新用戶自我紹介

[amhoanna]

Án-ni guân-lâi sī T6--ê sû kin-á-ji̍t kám lóng sī T7?

Ce tio̍h mūi AH-BIN.

Lí íkeng cai, ǔ--ê sǐ tha̍kcheeh im piaⁿ ji̍p tē 2 tiāu. "T2 = T6" ê hongsiaⁿ, bô tiāⁿ sǐ cū ánne puh--chutlâi--ê.

The "tha̍kcheeh im" in Hoklo is like the Classic Latin layer in English -- arguably not part of the core of the language.

I don't quite see the difference in quality between borrowing Mandarin characters or those from Literary Chinese.

I see a huge difference. Literary Chinese, which is not really "a language", but more of a tradition, serves and has served as a high language for a wide swathe of languages up and down Pacific Asia. It plays the role that Literary Arabic plays in the Islamic world, esp. in the so-called Arab area from the Gulf west to Morocco. Latin and Greek have played this role in Europe. Sanskrit and Pali have played this role in South and Southeast Asia.

Mandarin, on the other hand, is "just another language", as is Cantonese, as is Vietnamese, as is Japanese. As is Siamese Thai, although Thai is not Sinitic, and has no kanji to lend.

Mass borrowing from other languages is not bad in itself. But when all the borrowing is from one language, esp. from a language imposed through government fiat, nationalistic thought, and threat of force, then maybe it's time to ask questions.

Imagine if modern-day Normans overran the Mediterranean, then brainwashed the Castilians and Catalans into borrowing tens of thousands of Norman words and constructions. And when Castilian Joe complains, Castilian John stands up and says, "We borrowed from Greek and Latin all the time. Why can't we borrow thousands of words from Norman too? What's the difference?"

You can argue, going further, that Hoklo should stop borrowing from Lit. Chinese, or Maghrebi Arabic should quit borrowing from Classical Arabic, or Thai should stop borrowing from Pali. Personally, I wouldn't go that far. The key thing for me is that borrowing from Lit. Chinese does not much (if at all) damage the viability of Hoklo as a fully independent language.

I would have understood a "synthetic punji" as a newly created character such as 亻因.

Yes, your usage of "synthetic" is better. But 亻因, 𨑨迌, etc., don't pretend to be punji.

I guess I should've called the others (揣 for chōe etc.) "imitation punji".

harbouring the ideal that people can read and write Hokkien without any more difficulty than mandarin

Reading and writing shouldn't be too hard, but why use Mandarin as the benchmark? Why not Japanese? Why not harbor an ideal that people should be able to read and write Hokkien w/o any more difficulty than Tagalog?

creating a way of transcription that fits more smoothly with Chinese script (if going for something in the style of Hangeul, one could for example end up spelling ê as 에 with some kind of tonal mark)

Amen.

[amhoanna]

As for the Mandarisms in your Hokkien, U will need to make a mental adjustment, one that I made in the past.

Knowing Mandarin and leveraging it for Hoklo has allowed U to get to this point with Hoklo at a lightning speed. But at this point, it has started to hold U back, and the holding will only get stronger.

U must realize that Mandarin and Hoklo are separate languages, and not even very similar the way Teochew and Banlamese are, or Mandarin and 21st century Shanghainese. U must realize that U can't just take a Mandarin utterance and convert it to Hoklo pronunciation and voila, instant Hoklo. (This often works for Cantonese, though.)

Once U realize that, U realize that there is so much U don't know how to say in Hoklo.

Then, instead of just using dictionaries, U'll need live materials such as stories written in Hoklo, or videos in Hoklo. Fortunately, unlike when I was learning, there is a ton of info on the web. There is so much Hoklo stuff on the web now that none of us could go through it all before we die.

Koaⁿōe sǐ góa ê búgí. When I started learning Cantonese and Hoklo, I thought I could get them for free. I had grown up hearing ignorant adults say that all the "fangyan" were the same and used the same kanji, but with different pronunciations. Once I got into it, I found that Mandarin only gave me a discount: a big discount in Cantonese, and a little discount in Hoklo. (Although, as my Hoklo got better, knowing Hoklo gave me an even bigger discount for Cantonese.)

For the first few years, whenever I didn't know how to say something in Hoklo, I would just take the Mandarin and swap out a few words and go with that. But the results were surprisingly bad. I had underestimated the distance btw languages. After the first few months, I would say this approach was only slowing me down.

On the other hand, since Koaⁿōe sǐ góa ê búgí, I never had to work hard at it, and it was easier for me to put it aside. Mandarin may have cost U much sweat and toil. Partly out of sympathy for the speakers of your target language, you may have come to like the "one tongue to rule them all" that Mandarin has become. And, as an extension, you may (or may not) find yourself agreeing with the idea that "Hoklo should be as Mandarin-like as possible".

Good luck finding the best materials for you. Góa bô "cia̍hkàu", but I always recommend the 紅皮新約聖経 b/c the translation is dead-accurate and you can use it side by side with, say, a German version so that U can work w/o a dictionary and save time.

[Abun]

harbouring the ideal that people can read and write Hokkien without any more difficulty than mandarin

Reading and writing shouldn't be too hard, but why use Mandarin as the benchmark? Why not Japanese? Why not harbor an ideal that people should be able to read and write Hokkien w/o any more difficulty than Tagalog?

Sure. I was just speaking from the Taiwanese point of view, since they're mostly reading Mandarin. I meant as easy as any other language people might be able to read and write fluently^^

I don't quite see the difference in quality between borrowing Mandarin characters or those from Literary Chinese.

I see a huge difference. Literary Chinese, which is not really "a language", but more of a tradition, serves and has served as a high language for a wide swathe of languages up and down Pacific Asia.

I like to believe that literary Chinese used to be a living language maybe around Confucius' time (if it wasn't, how could people get the idea to write something down which was completely different from what they were saying? And how did it occur that Chinese characters do have a phonetic component?) But of course at least from Han dynasty or so onward, this language was probably dead and had indeed become a mere tradition (which one can see in the increasing number of formulations that would probably have been considered a mistake in classical times).
But I was talking about character borrowings, not loanwords. Since there are only approximate reconstructions of the sounds in classical Chinese, loaning words would only work by coining new words of existing characters and read them with their Hokkien reading, anyway, the same thing which Chinese languages (and other languages in East Asia) have done for quite some time (cf. the "lightning-brain" or the "net-route" that came up earlier in Mandarin (or were they coined in Japan?)), although I don't know how productive the direct loaning from classical Chinese is in Hokkien, right now...
Borrowing characters for their meaning in classical Chinese in order to write Hokkien words without a punji (for example writing tshuē as 求 or gōng as 愚) however seems a different thing to me. I'm not opposed to this, but I don't think this is much different in quality from loaning characters from Mandarin (e.g. 找 and 傻 for the same words as above). In both cases we would use characters that originally have nothing to do with the Hokkien word. Which I would be ok with as long as there are not many of these borrowings and if no confusion arises from it.

As for loanwords, I agree with you that one should be careful to loan too much from a single other language, especially if the loaning reaches an extent where it affects not only vocabulary but grammar too, otherwise there really is a danger of the loaning language to be reduced to merely a different way of pronouncing the language it loans from. However, at my stage of learning, I guess it'd be better to first learn and speak the way the locals do, even if that speech is scattered with loanwords, in order to be understood (which is why at least now, I won't call Mandarin kuan-uē because I'm most Taiwanese say kok-gí, although I find your argument for kuan-uē convincing) and learn the "proper" words that nobody uses anymore, later.
This of course brings me back to the problem that I don't have anyone to talk to but I will go and find some of the material you mentioned in the later post as soon as I have the time. After all, your argument that Mandarin knowledge will from a certain level begin to become a hinderance rather than an advantage is very true. I can see it even when I try to speak Plattdeutsch (Low German). In those rare cases, I usually end up merely changing Standard German words to Low German pronounciation, adorn it with a little Low German grammar. However there are of course a lot of things you would say differently in Low German than the standard language, only I, hardly ever being exposed to the former, don't know them... But maybe the material you mentioned will help me avoid that problem with Bân-lâm-gí (I'm not much of a bible fan either, but well... it's for a good cause )
By the way, much of my motivation to advocate a standard way of writing even if that means a certain degree of deviation from what we personally consider correct stems precisely from my wish to avoid that very problem by talking to people. I learnt much of my colloquial Mandarin by chatting on the internet with friends but this is rendered nearly impossible in the case of Bân-lâm-gí because none of my Taiwanese friends can write Tâi-gí, not even in transcription, which kind of startled me.

[amhoanna]

I like to believe that literary Chinese used to be a living language maybe around Confucius' time

It lives on yet. What language is used for contracts and legal code in Taiwan? But it has changed beyond any semblance of natural mutual intelligibility, compared to the writings of 2000+ yrs ago. That's why I say it's not "a" language, nor even a series of languages, but a continuum, a tradition, if U will.

Borrowing characters for their meaning in classical Chinese in order to write Hokkien words without a punji (for example writing tshuē as 求 or gōng as 愚) however seems a different thing to me. I'm not opposed to this, but I don't think this is much different in quality from loaning characters from Mandarin (e.g. 找 and 傻 for the same words as above).

Is that the Mandophile in U talking? Why not borrow from Japanese? Or Vietnamese?

because I'm most Taiwanese say kok-gí

They do so b/c of their political beliefs. I mean, what "kok"? And many others call it Hôagí.

But anyway, why not learn Penang Hokkien too? Penang Hokkien learners have more fun.

[Abun]

I like to believe that literary Chinese used to be a living language maybe around Confucius' time

It lives on yet. What language is used for contracts and legal code in Taiwan? But it has changed beyond any semblance of natural mutual intelligibility, compared to the writings of 2000+ yrs ago. That's why I say it's not "a" language, nor even a series of languages, but a continuum, a tradition, if U will.

I'm sorry, I phrased it imprecisely, by "living language" I mean "spoken language". In this understanding, I of course shouldn't speak of "literary Chinese" anymore, but rather "the language whose written form we now call literary chinese".

Is that the Mandophile in U talking? Why not borrow from Japanese? Or Vietnamese?

I kind of have the feeling that we're talking past each other. I am still talking about the characters to write Hokkien language with (that is, something completely unrelated spoken Hokkien) and my point was precisely that I find it equally good or bad to borrow unrelated characters, no matter which language they come from.
I can't speak Japanese, but as far as I know, original Japanese kanji (that is characters developed in Japan, I believe they call them kokuji 国字) while existent, are pretty scarce. Of course, there is no reason against borrowing those (for example one could use 鰯 for sardine if a punji in that word is unclear). Then, among the non-kokuji kanji, there are simplified ones (of which some, such as 国, are the same as in simplified Chinese, whereas others, such as 駅(cf. 驿) are not) and those that are still the same as in traditional Chinese. As for the latter group, we could of course borrow it, but I guess the result would usually be the same as if it was borrowed from literary chinese (unless the Japanese meaning differs from the one in literary Chinese). As for the simplified forms, I see no reason why they should not be borrowed.
The case with Vietnamese is probably somewhat similar, although I have even less knowledge of it than Japanese. I have no idea if there are a lot of characters in Vietnamese (if you were to write sino-vietnamese words with their corresponding characters) whose meanings differ from literary chinese, for those whose meanings are the same, again there would be no difference if we borrowed from literary Chinese or Vietnamese. What I do know is that there is something called Chữ-nôm, a system in which Vietnamese people created new characters to write original Vietnamese words. Just as Japanese kokuji and simplified character variants, this is a source one could draw from if one wants to borrow a character for a certain Hokkien word. Why not. The only problem might be that there don't seem to be too many people who know Chữ-nôm anymore, but I guess if one wants to, there should be no problem in finding one of those^^
The same goes for Korean btw, although the Korean-coined characters may be even fewer than the Japanese kokuji.

What I have the feeling you are talking about, is mainly loanwords (that is actual utterances in spoken language, not just characters used to spell utterances). In this question I agree with you that one should be careful not to borrow too many words from Mandarin in particular, but I feel I personally am not yet in a position to be even able to distinguish if a word has existed in both Hokkien and Mandarin ror a long time already or if it is a Mandarin borrowing. Even if I were, I would probably for the moment block out that question and go for the more commonly used word to get understandable and worry about the socio-linguistic implications of loanwords when I have reached a level where I am understood and thus have the leisure to worry about more subtle problems

because I'm most Taiwanese say kok-gí

They do so b/c of their political beliefs. I mean, what "kok"? And many others call it Hôagí.

Of course it is, I'm well aware of that. But actually if you ask me, calling it Huâ-gí is even less pc, as it implies that it's the only valuable language not only of a certain "kok" but of all "huâ", that is, the whole ethnic Chinese community. But again, I guess my priority should first be to make myself understood, and while I think your kuan-uē is the best term I have heard so far in terms of defending Hokkien as a distinct language, that won't help me if nobody else uses the term. If I began to use it, I suppose people would ask back "Kuan-uē sī siánn-mih tāi-tsì--ooh?" and I would end up having to explain what I mean and why I use this word, which simply isn't possible for me to do in Hokkien, yet. So if TWese people say "kok-gí", I will temporarily go along^^

But anyway, why not learn Penang Hokkien too? Penang Hokkien learners have more fun.

Being a non-native speaker, I guess you speak from experience, I'd be interested in hearing it But whether they have more fun or not, I guess it would be best to first stick to one variant, get that straight and then look at the variants spoken at other places^^

[AndrewAndrew]

The difference I think one can recognise is that Hokkien is at least descended from Old Chinese. It is not descended from Mandarin. Plus, words such as 之 would have been familiar to Hokkiens from generations past, so there is historical continuity in usage. That said, I think we should at least try to avoid obscure words that would cause confusion because they have a totally different meaning in Mandarin.

[amhoanna]

Plus, words such as 之 would have been familiar to Hokkiens from generations past, so there is historical continuity in usage.

Yes. Well said.

I'm sorry, I phrased it imprecisely, by "living language" I mean "spoken language".

OK, so you meant that there was no diglossia btw spoken and written forms in the time (and place) of Confucius. They wrote it just the way they said it.

There is much evidence out there to disabuse U of this notion. In fact, vernacular (白話) compositions have existed in the East Asian tradition for over 2000 yrs. I believe at least parts of the 詩経, for example, were written in some type of vernacular. Ah-bin would know more about this.

I kind of have the feeling that we're talking past each other. I am still talking about the characters to write Hokkien language with (that is, something completely unrelated spoken Hokkien) and my point was precisely that I find it equally good or bad to borrow unrelated characters, no matter which language they come from.

Yes. EXACTLY the same thing I was talking about.

The word "tshūe" has been a thorn in the side of anyone who wants to write Hoklo using just kanji. In the 20th century, scholars such as 王育德 assigned the glyph 尋 to it. (He may or may not have gotten this from older texts, such as stage scripts.) The reasoning was that 尋 is the glyph meaning TO SEEK in Lit. Chinese, and we would 馴用 it for Hoklo, consistent with centuries of 馴用 tradition. Moreover, 尋 is otherwise pretty much un-used in Hoklo.

In recent decades, others have more or less proposed the glyph 找 for "tshūe". The reasoning is that 找 is the glyph meaning TO SEEK in Mandarin, and we would 馴用 it for Hoklo. While there is not such a well-developed tradition of 馴用-ing kanji from vernacular languages (which is what Mandarin is), we could simply "pretend" that Mandarin had entered the "canon" of Lit. Chinese and was no longer "just" a vernacular language. Moreover, 找 is only rarely otherwise used in Hoklo, for the word cãu (TO GIVE CHANGE).

aBun is saying that both assignments are equally good, or equally bad. I'm saying that 尋 is far superior to 找.

I'm also saying that we should borrow "kanji usage" (not loanwords) from other vernaculars equally, if we do it at all. If we're open to picking 找 over 尋 -- and I don't think we should be -- we should also be open to picking 揾 instead, b/c it's the kanji for TO SEEK in Cantonese. And if we've already borrowed a lot of kanji usage (not loanwords) from solely Mandarin, then we should be all the less pre-disposed to continuing to do so.

I offer this reasoning up for anyone who may come across this on the WWW. I have not stated the case very well. I think Andrew put it much more eloquently in just one sentence. Apologies to aBun for writing so much English, which is non-native for him... I would gladly write in Hoklo, but Sim and Andrew and others tend to fade out when I do that.

[Ah-bin]

Somewhere (I'm not quite sure where) I came across the idea that the script was already quite different from the spoken language it was representing even in the time of Confucius, and that the one-character-to-one-syllable rule that developed in the writing system actually ended up influencing the way compound words were created in the spoken language. There is a nice detailed discussion of this question in the Columbia History of Chinese Literature[/] which I don't have time to dig into just yet. Perhaps it was Jerry Norman's Chinese where I read it?

Another thing that I noticed is that written Chinese (in characters) is highly resistant to change in a way that alphabetic scripts are not. If there is no character for a word it will often just get left out of dictionaries until a character comes along, and it is the written character that bestows "word" status upon the chaos of speech. Sometimes a word has to be attached to a character that is similar in sound 喝 (in Mandarin) for example or sometimes it has to be attached to a character with a similar semantic range like "bah" in Hokkien, which is completely unrelated to any of the Sinitic words for "meat" (ròu, yûk, even the loan niku in Japanese) or a new character has to be invented. This means that unless a new word in speech becomes absolutely essential for communication in writing, it is usually parsed or ignored until there is a way to write it. I've always conjectured that in a few hundred years they will have to have another 白話 movement to make writing and speech one again, because spoken and written Chinese will have diverged so much again.

[SimL]

Apologies to aBun for writing so much English, which is non-native for him... I would gladly write in Hoklo, but Sim and Andrew and others tend to fade out when I do that.

Thank you for taking my limitations into account. I can't speak for Andrew, but you're dead right when it comes to me. I think only Mark, niuc and Ah-bin can really read POJ and/or hanzi with any degree of ease.

[SimL]

Another thing that I noticed is that written Chinese (in characters) is highly resistant to change in a way that alphabetic scripts are not. If there is no character for a word it will often just get left out of dictionaries until a character comes along, and it is the written character that bestows "word" status upon the chaos of speech. Sometimes a word has to be attached to a character that is similar in sound 喝 (in Mandarin) for example or sometimes it has to be attached to a character with a similar semantic range like "bah" in Hokkien, which is completely unrelated to any of the Sinitic words for "meat" (ròu, yûk, even the loan niku in Japanese) or a new character has to be invented. This means that unless a new word in speech becomes absolutely essential for communication in writing, it is usually parsed or ignored until there is a way to write it.

Agreed. And the "problem" is made many times worse with the advent of the computer age. It was least serious in the purely handwritten age, where a "new/dialect" character (or several competing forms) could just arise from informal usage (personal correspondence, etc), until "statistics / society" settled on one form, by an organic process. Even in the age of woodblock printing, any press could just carve a new character if they felt like it. Once movable metal fonts were common, this obviously became much more of a problem. And now, with the Unicode Consortium, you would have to first convince some *national* body that a new character is desired, then wait 3-5 years while that national body submits it to the Unicode Consortium and the Consortium approves it, then wait several more years before font designers implement it so that it can be displayed, and even then, you have to wait yet again, until "input method programs" support it. [Even just the example of "gâu" we had here recently already illustrates this last point.]

The Vietnamese and the Koreans solved this problem some time back .

[Is that a coded plea for the abolishment of characters? I leave it in the air. I probably have a schizophrenic approach to Chinese characters. On the one hand, I constantly bewail their disadvantages, and on the other hand, I'm VERY attached to them. For the way they have survived for 2500 years; for the (illusion of???) "continuity" of Chinese civilization they have produced; for the way they "unite" all the Sinitic languages (or perhaps more accurately, "unite the shared Sinitic layer of the Sinitic languages"!); for their ability to convey meaning more directly (note, I'm not falling into the "Chinese is an ideographic script" fallacy; I'm sure most readers will know what I actually mean when I say this). Over and over again, I mutter prayers of thankfulness that the mid-1950's plans to first introduce pinyin and then eventually abolish characters never actually managed to reach the end goal.