What is “Hokkien” (and what is not)?

[Ah-bin]

Maybe it was actually àu-lông and not áu-lông. These would sound exactly the same in Penang Hokkien.

I found the former in Douglas (p. 322) with the lông as the literary reading for 膿 (pus) and the àu meaning "rotten" (p.7)

[SimL]

Hi Ah-bin,

Brilliant! Thanks for looking it up, AND including page references, to make it easy for me to see for myself. The character for "àu" in the Douglas with the handwritten characters is 臭. But I guess this is not the punji, and just used for meaning, as "àu" is not listed as a literary or colloquial reading of 臭 under "chhàu", where it almost definitely is the punji.

[niuc]

Douglas' lists àu-lông (p. 7) meaning "very stinking, as a dead rat, &c., said also in scolding men or women". It also lists àu to mean stinking & decaying. Beside these two, in my variant & in Sgp it also means something of low quality e.g. àu-liāu.

漚　-> in http://www.zdic.net/zd/zi/ZdicE6ZdicBCZdic9A.htm (Mandarin) has "rotten" in one of the meaning. 台文-華文線頂辭典 (http://210.240.194.97/iug/ungian/SoannT ... l/chha.asp) also lists it to have these meanings.

So, àu-lông = 漚膿, àu-liāu = 嘔料!

[SimL]

Hi niuc,

Great that you provided the character for "àu" - thanks! Perhaps Ah-bin can add "àu-lông" to the Penang Hokkien dictionary, once he's confirmed with another native speaker that it's common usage...

[niuc]

Link to my VNmese "loan idea" spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/a/tawa.asia/spr ... h_TW#gid=0

Amhoanna, there you list 南洋 to mean 印尼 instead of 東南亞, so Nam Dương in VN means "Indonesia"?

体操 in VN means sport? In my variant, 体操 thé-chau (some mispronounced it as ché-chau) means simple exercise or certain kind of calisthenics [I got this term from google translate of Indonesian "senam"].

客棧 sounds natural to me, but I usually say 旅館. 飯店 for me is a restaurant, while 旅社 is a travel company.

商賣 -> can we say 買賣 beside 貿易?

众居 -> 公寓 kong-ú is used in daily Hokkien also. A more colloquial way to describe it in my variant is kuí-ià càn-lâu ê chù 幾仔層樓个茨, some really used it, but it's very mouthful. Aokh suggests to use 層茨 tsân-tshù/cân-chù (or in my variant càn-chù, as we use cân in other contexts), which is very good.

盒詩->信箱->mail box? If yes, I'd say 批箱 phue-siuⁿ.
What is 平信? Ordinary mail? I'd say 平常批 pîng-siông-phue.

[amhoanna]

Interesting looking paper that I can't access -- Ah-bin and Sim might have ways, though.

http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=5011744710

Yes, in VNmese, Nam Dương means INDONESIA. But ... Inđônixia is a more common way to say it now, and most people draw a blank when I say Nam Dương. Indonesians are called người Inđô while Indians are called người Ấn Độ.

Niuc, next time I go in there I'm gonna give U edit access to the file so U can edit it.

[Ah-bin]

Great that you provided the character for "àu" - thanks! Perhaps Ah-bin can add "àu-lông" to the Penang Hokkien dictionary, once he's confirmed with another native speaker that it's common usage...

I must confess I've given up on trying to do this, because i don't have regular access to any native speakers other than on this forum. What I do now is just enter words as I come by them, and hope that others will have a good look through and pick out the ones they have never heard of, or have alternatives for. Hopefully for the people who read through it, it will be an enjoyable experience and not a chore!

What never ceases to amaze me is the variety of ways of saying one thing, and then how they get mixed up in the Hokkien of a single speaker. Sometimes the most rojak speakers will surprise me with the chhim-est words!