Hi, Sim,
Apologies for the rather late reply to your highly comprehensive posting. Admittedly, you certainly have raised the bar in our discourse on our respective approaches to language, thus composing a respectable reply certainly has posed challenges for me!
I, too, come from a non-Chinese-educated background - having picked up written Chinese and the dialects off the streets and through sheer grit and hard work.
I agree with you about the practical implications in having a constant tension between a forward-progressing vernacular speech and a static, time-locked written language. As much as I hate to admit it, I must concede that in all probabililty the Chinese language would have been killed by progress the same way as Latin, had modernisation via the baihuawen movement not been institutionalised.
My appreciation (obsession?? given my numerous such postings, which must by now be starting to irk you!) for the "original" form of word mirrors the preface in Wheelock's Latin (6th Ed) textbook: "Knowing Latin teaches us English... 60% of English words are derived from Latin... understanding the etymological history of a word gives the under vividness, colour, punch and precision... students will not only remember vocabulary words longer and better when they understand their etymologies... also use them with a sharper sense of meaning and nuance."
I suppose my best attempt at answering your rhetorical question "how far back do we go?" would be, in the spirit of Wheelock, "only as far back as is required to grasp the etymology of the word" (the words are my own, by the way). So for me, reconstruction of the pronunciations of words in Old Chinese is useful for modern Chinese only insofar as to illustrate its usage and correlations with other words - anything beyond that is purely academic.
Don't get me wrong - I have little misgivings about the generous amount of Malay loan words that have added so much character (and punch?) to Penang Hokkien. Every language has borrowed from another at some point or other in time - this is natural and inevitable. I agree that it has enriched the Penang Hokkien dialect (note that in this context, I can no longer use the term Chiang Chew Hokkien to describe the Penang Hokkien dialect, as the Baba features have made it quite a distinct language in its own right). In this sense, the exercise of finding the origins of Penang Baba Hokkien words from Malay (or rather, the Malayo-Polynesian) languages deserves special treatment independent of the Sinologist angle. And you will be pleased to know that I think Penang Baba Hokkien is none the poorer with these loan words!
That is why I am probably a little less particular than Hong about locating the exact pronunciation and tones of Hokkien words for different sub-groups of Minnan to the dot. My interest goes as far as "what was the word used? can we still use it today, rather than lose it?" Hokkien, like the other Southern dialects, has such a rich vocabulary that is absent in Mandarin - your extensive list of family relations already proves that! If such traditions are not given a conducive vehicle for preservation, our "ah ku", "ah tiau", "ah chek" and "ah paek" will be reduced to simply "uncle" (of course, some of these terms exist in Mandarin, but let's face it - who in Penang uses them?). In all fairness, Mandarin has contributed more than its fair share in terms of modern terminologies to suit a modern world so alien to our 19th century forefathers. But it need not be a one-way street at the expense of preserving what is good about our ancestral dialects.
To cite just one example: The Hokkien word for "reason" is "gŭan ǐm" 原因 (one of the first words I learnt when I started work in Penang!) and "because" is "ǐm wŭi" 因為. Some Penang Hokkien speakers I know of in Penang now just use the English words "reason" or "because". Others mis-pronounce the 因 in 因為 as "eng", pronoucing it as "eng-goey" (some even think that the mis-pronounced "goey" is 過, or "to cross over"!). Without an appreciation of the etymology of the root word ǐm 因, the sense of meaning and nuance is lost.
My grouse with word-borrowing only kicks in when the borrowing is not only unnecessary (when perfectly adequate words are already in use in the existing language), but also serves to drive the language into ruin and regression. A perfect example is the mindless borrowing of English words into Malay which I have observed in recent years. I look back with nostalgia on the old days when my 'cikgu' used to rap us for using bastardised English loan words like 'kanser' (cancer) and 'kualiti' (quality), when the words 'barah' and 'mutu', respectively, were perfectly adequate and in widespread use. The danger of "blind" word borrowing stems from selective "cherry-picking" of words without knowing their etymologies.
All said, I not only appreciate the angle which you are approaching languages - a dynamic and constantly-progressing one - I actually do agree with it. What pulls me in the opposite direction, i.e. going backwards to the roots of the language, is but the desire to bring it back in line when "progressive forces" turn out to be linguistically-destructive.
To quote you, your efforts are directed towards "constantly fiddling with the written language to bring it back into line with the spoken form". I would like to think that my efforts are towards the same goal, but by means of "reminding the speakers of where the words came from, so that they do not misguidedly stray too far from an existing, perfectly good spoken form" (Heaven forbid, "ǐm wŭi" evolves into "eng-goey" and further into "eng-ko" - and have our future generations thinking that "because" and "parrot" are the same in Hokkien!).
So, rather than the two of us coming to different conclusions, I would like to think of it as using different means of achieving a similar goal.
I have enjoyed this discourse, and likewise, look forward to your postings in the future.
With warmest regards,
Mark