Demonstrative Pronouns Singular and Plural

[Ah-bin]

I have been wondering how one makes the distinction between “this” and “these”, and “that” and “those” in Penang Hokkien, when one has to do it, or whether people just don’t need to do it and always go from the context.I was looking at a Hakka Textbook (Bernard Mercer, Hakka-Chinese Lessons 1930) and one of the sentences for translation into Hakka was “Don’t eat those oranges”, and I was wondering how to express “those” instead of “that”.


Lú màng chiáh há-lê chhiâm!

Can mean “Don’t eat that orange!” or “Don’t eat those oranges!”, is that right?
I’m guessing if I wanted to be specific about a single orange (“that orange”) I would say:

Lú màng chiáh hit-liáp chhiâm!

For the plural (“those oranges”) I would say:

Lú màng chiáh há-lê kúi-liáp chhiâm!

Actually, my feeling is that I might have to front the object in both cases for emphasis, making:

Hit-liáp chhiâm lú màng chiáh!

and

Há-lê kúi-liáp chhiâm, lú màng chiáh!


But then, my feeling is that I should only do this in a situation where I would qualify my command with “but you can eat……”


Then I suppose another way of doing it would be to use location and say:

Lú màng chiáh hó-pêng ê chhiâm!

But this again, is ambiguous. It could be “those oranges there” or “that orange there”, all of which makes me think that Penang Hokkien speakers don’t worry about the ambiguity, and make a distinction only when it is absolutely necessary to do so.

Similarly:

Lú màng chiáh chit-liáp chhiâm! (“this orange”)

Lú màng chiáh chí-lê kúi-liáp chhiâm! (“these oranges”)

For these examples I have used a word which has a distinct measure word (liáp)
For “lâng” (person) where the measure word is often the same ê/lê, I wonder what to do.

Maybe use a different measure word?

Chí-lê lâng/Chít-pêng chít-khe•n “this person”
(but how to say “these people”?)

Há-lê lâng/Hó-pêng chít-khe•n “that person”
(but how to say “those people”?)

Maybe it is
Hó-pêng ê lâng and Chít-pêng ê lâng qualified with “kà-liáu”?

Chit-pêng ê lâng kà-liáu sī Tng-lâng.

Hó-pêng ê lâng kà-liáu sī Tng-lâng.


"These/those people are (all) Chinese"

I wonder, not speaking Hokkien natively whether my intuition is in fact correct?

[AndrewAndrew]

I think it depends whether it is ê or another classifier. Generally with ê, it is only from context, e.g. hit--e lang can either mean that or those people. If you really need to emphasise the plurality, you could say hit-kui/2/3/4--e lang or hit-peng kui--e lang, etc.

With other classifiers, I think you probably do need to express the plurality, e.g. hit-liap-nuiN is to me clearly singular. To make it plural, you would have to say hit-kui/2/3/4-liap, or use a construction that uses ê instead of liȧp.

It is not so different from Mandarin, except that in Hokkien we don't have the 這些／那些 construction and ê has the meaning of both 個 and 的.

[Ah-bin]

That's great, it's kind of what I suspected, thanks so much Andrew. What makes me even happier is that I kind of "knew" it would be like that, but not being a native speaker, I wasn't going to make statements about it without checking first.

[amhoanna]

I guess this kind of thing is yet another hotbed for variation within Hokkien. In TW and maybe Amoy, ciah'ê means THESE and hiah'ê THOSE, with the T4 syllables losing their glottal stops and "sandhi'ing" to high-falling.

Once I met someone from the shore north of Tâilâm/Anpêng who told me that they said "hiòng'ê" instead of "hiah'ê". He was very conscious of this.

The split between ê on one hand and other classifiers on the other, as described by Andrew, holds true here. (C)hiah'ê only works with ê. How would we say THESE DOGS? If it was just a few dogs, one way (or the only way?) to say it would be Cit kúi ciah káu. But if it was a lot of dogs, I think it might be Ciah'ê káu. May the natives correct me if I'm wrong.

[AndrewAndrew]

I guess this kind of thing is yet another hotbed for variation within Hokkien. In TW and maybe Amoy, ciah'ê means THESE and hiah'ê THOSE, with the T4 syllables losing their glottal stops and "sandhi'ing" to high-falling.

Once I met someone from the shore north of Tâilâm/Anpêng who told me that they said "hiòng'ê" instead of "hiah'ê". He was very conscious of this.

The split between ê on one hand and other classifiers on the other, as described by Andrew, holds true here. (C)hiah'ê only works with ê. How would we say THESE DOGS? If it was just a few dogs, one way (or the only way?) to say it would be Cit kúi ciah káu. But if it was a lot of dogs, I think it might be Ciah'ê káu. May the natives correct me if I'm wrong.

I think this is because in TW ciah and hiah mean here and there respectively? In which case the ê in ciah--e and hiah--e would be in the sense of 的. In Penang we would have to say cit-peng--e and hit-peng--e.

[amhoanna]

I think this is because in TW ciah and hiah mean here and there respectively? In which case the ê in ciah--e and hiah--e would be in the sense of 的. In Penang we would have to say cit-peng--e and hit-peng--e.

HERE and THERE are cia and hia in TW (both T1). It's still possible that ciah'ê and hiah'ê are derived from cia and hia in the way U described.

Come to think of it, I don't know why the TWese/Amoyans write ciah'ê and hiah'ê this way. Why not cià'ê and hià'ê? Maybe there are dialects outside of TW where the glottal stop can be heard.

I notice that cia/hia don't "work" down on the Lâm'iûⁿ in general, but I noticed that they used these words in Kiat'iông Teochew.

[niuc]

Bâ-gán-uē is similar to TW/Amoy in this aspect, we use ciâi and hiâi for both these/those and here/there. These oranges = ciâi chiâm. Come here = lâi-ciâi. It's quite obvious that ciâi/hiâi are contractions of cia-ê/hia-ê. It seems that Bâ-gán-uē likes contractions, e.g. khiái = khí_laï, mang = m-thang, chuái = chut_laï, luàih = lòh_laï, tuài = tò_laï.

[siamiwako]

I say "tsuai" for these and "huai" for those.

[siamiwako]

I thought Taiwanese Minnan dialect is a mix of hokkien, teochew and hakka?

[Yeleixingfeng]

Bâ-gán-uē is similar to TW/Amoy in this aspect, we use ciâi and hiâi for both these/those and here/there. These oranges = ciâi chiâm. Come here = lâi-ciâi. It's quite obvious that ciâi/hiâi are contractions of cia-ê/hia-ê. It seems that Bâ-gán-uē likes contractions, e.g. khiái = khí_laï, mang = m-thang, chuái = chut_laï, luàih = lòh_laï, tuài = tò_laï.

Apparently, we have that too. A lot, but we consciously know that they are two syllables though. Is that same there?