More words...about 300 I can't track down.

[Mark Yong]

amhoanna wrote:
I saw a N. M'sian use the word "ki-thiu" yesterday, meaning MILE (Mand. 英哩). It can be taken apart like 点鐘：3.5 MILES = saⁿ ki poàⁿ thiu. Wow -- what is going on there?

I do remember that back in the 1970’s/80’s, the older generation of Cantonese speakers in Malaysia referred to the English mile as 支碑 zi7-bei7, probably referring to the actual physical milestones on roads. For example, the 9th mile of the Cheras road in Kuala Lumpur was referred to as 九支碑 gau2 zi7-bei7

I would venture to guess that the ki in ki-thiu is 支, but wouldn’t have a clue what the thiu is.

Ah-bin wrote:
Tó-tàⁿ 倒擔 which Douglas defines as a pedlar going bankrupt

SimL wrote:
I think it could be used for "bankrupt", but for me it has slightly different connotations. For me, "to-taN" means "going out of business", and denotes more the cessation of activities in the operating of the shop / company than things connected with the owner, whereas "bankrupt" denotes more the financial state of the owner (or any other individual).

kkslok wrote:
For bankrupt we say phok-kai.

amhoanna wrote:
仆街 seems to mean different things in Malaya Cantonese vs China Cantonese.

Interesting comments! My personal opinion would be that, if Ah-bin’s intention is to capture and record as closely as possible the vocabulary of Hokkien (as it is spoken among the native speakers in Penang), while at the same time avoiding overly-formal/contrived terminology, then I would suggest that for practical intents and purposes, 倒擔 tó-tàⁿ be used, and not adopt the Cantonese po-kai, which is a corruption both by pronunciation and definition.

amhoanna’s statement that the term means something entirely different in its native Cantonese is correct. In Cantonese, to 撲街 pok7-gaai1 literally means ‘to hit (oneself to) the ground’ (‘bite the dust’, if you like), i.e. to suffer an unfortunate calamity - which would roughly correspond to Hokkien’s 挵壁 long-piak ‘to knock (oneself) into a wall’. Also, note that 撲 pok7 in Cantonese has an aspirated consontantal initial. Either way, both terms are not congruent, and such an adoption would be a Canton-isation of Hokkien, if one may call it that!

[SimL]

I saw a N. M'sian use the word "ki-thiu" yesterday, meaning MILE (Mand. 英哩). It can be taken apart like 点鐘：3.5 MILES = saⁿ ki poàⁿ thiu. Wow -- what is going on there?

Hi amhoanna,

Indeed, quite a familiar word to me. I'll have to check with my parents, but my gut feeling is that I would say 3.5 miles as saⁿ-ki-thiu-poàⁿ. (There's a precedent for this, as $3.50 is saⁿ-khO-poàⁿ.)

I would venture to guess that the ki in ki-thiu is 支, but wouldn’t have a clue what the thiu is.

The "mile" meaning is listed in Barclay p250, given as an additional compound under "thiu1" 抽. A bit of an odd-man-out among all the other compounds which do indeed have meanings related to "drawing out".

I have to admit that in my subconscious, I had also actually always thought of it as the same "thiu" as in "thiu1-chiam1" (= "drawing / shaking the sticks out of the holder, to know the will or advice of the gods"). The image in my head was that one slowly "drew out" or "pulled out" the miles as one travelled along, moving further and further away from one's starting point. [I offer this only to share my internal reaction to the word, not as any "evidence" that this is indeed the appropriate punji. After all, I thought for most of my life that "iauN5-som1" was 羊參, because I thought the dried roots looked like goats' horns! .]

[Ah-bin]

This all very interesting. My book "Cantonese for Malayan Students" which teaches Malayan-style Cantonese as it was spoken in the 1950's, has the same word chi-pei for mile (is this not used any more?). The whole thing about stones or stelae for miles seems to be a Malaysan thing. Barclay notes it as such, i believe.

In the index of the same book for bankrupt there is the word 倒 tó.

Two of my other books of Malaysian-style Teochew and Hainanese to have a special word for bankrupt which was 倒賬, also with 倒. But I can't help thinking that these may also mean to go out of business as well, and that the concept of bankruptcy as in being declared bankrupt was a fairly recent thing anyway.

Aha!!! I've just checked another old Teochew dictionary that i hadn't looked at before...and what did I find?

Two words for bankrupt: tó-tièⁿ (=倒賬) and phuà-ke, which I guess to be 破家. Now one of my observations about PGHK pronunciation is that oa is often shortened to o e.g. tòa becomes tò and soáh becomes sóh. Is i possible that phòa has become phò here? How about the e• sound in ke•? I notice a lot of people write it out as "kay" to try and capture the sound.

As for the meaning, this would fit more with household or individual bankruptcy, whereas tó-tàⁿ 倒擔 is restricted to the meaning of going out of business.

The question is, is it more likely to be an altered pronunciation of something that has a similar meaning (and is attested in other Hokkien dictionaries) or is it a loan from Cantonese with a rather different meaning. I suspect it is the former, but that the well-known Cantonese word that also refers to something bad has had an influence on the way people perceive the word and the way it is pronounced. That is just my guess though.

[Mark Yong]

Check these out:
http://blog.omy.sg/sgstory/archives/1447 (1st paragraph)
http://m.moonlightchest.com/selangor_ti ... _story.asp (3rd paragraph)
http://www.sgcninfo.com/2012/03/blog-post_8754.html
http://www.i-kgbaru.com/kampungbaru.php ... d=9&kbid=3 (1st paragraph)

Looks like the commonly-used terminology for the English mile was/is 條石, in addition to 支碑. Not sure if the KL version is in Cantonese or Hokkien, but I would venture to guess that the Singaporean version would have been in Hokkien.

If so, then it would suggest that what amhoanna heard may have been a fusion of 支碑 and 條石 to become 支條!

Ah-bin: To answer your question - no, I hardly ever hear 支碑 zi7-bei7 used anymore. It is probably a combination of the onslaught of Mandarin, plus the Imperial system having gone out of fashion in Malaysia. Ironically, the current generation tend to just say ‘k’ (an abbreviation of the already-abbreviated ‘km’!), even when speaking in Chinese (of any form).

[Ah-bin]

That is wonderful detective work, Mark, thanks.

My guess at what happened is that the Cantonese pronunciation of 條 was borrowed into Hokkien, with the high-rising tone 45 (Cantonese 陰上) approximated to the high flat 44 tone of the Hokkien 陰平.

The quote from Barclay is p. 250
chit ki thiu, a milestone (Singapore); a mile.

Bhante Dhammavudho often uses the word for distances. I haven't come across any instances where it is split in two though. I think I heard it on the PGHK podcast too.

I might add that i forgot to say my old Malay dictionary (in Jawi and Rumi) has "mile" as one of the meanings of "batu".

I am beginning to wonder now just how many more of those little words I can't find in Hokkien dictionaries have something to do with Cantonese.

[Ah-bin]

I'm back!!!! After a few months of very sluggish progress (and losing a few pages of additions through a corrupted file), I've started on the dictionary again!
Here are ten more words I need help with. Thanks everyone!

1) Carving, to carve is this tiau 雕 or khe•k刻 perhaps, or tok?

2) Ceremony I know the word tián-lé 典禮 from Taiwanese. I guess a lot of traditional religious ceremonies are called by their names, or simply pài ang-kong

3) challenge - has two meanings in English, one I suppose could be expressed by kan-khó• chò艱苦做 "hard to do" in the sense of "a challenge", but what about challenging someone to a fight?

4) change bus or train I guess Oāⁿ-chhia 換車 but it sounds like swap or exchange to me, rather than changing buses or trains in the middle of a journey

5) cool this isn't Léng 冷, I suppose there must be a more fitting expression

6) coral Douglas has the choice of sien-hô or san-hô• for 珊瑚

7) cot I have no idea about this one

8 ) crowded at the moment I would be lazy and say siāuⁿ chè lâng

9) deposit, advance money

10) a desk

[AndrewAndrew]

5) cool this isn't Léng 冷, I suppose there must be a more fitting expression

koaN5?

8 ) crowded at the moment I would be lazy and say siāuⁿ chè lâng

tsak4

[Mark Yong]

Again, totally colloquial:

Ah-bin wrote:
...what about challenging someone to a fight?

弄 X 相拍 lāng X sio-phah

Ah-bin wrote:
desk

寫字桌 siá-jī toh

[Ah-bin]

Here are ten words that I have already asked about on Facebook in the Penang Hokkien Dictionary project plus the answers I received about many of them, as well as my own observations. I would be interested to hear what forum members have to say about them, and about the answers that I have already received.

1) dessert - any way to say this?

2) lemongrass - an important ingredient in Southeast Asian cooking!

I was given chang-mau. I realised I had this somewhere in a notebook from a conversation with Sim a few years ago.

3) lime - I know the word for"kaffir lime" (Thái-ko-kam 癩哥柑) but not for a normal lime, or for a lemon.

I was given
Suiⁿ-kam 酸柑 – n. a lime

4) plum - a Hokkien pronunciation of 梅 perhaps?

5) recipe - sometimes I heard "kang hu" referring to a special secret way of cooking something, maybe that counts as the word? did Chinese use "recipes" out of books like westerners do? Perhaps this is the way to say it, a special way of doing things passed down to someone else.

Kang-hu 工夫 – n. special or secret method or technique for doing something

6) soft drink/soda - any sweet drink with bubbles in it. Is there a general Hokkien word for this, or do people just differentiate brands by using the names (coke, sprite, etc.)?

I was given
Khì-chúi 氣水 – n. a soft drink


7) spices or herbs - in Mandarin this is 調味料, not sure if there is any general Hokkien word for things used for flavouring food or not.

I was given
Phang-liāu芳料 – n. spices but nothing for "herbs" I guess 調味料 actually includes both. Also spice paste lem-pah was given (how is this phonetically realised in PGHK?)

Kidney beans - these must be some kind of "tau" but I have no idea what they are.

I actually had this just as "red beans" in the dictionary, but was given
Âng-tāu 紅豆 – n. red kidney beans and told that tōa-liáp and sè-liáp are used to describe the different ones

9) soy beans - are they called ooi-tau (黃豆) by any chance?

I was told these are just referred to as tāu, I now that in compounds like tāu-chúi 豆水 – soy milk, tāu-hū 豆腐 – bean curd or tofu and tāu-iû 豆油 – soy sauce, the tāu means "soybeans". But how about in tāu-gê• 豆芽 for beansprouts?

10) Ice-cream - the Mandarin word for ice-cream actually came through Hokkien! The last two characters in 冰淇淋 are pronounced "khi-lim" and it's a transliteration of "cream". I wonder if Penang Hokkine has a different way to say it, though. It is always full of surprises!

The answer for this was interesting - a loan from English pronounced as "Ice khe-leng"! I wonder if this had something to do with association with "leng" for "milk"?

[SimL]

Hi Ah-bin,

Very relieved to see that you're still working on the Penang Hokkien Dictionary . This Forum has been quiet for a while, so I was a bit worried...

1) Carving, to carve is this tiau 雕 or khe•k刻 perhaps, or tok?

This I know, and it was confirmed by my parents: we say "khek4" for jade and other stone carvings. Not sure about wooding carvings, because the "feel" of the action of carving on wood is quite different (smoother, less jerky, shavings rather than stone chips left over). But definitely ok for all stone (a sort of chipping action).

BTW, we say "khek4", not "khEk4".

"tok4" is used for knocking (or pecking?), without a sharp edge. The most common phrase it appears in is "tok4-o5" (啄? 蚵?/蠔?).

I was given chang-mau. I realised I had this somewhere in a notebook from a conversation with Sim a few years ago.

I can confirm that this is still how I say it . When I first came across 香茅 in Mandarin, I assumed it was the same morphemes as the Hokkien one, but now I realize that "chang1/5-" (sandhi-ing to "chang3/7" would probably not be 香, which is "hiong1" or "hiauN1". I wonder if it's 蔥茅? A single stalk/stem of lemon grass also has a vaguely bulbous thing at the bottom, a bit like a shallot. And it would have the right sandhi-tone.

lime - I know the word for"kaffir lime" (Thái-ko-kam 癩哥柑) but not for a normal lime, or for a lemon. I was given Suiⁿ-kam 酸柑 – n. a lime

I use 酸柑 for a proper Western lemon (yellow, larger, not round), not for a lime (green, smaller, round). I think the word for "lime" is "kiEt4-la2". I'll have to check with my parents. This might be "結<something>", as its sandhied tone is correct (not that that means that much).

I guess you've got an entry in your dictionary for 癩哥 "leprosy". The "哥" is not confirmed by Douglas, BTW.

4) plum - a Hokkien pronunciation of 梅 perhaps?

Plums were only ever called 李仔 (li2-a2). The word 梅 occurs in what Australians call a "salty-plum": 酸梅 "suiN1-bue5".

Kang-hu 工夫 – n. special or secret method or technique for doing something

In my usage not so much emphasis on the "special or secret" part of it (though not excluding it of course). It was just used for "technique", or even for "quality of workmanship". "i e kang-hu cin-nia ho" = "he has very good workmanship", "his work is of very high quality", said of a carpenter, or tiler.

... in compounds like tāu-chúi 豆水 – soy milk, tāu-hū 豆腐 – bean curd or tofu and tāu-iû 豆油 – soy sauce, the tāu means "soybeans". But how about in tāu-gê• 豆芽 for beansprouts?

In my usage, 豆 is not like "bah4" (which means pork in the absence of any other qualifier). For me, 豆 definitely only means "bean" in general. The fact that it means soybean in those 3 contexts is co-incidental/contextual, as proved by 豆芽.

10) Ice-cream - the Mandarin word for ice-cream actually came through Hokkien! The last two characters in 冰淇淋 are pronounced "khi-lim" and it's a transliteration of "cream". I wonder if Penang Hokkine has a different way to say it, though. It is always full of surprises!

I can confirm something very similar from my youth. We called it "ai3-si3-ki3-lim2". And this wasn't just Babas or people exposed to English - the non-English educated hawkers called it this as well. Very well established usage.