Gosh! I thought my mother was the last person on earth to do this...amhoanna wrote: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.
Her background: She sort of spoke Mandarin in her youth, but never particularly well (although both her parents were born in China, they made the fateful decision to send her to English school). So her languages in order of fluency were: as a very young child - Hokkien, Mandarin (no English, because she grew up with no Babas around her); as a young girl - Hokkien, English, Mandarin (because she got her entire education in English, with (only very limited, e.g. once or twice a week for a year) evening classes in reading and writing Mandarin); and as an adult - English, Hokkien, Mandarin (because more and more "sophisticated things" were only known / done in English, and she rarely spoke Mandarin in everyday life). After migrating to Australia, and not speaking any Mandarin for 40 years, the Mandarin has now more or less dropped off the list.
Anyway, one interesting thing I noticed - even when I was in my teens and she was in her 40's - was that she would occasionally read out Chinese characters in Hokkien (not always, not even very often, but occasionally). She did this not just with one or two characters, but with whole sentences of continuous text, albeit not very long ones, and not whole passages - her Chinese was not good enough for her to read whole passages. This was in the 1960's and 70's. This used to puzzle me, as nobody else in her generation or even of her parents' generation did this - they all were (or became) Mandarin reading adults. In fact nobody else on earth I knew did this. I imagine she did this because she's linguistically quite talented, and as her Mandarin fluency declined (from young girl -> adult), she discovered that she still knew the characters (from the evening classes), and knew the Hokkien syllables (from being a native speaker), and could associate the two, but could no longer make the connection "character <-> Mandarin pronunciation". [For example, when I told her in 2011 that the Mandarin word for "science" was "ke1 xue2", she didn't know it and had no memory of ever having known it, but as soon as she heard "ke1 xue2" - and was told it meant "science" - she immediately said: "Oh, 'kho-hak' ".]
So, as I said, it used to intrigue me that she did this, while nobody else I knew did. Later I found out that my grandfather (her father, born in China in 1900) had had his primary education in Hokkien, and only later picked up Mandarin as a teenager / young adult, as the movement to promote a national language among all Chinese grew. [I imagine this was true of many other people of his generation from Southern China.] Nevertheless, I was always convinced (and still am) that my mother's reading Chinese characters out in Hokkien was not a continuation of her father's early 1900's tradition, but something she had invented herself, as a partial solution to her declining skills in Mandarin. Still, in that indirect sense, I thought of her as the last person who still did this.
And now, you tell me of these teenage Teochew girls!
Do you think they were doing something similar to my mother - i.e. "re-inventing" this method of reading Chinese characters, or do you think it could possibly be a "continuous descendent" of the pre-1900's tradition of reading Classical Chinese in fangyan?
Have you ever heard any (below 70-year-old) Taiwanese do it, in Taiwanese? Come to that, has anybody else here heard of cases of this, besides my mother and amhoanna's Teochew girls...? [Again, I wish to exclude the very old, who might have just learnt it in primary school along with all their schoolmates, as part of their growing up. Also (thinking further about this) I would also exclude the entire school (I believe it still exists in Taiwan, though the number of people who can do this is rapidly declining) who consciously and deliberately read Classical Chinese in Hokkien or Hakka. If I recall correctly, the father-in-law of one of our Forum members - Aurelio - was able to do this, in Hakka. I'd estimate that Aurelio is about 40-45, making his father-in-law perhaps in his 70's. But he also said that - as far as he knew - his father-in-law was one of the last people who could.]
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