Mark Yong wrote: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.
Oh, I think this is a very valid theory. I noticed something similar for personal names a few years ago. I may even have written about it here on the Forum, or perhaps only shared with Ah-bin (or perhaps not at all). Perhaps you might consider what I write below even as "strong confirmation" of your theory.
Namely, I noticed that in school (with my school mates) and among my parents' friends, almost all the Chinese had "Chinese" names (like mine - Lee Hock Sim, instead of George Lee). But, when speaking English, these 2-syllable Chinese names "X Y" were
always pronounced X1_Y2 (sandi tone marked on the written syllable, so high-ish, then falling) in the English speaking context. So, I was always "hok8_sim2", my brothers "hok8_ban2" and "hok8_peng2"*, my father was always "cin1_kang2", my mother was always "nai1_ting2" (
when speaking Malaysian English), irrespective of the fact that our last syllables were "sim1" (森), "ban7" (萬), "peng5" (平), kang1 (江), and teng5 (廷)**.
So, if you met a new person, and saw that his name was "Chee Beng", then you would immediately just pronounce it "ci1_beng2".Indeed, he would often just introduce himself as "ci1_beng2", even though - obviously - he knew the proper tones of his own name.
I reasoned that this was precisely because - without knowing the Chinese characters
and the dialect - the person addressing you (i.e. your school mates, colleagues, and university friends) wouldn't know what tones to apply to the two syllables of your name. Even if they had access to the characters and knew which dialect you were from, they mightn't know how to pronounce these characters with the correct tone. So, the "convention" seems to have emerged - when speaking English - to always use the X1_Y2 pattern***.
Notes:
*: hok8. Here, I'm equating the Hokkien ru-tone T8 with the Hokkien T1 in that they are high-ish short/level, respectively. From the point of view of
synchronic descriptive linguistics, one could consider Penang Hokkien T8 to be just a T1 with a stop at the end.
**: my mother's name being "ting"/"teng". The discrepancy between "teng" and "ting" is because my mother has the Mandarin form on her birth certificate, so the Hokkien form is used only in the family context, and the Mandarin form is used only in the outside context. (But that's particularly irrelevant to the point being made here!)
***: This goes even further. When speaking Malaysian English, for something like "Miss Chuah" or "Mister Tan", the pattern would be "mis1_chua2", "mis1_tə1_tan2". To take it
even further, even many di-syllables borrowed from English into Hokkien would use this tone pattern: "he's very stupid" - "i1 cin3_nia1 stiu1_pit2", etc.
Mark Yong wrote: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?
When I was young in Penang, I remember people
very occasionally saying (things like)
陳先生 tân sīn-sÊⁿ. I don't remember hearing anyone ever saying (things like)
李太太 lí thài-thăi. But even then, the most normal term was indeed "Mr. Tan" (and "Mrs. Lee", of course).
Now, that's only proof that
先生 hadn't fallen into disuse yet,
not that
太太 had. You see, most of the time, I mixed with the English-educated segment of society, where (even when speaking Hokkien) "Mr. Tan" and "Mrs. Lee" would have been the normal terms. The times I would have heard
先生 would have been when I was in the heart of "downtown" (e.g. Penang Rd, Campbell St, Chulia St, Maxwell Rd, etc). And there, it would have mostly been men shop-keepers (e.g. in the Chinese pharmacies, hardware shops, etc). Very rarely do I remember a "thau-kE-so" (or even a "thau-kE-niau") being around, so the circumstances where I would have heard
太太 would have been much less. Where there
were women present (e.g. in clothing and cloth shops, tailors etc), they tended to be younger girls (at least, younger from my present point of view!), so my parents addressed them as "a-nia".
, i.e.: