Penang Hokkien Vocabulary Questions

[SimL]

Hi Ah-bin,

Congratulations on the completion of your dissertation. Good to see you back here. Good to see all the replies too - I was starting to get (very slightly) concerned.

Just a very quick and short(-ish) reply, as I'm not in the office, and am doing this from a not-hanzi-enabled Blackberry.

I too say "toh4-kha1" for "under the table".

"song5" in my usage is "dowdy", "unsophisticated", "countrified", "provincial", "dimwitted", "stupid". Rather close to niuc's usage.

Water chestnuts are "bE2-ciN5", which looks to me like a very "colloquial pronunciation" .

Curry is definitely voiced "gu5-lai2", not "ku-lai". [Perhaps a suitable character for "gu5" might be "cow", as this cuisine/word is borrowed from Malay, where beef and not pork would be one of the natural things to cook in curry...]

Wantan (or, if you're American, wonton) I pronounce "uan1-than1" or "uan5-than1" - the sandhied form of both tone1 and tone5 sound the same to me: tone3 or tone7. I think I prefer "uan5" as I then associate it with "ball"/"lump", as in "bah4-uan5" or "hu5-uan5". Curiously, the "than1" DOESN'T sandhi, in the combination "uan5-than1 mi7", perhaps because it's borrowed from Cantonese... (but that also seems weird)?

As for that strange brownish dried-and-then-re-hydrated squid (which I love eating), I've always (mis-)pronounced it "ju-hu". [lLike fresh lotus roots: I've always pronounced this "leng5-ngau7" (perhaps believing in some connection to dragons, as with "liong5-an2"), and it was a total surprise to me to learn (from Douglas) that the first syllable is simply the "lian5" of "lotus"!.

I've never pronounced it "iong-tau-Hu", always "iong-tau-Fu", hence revealing it as a borrowing from Cantonese. Perhaps it has since integrated to the extent of the "fu" changing to the more native "hu". [BTW, are you all aware of the claim that Hokkien "really IS special, compared to the other forms of Sinitic", in that it split off from the main body much earlier than any other form (and this is supposed to be the reason that it's the only form without "f-": because the "f-" sound only evolved in the main body after the Hokkien split-off). I recall reading this on English Wikipedia, and I've just tried to find the article again, but it proved too difficult on a Blackberry. I'll have another look when I have a decent screen and keyboard again.] So the character for "iong" should probably be looked for in Cantonese...

I'll soon be posting my long-promised investigations into radical names. It's taken quite a while to do, and it's *long*.

[SimL]

Oops, just checked the link which Andrew posted (thanks!), and apparently, yong-tau-fu is Hakka, not Cantonese.

[SimL]

Hi Mark,

What a great way to make a come-back... by my usual *bitching* about 本字!

Haha! I can't see the TLJ, but from context I imagine it's your favorite topic of correct character usage.

You're possibly still less of a pain than me, because I'm soon going to be complaining about the very *nature* of Chinese [if not the language itself, then certainly the "frame of mind" of its speakers ]. I had an earlier version which was even more "whiney", but a friend read it and made me tone it down!

[niuc]

Sim, glad to see you posting again. I look forward to reading yours about the very *nature* of Chinese!

[SimL]

Hi niic,

Yeah, I was really happy to see your reply too.

Well, I've done it. I just hope nobody gets fed up with my "complaining"...

[Ah-bin]

Thanks for all your answers. I have many more questions, of course. I’ve done as much work as possible so no-one has to do much work to answer them, unless the answers are difficult

None of these are in de Gijzel:

1) Mosquito repellent, the smokey kind – Taiwanese has báng-hun 蠓薰

2) A lid – Taiwanese has kòa 蓋

3) A carpet – Taiwanese has thán-á 毯仔 (this is more like a rug than a wall-to-wall carpet, but wall-to-wall ones are yucky in the tropics, so I think the word for rug will be better-known)

4) A cupboard to store dishes – Taiwanese has oáⁿ-ti-tû 碗箸櫥 might this be oáⁿ-tū-tû?

5) A palanquin – Taiwanese has kiō-á 轎仔　I guess this would be simply kiō in PGHK

6) A pipe, for water – Taiwanese has chúi-tò 水道 which I think is from Japanese

7) Railway Station – Taiwanese has chhia-thâu　車頭

Bank account – Taiwanese has kháu-tsò口座 , also from Japanese

9) Bank note (money) – “paper money” as opposed to coins.

I guess these last three will be the same as Taiwanese, but you never can tell….

10) A (Chinese) chess piece – kî-chí 棋子

11) Ma-Jhong – bâ-chhiok　麻雀

12) A (Chinese) chess board – kî-poâⁿ　棋盤


13) Is an urn for putting joss-sticks in called a hiauⁿ-lō•? 香爐

14) Is a tombstone a bōng-pâi?　墓牌

15) Is a persimmon an âng-khi?　紅柿

17) Is a wine cup called chiú-au or chiú-poe? 酒甌 酒杯

A final teaser:
How many different types of spoon can you think of – the âng-mô• kind made of silver, the porcelain one for soup, the scoop for rice and the large wooden spoon for stirring a pot of something.

[Mark Yong]

Hi, Ah-bin,

My little stab at some of them...

Mosquito repellent – I normally hear 蠓香 bàng-hìoⁿ. Could be Cantonese influence, I don’t know.

Train station – I normally hear people say 火車站 hôe-chīa cĭam or 火車頭 hôe-chīa tháu, probably to disambiguate it from other types of 車頭 chīa tháu.

Bank account – Discounting the 紅毛屎 àng-mÒ-sâi’s who tend to conveniently fall back on the English word ‘account’ , I normally hear 戶口 hŎ-khâu.

Bank note – This is a tricky one! In the very few instances I have encountered where the distinction between notes and coins had to be made, I believe I heard simply 紙鐳 cûa-lūi. On that note (no pun intended), does anyone know the 本字 for tā-lī-kiâⁿ ‘coins’?

In my experience, Penangites seem to have an aversion for using the word 杯 pōe for ‘cup’, preferring to use 甌 aū (the only exception I know of is 銀杯 gĭn-pōe ‘trophy’). One possibility could be that in the particular case of Penang Hokkien, it is a homonym with 飛. I guess such ‘homonym taboos’ also exist in other dialects, too.

Spoons - As far as terminology is concerned, I only know one: 調羹 thăo-kiōng . That said, a couple of my Teochew-descent Penang friends sometimes say 湯匙 thng-sí and get away with it.

Please mind my tone marks. I’m still sh*t at them.

[Mark Yong]

SimL wrote:
...perhaps believing in some connection to dragons, as with "liong5-an2"

Just out of curiosity, Sim - Do you belong to the group that pronounces 龍眼 as lèng-gêng or gèng-gêng? In one of the late Khor Cheang Kee's books, he quotes the Hokkien saying: 食龍眼，好尾景 Chiak Geng Geng， Ho Boey Keng (Eat dried longans and have a good ending).

The full set of couplets can be found here:
http://nonyalife.blogspot.com/2011/08/h ... tties.html

Just curious to know how far back in time did lèng-gêng morph into gèng-gêng...

[Ah-bin]

Thanks for those Mark.

Bank note – This is a tricky one! In the very few instances I have encountered where the distinction between notes and coins had to be made, I believe I heard simply 紙鐳 cûa-lūi. On that note (no pun intended), does anyone know the 本字 for tā-lī-kiâⁿ ‘coins’?

Ah, actually I already had this word but just forgot it. It should be choá-jī 紙字

Somewhere I found out that tâ-li-kiáⁿ is a corruption of tâng-lui-kiáⁿ 銅鐳囝, I can't remember where.

Bank account – Discounting the 紅毛屎 àng-mÒ-sâi’s who tend to conveniently fall back on the English word ‘account’ , I normally hear 戶口 hŎ-khâu.

This doesn't surprise me in the slightest. If Taiwanese has a Japanese word for it, and PGHK has a Mandarin-style compound and English pair, it probably means the word and concept in Hokkien is not very old.

[SimL]

SimL wrote:
...perhaps believing in some connection to dragons, as with "liong5-an2"

Just out of curiosity, Sim - Do you belong to the group that pronounces 龍眼 as lèng-gêng or gèng-gêng? In one of the late Khor Cheang Kee's books, he quotes the Hokkien saying: 食龍眼，好尾景 Chiak Geng Geng， Ho Boey Keng (Eat dried longans and have a good ending).

The full set of couplets can be found here:
http://nonyalife.blogspot.com/2011/08/h ... tties.html

Just curious to know how far back in time did lèng-gêng morph into gèng-gêng...

Hi Mark,

I say "geng5-geng2".

I was totally amazed to find out that the first syllable was "dragon"! Up to that point (in as much as I thought about it at all), I thought it was just a "repetition" syllable, like "ko-ko" for "elder brother" or "ban-ban" for "slowly". Once I "knew" otherwise, I realised that it couldn't possibly be a "repetition" syllable, because the second syllable is a tone2, which would not have a tone3/7 as a sandhied tone in the first syllable. The word "dragon", being tone5 would indeed fit, having as sandhi-tone tone3/7.

This was the term for as long as I can remember, so it must have been current by the mid 60's.