Hokkien alternative names for Technology Stuff

[amhoanna]

One more thing. Aokh, what's the usage in Amoy?

[Mark Yong]

Ah-bin wrote:
Yes, I think there certainly is a t/k mix up in various types of Hokkien... I wonder if there are any more.

Two candidates off the top of my head:

1. 指 - kĬ
2. 到 - kâu

I realise there are have been alternative characters proposed for the 2nd example.

[SimL]

Yes, I think there certainly is a t/k mix up in various types of Hokkien. etc

Yes. I've always said "khau7_kiong1" for "spoon", but I think the "correct" (in any case, more common) form is "thau-kiong". Perhaps a bit of folk-etymology with "khau1" (= "scrap"), as that is how one uses a spoon to get the stuff off the plate...?

[SimL]

Thank you for the comments on siâng Aokh. I have to say that I have never heard siāng myself, but I have a very small pool of people (probably less than ten) who I hear speaking Penang-slyte Hokkien on a regular basis. I'll put it in as a variant of siâng. I suspect from the number of people on the podcast who say siâng, that siāng is on its way out.

The sandhied siâng in siâng-kà will sound exactly like siāng-kà.

Exactly.

Actually, I've always said "siāng" and "bô-siāng" for "same" and "different", and never even noticed or suspected the existence of "siâng" until I started reading this Forum regularly.

[Ah-bin]

Actually, I've always said "siāng" and "bô-siāng" for "same" and "different", and never even noticed or suspected the existence of "siâng" until I started reading this Forum regularly.

Oh no!....now I am just doubting everything I hear....I could have sworn everyone was saying siâng the whole time..I think it was the influence of the podcast and Bhante Dhammavudho, and then I just stopped thinking about it!

[SimL]

Actually, I've always said "siāng" and "bô-siāng" for "same" and "different", and never even noticed or suspected the existence of "siâng" until I started reading this Forum regularly.

Oh no!....now I am just doubting everything I hear....I could have sworn everyone was saying siâng the whole time..I think it was the influence of the podcast and Bhante Dhammavudho, and then I just stopped thinking about it!

Haha! No, don't doubt yourself - you have one of the keenest ears I've ever come across in a linguist. It's entirely possible that I never used the word while we were speaking...

PS. Because the sandhied tone of "siāng" doesn't sound any different from the non-sandhied tone in my variant, I thought for most of my life that "twins" was "siāng-sEN" (= "same birth"). It was only when I was way past 40 that I discovered that it was "siang-sEN" (= "pair birth") - which, sandhied, sounds identical to "siāng-sEN" in Penang Hokkien. Of course, this makes much more sense, though it's also quite understandable why I thought the former.

[Ah-bin]

Two candidates off the top of my head:

1. 指 - kĬ
2. 到 - kâu

I realise there are have been alternative characters proposed for the 2nd example.

The second one makes a lot more sense now in the context of all the other t/k correspondences.

Just thought of another one too

枝 - ki

I think the initial here was originally the same as that of 豬 and 竹, the unvoiced retroflex 知母. It is still a mystery to me how the word 知 ended up as "chai" in the colloquial stratum.

perhaps 蛭 is another one too.

[Mark Yong]

amhoanna wrote:
Mandarin and Japanese are "homonym city", but is Hoklo really that bad? For people who read the tone marks?

Admittedly, homonyms in Hoklo are nowhere as bad as Mandarin (or Shanghainese, for that matter). But in general, homonyns are still a characteristic of Chinese in just about any form. I just personally find reading them difficult, because the very fact that there isn't a one-to-one mapping between the written and spoken word means an extra mental step is required to 'deduce' what it is, making it unintuitive.

I am aware that proponents for Romanisation will say that tone markers and sentencial context will resolve the ambiguities, especially for Hoklo which has relatively less homonyms compared to the Northern dialects. While it is true to some extent, my experience (or maybe it is already a knee-jerk reaction from me!) is that it is still quite limited. In most cases, in order to take advantage of the context, you practically have to read and digest the entire sentence first (as compared to 'natural' reading, where you 'take in' the meaning of the sentence real-time as your eyes gloss past the words).

Quite frankly, I am really amazed how the Koreans manage it so well with Hangeul, as well-evidenced in their world-class literacy rates. My favourite example (taken from the Wikipedia article on Hanja) is sudo 수도:

修道 — spiritual discipline
受渡 — receipt and delivery
囚徒 — prisoner
水都 — 'city of water' (e.g. Venice or Hong Kong)
水稻 — rice
水道 — drain
隧道 — tunnel
水道 — rivers, path of surface water
首都 — capital (city)
手刀 — hand-knife

[Ah-bin]

I am aware that proponents for Romanisation will say that tone markers and sentencial context will resolve the ambiguities, especially for Hoklo which has relatively less homonyms compared to the Northern dialects. While it is true to some extent, my experience (or maybe it is already a knee-jerk reaction from me!) is that it is still quite limited. In most cases, in order to take advantage of the context, you practically have to read and digest the entire sentence first (as compared to 'natural' reading, where you 'take in' the meaning of the sentence real-time as your eyes gloss past the words).

Ah yes, but that is a very new and westernised style of silent reading you are talking about there. The trick to reading Romanised Hokkien is to do it out loud i.e. to 讀 thák or 念 liām it rather than just 看 khoàⁿ it. Then the meaning will come straight to mind. Not as fast as silent reading, though. In the past all Chinese used to be read like that (including the classics, by chanting). It's only over the last century or so that Chinese have fallen silent during reading.

I read somewhere that reading used to be done out loud in European languages as well, and someone told me a quote from Chaucer complaining about people starting to read silently, but I can't remember what it was.

[amhoanna]

Interesting. Generally, I don't speed-read Hoklo. This is b/c I've mostly used written Hoklo to learn the spoken. Even if we switched to Hoklo on this forum, I'd be sounding it out -- at least in my head -- to get a feel for Penang and Bagan Hokkien, etc. So honestly I don't know if I could speed-read Hoklo. One thing, though. I "naturally" speed-read Portuguese, a language I don't even really speak yet, while tending to "sound out" Mandarin, my native language. This is b/c I almost entirely "tha̍k ângmo͘ cheh", in terms of schooling. I've been training myself to speed-read Mandarin, but the words just don't jump out at me the way they do in a Portuguese text.

All this said, I think I'd probably read "han-roma" Hoklo fastest, then pure POJ, then pure hanji w/ punji + phono-semantics, then pure hanji w/ lots of latter-day Standard Chinese characters such as 的彼蔗 etc. (I'm not sure if I've ever seen a text in the third category. )

Mark, the 수도 example is something to behold. I challenge anybody to find anything along these lines in Hoklo. I think "real-life" Hoklo and Cantonese are pretty lean on the homophones, maybe even leaner than English. In other words, w/o having given it much thought, I'm questioning your statement that homonyms are a characteristic of Hoklo, among other languages. At the same time I acknowledge that if we transliterated classic Chinese (not Hoklo) texts into romaji using the Hoklo-唐 pronunciations, they'd arguably be unreadable.

A note about reading Hokkien out loud as a "proxy" for listening to native-speaker Hokkien. In my "intermediate" stage, I used to read the Barclay Amoy Bible out loud. For years I was usually still mystified by native-speaker Hokkien. I was living way outside the Hoklosphere, and internet radio was still in its infancy. Years later, after I'd become a bona-fide Hoklophone, I met an Amoyan lady in Tâipak who left Amoy with her family as a kid. When she spoke Hoklo, it was straight-up Barclay Bible Hokkien. I could understand every single syllable. I was amazed.

Last, I also have to question cai = 知. Could it be 悉 instead? Could it be non-Sino? Or maybe cai and 知 could be fuzzy cognates, like how a lot of VNese and Siamese words echo Chinese, but don't hold up as cognates under analysis.