Hoklo in the Bisayas: comments on the archives

[Abun]

Hey amhoanna,

yes it's indeed quite interesting. Might I ask where those parts come from (you might have mentioned it in Castellan earlier, but I have some difficulty reading that since I've never learned that and my French is already half forgotten as well )?

汝 sounds high-level, as it would in Mainstream TWese. We can interpret it as being citation / standing.

Do we? I don't quite see the difference between this one and Kinláⁿ- in sentence two. Both should be T2 if you look at other variants, and both take the running tone instead of the standing one, which we would expect. So do you have a reason why you interpret one as running T2 and the other as standing T1?

9 M̌ sǐ, góa sǐ câli̍t khì khòaⁿ--i.
* "Ca" definitely sounds low-falling. The cognate in TW is mid-level. This fits the profile of T5. Not sure what's going on here. There is clearly no glottal stop. The choice of 昨 to write this etymon seems ill-advised.

I learned this morpheme as "cha" (in T1), but I have no audio sources to check that now. Anyways, cha or châ wouldn't make a difference for me, since I would sandhi both to mid-level and I have yet to come across a word where I would have to use the citation tone for this morpheme.
But does the absence of a glottal stop necessarily mean that 昨 can't be the pún-jī? Sure, my rhyme dictionaries also write it as 疾各切 and 各 does have a glottal stop, but isn't it still possible that a pronunciation from an older layer is missing that? At least the pronunciation-defining 乍 has two spellings in 集韻: 即各切 and 鉏駕切, the latter of which renders chà in Hokkien, without a glottal stop. Is it then impossible that 昨 has a pronunciation without glottal stop?

[amhoanna]

isn't it still possible that a pronunciation from an older layer is missing that? At least the pronunciation-defining 乍 has two spellings in 集韻: 即各切 and 鉏駕切, the latter of which renders chà in Hokkien, without a glottal stop. Is it then impossible that 昨 has a pronunciation without glottal stop?

Good point. U are right AFAIK, there is that likelihood. Indeed 炸 is ca3 in Hoklo.

I don't quite see the difference between this one and Kinláⁿ- in sentence two. Both should be T2 if you look at other variants, and both take the running tone instead of the standing one, which we would expect. So do you have a reason why you interpret one as running T2 and the other as standing T1?

Both should be T2 if we look at other variants, true.

The láⁿ- is high-rising, and in a position where we'd expect the syllable to stand. High-rising means either running T2 or standing T5. Based on other variants, we interpret it as running T2, but it's like there's a "ghost" standing syllable following it. Hence the "trailing dash" -- not an elegant convention, I know.

The most well-known example of a "standing ghost" is the swear word "kàn-". In TW, the swear word is always high-falling, which is running T3. Yet, many times nothing follows it, even though running syllables generally have to have something following it. In this case the "ghost" is some form of "lín liâⁿ ".

Góa is not high-rising -- it's high-level. In her dialect, high-level is either running T3 or standing T2. Based on what we know from all other tonal languages in the Sinosphere, we interpret it as standing T2. From there we conclude that pronouns generally stand in Mainstream Phils Hokkien (and Penang Hokkien), even though they run in Taiwan and Amoy.

And BTW even though Amoy is often cited as a "representative", it's really not representative of Mainland Hoklo. It's like a Taiwanese dialect that washed back onto the Mainland, if that makes sense.