Tones

[amhoanna]

On a different note... It strikes me that maybe Penang citation T2 (and running T3?) is so high, and barely falling if at all, b/c of Cantonese influence? This ties into what Sim was saying about people learning a language from people of another generation who themselves "had an accent" and/or influence from another tongue. If seems that, at some point, Penang more than anywhere else saw a great number of Cantophones shift to Hoklo en masse.

[AndrewAndrew]

On a different note... It strikes me that maybe Penang citation T2 (and running T3?) is so high, and barely falling if at all, b/c of Cantonese influence? This ties into what Sim was saying about people learning a language from people of another generation who themselves "had an accent" and/or influence from another tongue. If seems that, at some point, Penang more than anywhere else saw a great number of Cantophones shift to Hoklo en masse.

There are two ways of pronouncing Penang citation T2 - one is high falling, 54, another is high rising, 45. Therefore, it is possible to say m7-sai2 so that it sounds Cantonese. According to one study, most people use and stick to one or the other. The main thing is that you touch the 5, because no other tone in Penang does.

Penang running T3 is more like citation T1 - 44.

[amhoanna]

Thanks, Andrew!

[SimL]

There are two ways of pronouncing Penang citation T2 - one is high falling, 54, another is high rising, 45. Therefore, it is possible to say m7-sai2 so that it sounds Cantonese.

and

On a different note... It strikes me that maybe Penang citation T2 (and running T3?) is so high, and barely falling if at all, b/c of Cantonese influence? This ties into what Sim was saying about people learning a language from people of another generation who themselves "had an accent" and/or influence from another tongue. If seems that, at some point, Penang more than anywhere else saw a great number of Cantophones shift to Hoklo en masse.

This ties in with what one of my relatives said during a family history interview. I reported it in another thread of this Forum, but will re-quote it here for convenience.

... He explained that there was a minority of Cantonese speakers in Penang in his youth. The majority Hokkien speakers (or, at any rate, the people of his own background) treated them with contempt (part of it being that they didn't speak Hokkien). The derogatory term they used for them was "makau tu" (= "pig"). He explained that it was interesting that this term of abuse was used for *all* Cantonese speakers. People were aware that not all of them came from Macau, but this term was used to cover them all, irrespective. The use of that term - he continued to explain - brought into focus the fact that he himself was a *Hokkien* speaker, hence producing a stronger consciousness of a Hokkien identity.

When there are only a very few members of an ethnic group within a larger community, there is (usually) little negative feeling. For example, the presence of only a few Chinese prior to the Gold Rush days in Australia, or the presence of only few Middle Eastern people in Europe prior to the 1970's meant that nobody thought much about them at all. It was only when they started forming a visible minority (still perhaps insignifant in absolute numbers, but enough to be a distinctly identifiable group), that the negative feelings start to develop. From the description of this term of abuse, I surmise that there must have been a major influx of Cantonese speakers coming to Penang at some time in the early 20th Century. Otherwise, there would have been no need to have a term of abuse for them. The fact that Penang is so overwhelmingly Hokkien speaking nowadays tells us that this minority then switched over to Hokkien.

So, putting all the little inputs from Andrew, amhoanna and me together, we might have an explanation for the "Cantonese form" of "m-sai". (I myself use the "falling" version.)

[Yeleixingfeng]

Recently however, Cantonese-speaking people are considered unique, but they are predominantly from KL or Ipoh. And yes, the original Penangites, ancestrally Cantonese/Hakka/Hainanese, speak fluent Hokkien despite their respective dialect. Usually, the parents still know the dialect - which quite reflects SimL's observations.