"Lost" terms in 南洋 Hokkien

[Ah-bin]

I've been looking through de Souza's "Manual of the Hailam Colloquial" (Bunchio dialect, based on 南洋 usage)
Cantonese for Malayan Students (1950's book on Malayan-style Cantonese)
Handbook of the Swatow Vernacular (late 19th cent. published in Singapore)
Hakka Chinese Lessons (1920's, north Borneo Hakka)

Some of the lists of words, and wondering whether some of the words which are found in Hainanese for commercial and legal terms were not the same in all the 南洋 Chinese languages

Here are some I could work out the characters for from the Hainanese Romanisation. I was wondering if they correspond to Hokkien terms.

I'm sure some of these aren't lost at all, they have just fallen out of use amongst younger people. Or maybe everyone knows all these except for me? If there are terms that are not used in Penang Hokkien (or other types of Hokkien), or have a different meaning, I would be grateful for guidance.

花紅 – hoa-âng = a commission (a paid one) - this means bonus as well?
二手 - jī-chhiú = an assistant
換貨 – oāⁿ-hòe = to barter
字號 - jī-hō = a name chop khàm字號, to affix a seal
貨紙 - hoè-choá = an invoice

Then some of the books have sections headed "The following are understood locally" mostly these are terms to do with the colonial government:

保理主 - magistrate (the 新加坡閩南話詞典 says this is actually from “police", if so it is a really clever
阿金 - a-kim a judge (Hainanese?)
衙門 - a government office
大王 - tōa-ông Governor
二王 - jī-ông colonial secretary

Of course some of these will no longer be current just because the system they were used to describe no longer exists.

[SimL]

阿金 - a-kim a judge (Hainanese?)

I'd venture that this is from "hakim", Malay for "judge".

Indonesian Wikipedia http://id.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hakim links to English Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judge (but not vice versa).

[Ah-bin]

Now why didn't I think of that. I think you are right!

[Yeleixingfeng]

衙門 - a government office

Wow. This is cool. ^^

[amhoanna]

On a tangent, I was reading about the "disputed islands" of Southeast Asia on Wiki. The biggest one is called Itu Aba in English. One etymology has it coming from Malay "itu apa", another has it coming from the Hainamese Hoklo name 黃山馬! The second explanation seems to make way more sense. I like the Tagalog name "Ligaw" = WILD most of all. Ironically, Ligaw Island's been under R.O.C. control since, like, forever. The only rock w/ fresh water in the whole godforsaken "ASEAN Sea", controlled by none other than the SEA state with no status.

[Mark Yong]

Since we are on the subject of ‘lost terms’...

In Volume 1, Page 231 of Bodman, there is an example dialogue that demonstrates (what used to be) the polite form of address:

A: 即位先生貴姓大名？ cît-uĭ sīn-sÊⁿ kuì-sĕng taĭ-béng?
Literally: (May I enquire) your honourable surname and great name?

B: 敝姓... pè-sĕng...
Literally: My humble surname (is)...

(The Chinese characters are my own insertions, and I adapted the Romanisation to suit the Penang variant; Bodman’s original text Romanises 先生 as sian-si, in line with the Amoy variant.)

The fact that it forms part of the example dialogues in the text would suggest that at least until the 1950's, it was an accepted form of polite address among Hokkien speakers in British colonial Malaya.

It is a pity that nowadays, it has been downgraded to simply 汝叫何物名? lu2 kio3 ha1-mih4 miaⁿ5? I would love to use the afore-mentioned polite form in Penang today without being looked on as if I just got off a time portal from ancient China. To begin with, most Penangites today would not be able to see the 文讀/白讀 relationships for 姓 seng3/sEⁿ3 and 名 beng5/miaⁿ5.

[Ah-bin]

A: 即位先生貴姓大名？ cît-uĭ sīn-sÊⁿ kuì-sĕng taĭ-béng?
Literally: (May I enquire) your honourable surname and great name?

B: 敝姓... pè-sĕng...
Literally: My humble surname (is)...

Yes, it is a pity that this sort of polite address no longer exists, but this feature of linguistic change is not limited to Hokkien. The old Hodder and Staughton "Teach Yourself Chinese" published around the same time as Bodman had the same constructions as I remember. 貴姓 still exists of course, and 貴國 and a few others, but the 敝 compounds have fallen out of use in Mandarin, even in Taiwan. It's also good to remember that for the first thirty years of their rule in China, the Communists tried to eradicate not only this type of expression, but also words such as 先生 and 太太, and that probably has something to do with the decline of polite language in the Chinese-speaking world.

[Mark Yong]

Ah-bin wrote:
...the 敝 compounds have fallen out of use in Mandarin, even in Taiwan.

Um, there may still be hope...

When I was corresponding via e-mail with one of the Taiwan bookstores for Classical Chinese books (Ah-bin, you will know which one I am referring to ) just a couple of months ago, the bookstore staff writing to me referred to her shop as 「敝館」. Of course, it could have been partly because I started the ball rolling by writing in pseudo-Literary Chinese. And then again, this was in a written context, not spoken, so it is not really a fair comparison.

Ah-bin wrote:
...for the first thirty years of their rule in China, the Communists tried to eradicate not only this type of expression, but also words such as 先生 and 太太...

You’re kidding, right? Even ‘Mr.’ and ‘Mrs.’ were not spared of the intended cultural onslaught? So, what were the buggers expecting as titular substitutes - 老王, 小陳, 林工, 李總, etc., like what they have now?


All this reminds me of that 2004 movie National Treasure. When Nicolas Cage’s character, the protagonist Benjamin Franklin Gates, finished reading the U.S. Declaration of Independence, he said, “People don’t talk that way anymore. Beautiful, huh?”

[Ah-bin]

Everyone became 同志 back then, and as for the use of 先生 and 太太 in the sense of husband and wife, they made them say 愛人 instead, and this one has been more difficult to get rid of.

This was all in the period where what went on inside China didn't really matter to or affect people outside as contacts were kept to a minimum and most of the world still treated the PRCas an illegal regime. Notice it wasn't until the 70's that all that simplified character rubbish started outside China, before that the PRC was culturally non-existent and irrelevant to most Chinese beyond its borders.

By the time there was more contact with the outside world again the age of high Maoism was already over and people started using words like 先生 and 太太 again without fear of being labelled reactionary or rightist.

There are a few terms like that which are kind of connected to communist ideology, and once China gives up the facade of communism, they will probably abandon them altogether, the other one I can think of is 公安 for police, meaning "public security", as opposed to the 警察 "who only protected the capitalists" - at least that was the way people saw it back then, hence the need for a name change. I read they didn't start officially using 警察 again until 1995 in China, but I know they still call a 警察局 a 公安局 there.

[Mark Yong]

Well, I was in Shanghai as late as 2006, and still recall the huge words 公安 in blue plastered on the white police patrol cars.

But to come back to the topic at hand...

From my experience, the term 先生 sīn-sÊⁿ for ‘Mister’ is hardly ever used in Penang nowadays, and definitely not 太太 thài-thăi for ‘Missus’. That said, addressing a lady as 小姐 sīo-cîa, but sans the surname prefixed, is still commonplace (e.g. when calling a waitress in a restaurant).

My theory is that it is due to Penang Hokkien speakers today being less-confident in determining the dialect of a person’s surname, and therefore not being able to transpose non-Hokkien surnames into Hokkien in order to match it up with the 先生 sīn-sÊⁿ and 太太 thài-thăi, respectively.

For instance, when a Penang Hokkien speakers meets a Mr. Tan, it does not sub-consciously occur to him that Tan = 陳 in Chinese, and therefore he should be addressed in Hokkien as Tan sīn-sÊⁿ (notice how I have manfully-avoided putting tone marks on the Tan, to drive home the point that I, like many Penangites, do not know the actual tone for Tan!).

What complicates the matter is that while Penang Hokkien generally maps to the 漳州 Ciang Ciu variant, you get chaps with the surname 黃 Romanised as Ooi or Ng.

Take me, for instance. My surname Yong 楊 is definitely not Hokkien. But when a Penang Hokkien native speaker addresses me, it would not occur to him to map 楊 to Ióⁿ, and therefore address me as 楊先生 Ióⁿ sīn-sÊⁿ (or Yeoh Sin Seh, to use ‘common’ Romanisation). I could do it to someone else, but I just know that I will get weird looks.

Again, I believe it comes back to the psychological disjoint between Penang Hokkien and Chinese characters.

I have not visited Taiwan, but from what little exposure I got from my transits at the Taipei International Airport and in-flight on Eva Air back in 2000, my guess would be that the use of 先生 sīn-sÊⁿ and 太太 thài-thăi is not a problem in Taiwan?

Sim, was the use of 先生 sīn-sÊⁿ and 太太 thài-thăi more commonplace in Penang during your growing-up years? Or was it plain “Mr. Tan” and “Mrs. Lee”, as it is today?

niuc, what has your experience been in Bagansiapiapi?

siamiwako and haroldmanila, what has your experience been in the Philippines?