Hokkien culture better preserved in Malaysia than China

[Ah-bin]

It might have been that the T'ang finals were actually in the Wu dialects, and became reduced to glottal stops at a later period. Or perhaps the speakers of old Hokkien were very conscious about getting things correct when they read out texts (the origin of the literary stratum) because they felt a bit rustic and had a need to emulate the cultured behaviour of the capital, whereas people who lived close to the old Capital saw themselves as cultured people to begin with, and expected the provinces to follow their fashion, if they thought of it at all. Kind of like Malaysian Cantonese getting obsessed with talking like people from Hong Kong, even though HK people get their n's and l's mixed up and drop ng's all over the place. In Hong Kong hardly anyone seems to get obsessed about speaking correct Cantonese, in Malaysia....well we all know someone who can't accept that there are differences in Hokkien, and I've seen similar posts of his about Cantonese too.

Anyway, that is pure speculation about the finals, but it is the sort of thing that happens sometimes.

[niuc]

Or perhaps the speakers of old Hokkien were very conscious about getting things correct when they read out texts (the origin of the literary stratum) because they felt a bit rustic and had a need to emulate the cultured behaviour of the capital, whereas people who lived close to the old Capital saw themselves as cultured people to begin with, and expected the provinces to follow their fashion, if they thought of it at all. Kind of like Malaysian Cantonese getting obsessed with talking like people from Hong Kong, even though HK people get their n's and l's mixed up and drop ng's all over the place. In Hong Kong hardly anyone seems to get obsessed about speaking correct Cantonese

Ah, I can relate to that in someway! Unlike many other capital cities, Jakarta people do not speak standard variant of its national language, but a slang version. Last time in Bagansiapiapi we all learned Bahasa Indonesia baku (standard) and used standard vocabularies (albeit with Hokkien influenced accent ), until we started to watch dramas from Jakarta. [It's kind of strange (but logical) that we used to watch Malaysian tv channels and almost never managed to get Jakarta's channels in 1980s, due to our proximity to West Malaysia, especially Malacca.] Then we started to imitate (with not much success) Jakarta's accent and slang words because things from the capital was of course considered cool!

in Malaysia....well we all know someone who can't accept that there are differences in Hokkien, and I've seen similar posts of his about Cantonese too.

[SimL]

Ah-bin, would it be (more) correct if we say Min (including Hokkien) is the most ancient among current Chinese languages?

Hi niuc,

Great to see you posting here regularly again .

I was going to write a long and elaborate answer, but I was away from Amsterdam at the time and couldn't. Then Ah-bin wrote such a succinct but well thought-out and clearly expressed reply that there wasn't any need to after that!

I think I've posted (possibly even twice) on this Forum a link to a Wikipedia article which indicates an earlier branching off of Hokkien than all the other Sinitic languages; i.e. (with time going downwards):

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 Proto-Sinitic
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 All other Sinitic languages

In that article, it claims that that is why all other Sinitic languages have an initial f-, but Hokkien doesn't.

That article does address in part the initial question you posted (taking into account all the ifs-and-buts and qualifications to the "meaning" of such a question/answer that Ah-bin has now so clearly explained).

I'm frustrated that I can't find the article again. I know that I stumbled across it every now and again in the past, when just browsing on the subject of Hokkien in Wikipedia, but this time it seems to be really gone.