It seems that there are a lot of arrogant and rude people in this forum bad-mouthing me during my long stay away from this forum ? Even when what I am trying to do is educate the people on the origins of the so-called 'hokkien' words but NOBODY here thanked me ?Yeleixingfeng wrote:Rea
Indeed, as stated by xng, a lot of my friends are oblivious to the Malay borrows in Hokkien*, like lui(duit), ga-lo(gaduh), kau-eng(kahwin)** and ciah-hong (makan angin).
* not sure about the previous generation
** some say it is 媾姻. I don't know. Haha.
媾姻 is a borrowed word just like 巴剎 (pasar) is a borrowed word bcos most people in the past had poor command of the hokkien (or any chinese dialects for that matter as it was deemed useless when compared to English/malay in the past before the rise of china after the 1990s). And TV media was only prominent during the last 50 years or so, even then it was restricted to mandarin and cantonese dialects.
by the way, 媾 is pronounced 'kio' and not 'kau'. If you watch taiwanese hokkien shows, the most common usage for divorce is 'li ien' 離緣 but 'li hoon' is not wrong either.
So one error gets 'inherited' through several generations. words such as 'suka', 'pasar' substituted the real hokkien words for generations that they have forgotten about the original word. Penang hokkien were more 'malaynised' than singapore hokkien with additional words such as 'batu' when they use 'cio thau'. With the advent of taiwanese hokkien shows, we hope that more and more people realise this fact.
食風 is NOT borrowed from Malay, rather the malay borrowed from chinese. cantonese also use 'sik fung'.
http://www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk/dictio ... ?full=true
sadly, most malaysian chinese hokkien (especially those english ed) can't distinguish which are hokkien, malay or english words as it is one big rojak.
Malaysian cantonese has less malay words as I think it is because of better cantonese penetration in the media.
As you rightly pointed out, 鐳 is actually for radium.
金 is for the metal element, 雷 is for the sound 'lui'.
There is absolutely no basis for this as I have repeatedly pointed out, it comes from the malay word 'duit' and since chinese can't pronounce 'd' initial consonant, it is approximated into 'l'. It is also similar to 'durian' which is approximated to 'liu lien' and not 'du lien'.
The next thing I will hear from 'intelligent' people here is that 'liu lien' originated from hokkien too because it starts with 'l' and not 'd' ! furthermore, it is published in chinese newspaper as 'liu lien' with chinese characters.
Even malaysian cantonese uses 'lui' but if you were to go to china guangdong province, NONE of the natives there know what 'lui' is.
I just browsed through my old nemesis ah bin silly and stupid argument again. The 'lui' sound is so entrenched in malaysia and indonesia that it is even put as an entry in a recent dictionary but why is it that this word (meaning money) cannot be found in china's dictionary before the Ming dynasty and before the chinese came to SEA which is 15th century and earlier ? There's your answer.
I can also put 'pasar' in a hokkien dictionary since it is published everyday in chinese newspapers in malaysia but that doesn't mean 'pasar' originated from hokkien or even mandarin. It actually originated from malay word 'pasar' which the malay borrowed from the arab 'bazaar'.