it is "hoé sio chù", not "hoé hiâⁿ chù". What word would U guys use for TO BURN FIREWOOD? Or TO BURN AND DESTROY PAPER DOCUMENTS? Or "Goá ê chia teh BURN MOTOR OIL"? What about "the firewood IS BURNING"?

Most of these are "sio1" for me, both 'active' - as in "a person doing the act of setting fire to something", as well as 'passive' - as in "a thing undergoing the burning process"***. The only exception in your examples above is the burning of motor oil. There I would hesitate to use "sio" (both 'active' and 'passive'). For some reason, I think of "sio" as for physical objects - houses (as in my original example in an earlier reply!), books, paper, leaves; much less for liquids. I have images of the thing burning turning brown, "curling up", turning to ash, etc, as it is consumed by the flames. Oil and other inflammable liquids don't do that, so I don't think of them as much in connection with "sio".

***: "burn" is used in much the same way in English (i.e. both 'active' and 'passive' - "he's burning the evidence" and "this wood is burning rather slowly"). The weird thing someone once pointed out to me is that (for the 'passive' sense) both "the wood/paper etc burns" and "the fire burns". But in the latter case, it's not the fire which is actually burning (i.e. the fire itself isn't being consumed and turning to ash, instead, it's the presence of the fire which makes one say that the 'fire is burning'). It took me a while to see how strange this actually is.

What if an oil spill caught fire? What verbs could be used there?

Here it would be "sio" I think, in the 'passive' sense of the fire itself being present (the same sort of paradox as my "***" note above).

Much like Sim, to this pt I've only known khòng as part of khòngbah STEWED SAMCÂN PORK. On Bílētó this shows up on menus and walls as 焢肉, kong4 rou4 in Mandarin.

Nice that we both learned so much from niuc's simple statement.

After thinking about it overnight, I realise that I know another phrase where that "khong" is used. Namely "khong tau-iu" (= "cooked in/with light soy sauce"). Weird that I never connected those two "khongs" as a verb meaning "to cook" before.

[Yeleixingfeng]

SimL,
Replying to your 'burning' phenomenon - it actually happens more frequently in Sinitic languages - a trait inherited from Classical Chinese.
1) 目鏡換了ka會看著. Who is seeing? Saying 目鏡換了我ka會看著 sounds formal, doesn't it?
2) Mata來著走了. Who is running away?

I know of many other different examples, but I can't recall them now. I am sure others can provide you with sufficient examples. ^^

EDIT: By the way, thanks for your wish! Haha, I am having Sejarah and bio tomorrow. LOL, two memorising subjects and here I am replying posts. LOL!!

Hey, thought of another one:
3) ma載考何麽? Who is sitting for the exam?
Note: I am trying to give you different examples of compound sentences. The first example is 因果, the second 承接, the third is 主謂. Sorry, don't think there would be any Hokkien equivalent for these. (Amhoanna, get my point here? Specific/high-level terms are necessary for a language to prosper.)

[SimL]

Hi Yeliuxingfeng,

Thanks for your response. Indeed, I agree with you that Sinitic languages do this a lot more than Western ones. Western languages (well, the ones I know, from Western Europe, either directly descended from Latin, or - more remotely - from Indo-European, or in any case heavily influenced by Latin) have a much stronger sense of the distinction between "agent" and "thing acted upon". Sinitic languages tend to leave it up to the listener to work it out from context. This might be related to the fact that Indo-European had a nominative and an accusative case.

Where the European approach "falls down" - I use the term very loosely, because it's not meant as a serious 'criticism', just a phrase to get on with my exposition - is in "verbs" like "to rain". If a native English speaker says "It's raining heavily at the moment", it sometimes surprises them if you ask them "What is?". Many English native speakers who are not linguisitically aware / experienced will be a bit taken aback by the question, and then say "erm, well, 'the sky' / 'the cloud' / 'the heavens', I suppose..." or something like that . [While "we" actually know that the pronoun "it" isn't replacing 'the sky' or 'the cloud' or 'the heavens', but is simply an "empty placeholder" because the grammar demands a subject before the verb. Having put it there because of the grammar, the sense requires it to be a sort of "doer", doing the raining. And that's when the apparent 'paradox' of what exactly is doing the raining arises.]

In that sense, the Sinitic languages don't bother about this, so the problem doesn't arise: "tong-kim ti loh tua hO" doesn't require a subject at all. [On re-reading, I realise that this is slightly different from your "non-explicit subject vs object" issue, but, in some senses, related.]

Good to hear that the exams are going fine.

BTW, just a small tip: if you're writing quite long posts, try to remember to save the text somewhere (e.g. in Notepad, or at least in your paste buffer) before hitting "Submit" or "Preview". Sometimes, if you work on the post for long enough, you get disconnected from the Forum, and then when you hit "Submit" or "Preview", it comes back saying "not logged in", and all the text you worked on is lost! Ah-bin and I run into this frustrating phenomenon every now and again.

[amhoanna]

Specific/high-level terms are necessary for a language to prosper.)

Maybe Hoklo lacks specific/high-level terms b/c it's not prospering.

Strictly speaking, it doesn't lack any terms. Tn̂gsoaⁿ 唐山 Hoklophones will just take the Mandarin word and pronounce it in Hoklo. For them, that's Hoklo.

A few days ago in Teochew, I was surprised to hear teenage girls reading text messages out loud in Teochew, including nationwide mass texts from China Mobile. More on my Teochew trip later.