Penang Hokkien Vocabulary Questions

[SimL]

niuc: yes, "hau2" is the word for "cry" (as in "weeping", with tears etc) in Penang Hokkien. The normal word for "shout", "scream", "shriek" is "jiang2".

There is also the verb "huah4" which means to call out loudly, shout. I use it in the phrase "luan-luan huah" (= (literally) "yell out things at random", but also (metaphorically) "talk rubbish", "say the first thing that comes into someone's mind"). As in "miEn chai i, i ha-mi to(h) m-chai e, luan-luan huan nia" (= "just ignore him, he doesn't know anything, just talks rubbish / says any old thing").

Yeleixingfeng: ask your friends if they know "khau2-pE37" (= "grumble", "complain"). It was only in the last 5 years, after Hokkien became a major interest of mine, that I learnt that it's a reference to wailing, at the funeral of one's parents (IIRC). As I also knew the 'full phrase' "khau-pE-khau-bo", it made sense to me. But, is it true that this is slightly vulgar way of expressing "to complain"? I read that somewhere, but in my limited knowledge, I just used it as the regular term for "complain".

[Mark Yong]

SimL wrote:
There is also the verb "huah4" which means to call out loudly, shout.

An excellent example! I do believe this is one instance where the original meaning of the word is preserved in the Southern dialects, but morphed into something unrelated in Mandarin. My guess is that the Chinese character for huah4 is 喝. If so, it is cognate with the Cantonese hot3, which means ‘to shout’.

《集韻》何葛切，音曷。呼也。

niuc wrote:
About 師公, do they read the prayers/scriptures in wholly literary Hokkien? From what I ever heard (only few occasions, from a distance, and many years back), the reading was very different from "real life" Hokkien (and also Mandarin).

I only have some memory of it from attending a close friend's maternal grandfather's funeral back in 2000 (which means that at that time, I would have been acquainted with Hokkien for a little under 3 years). But you are right, the Hokkien used was quite literary. For one thing, virtually all the pronunciations of words used were 讀册音. But that said, ‘literary’ did not mean ‘mapped directly from Mandarin’.

The part that I definitely remember was when a relative arrived to pay his/her respects:
<announcing the kinship and full name of person in Hokkien>... “頭耷一鞠躬、 再鞠躬、 三鞠躬 thâu-tap ĭt kĭok-kiông, cāi kĭok-kiông, sām kĭok-kiông。”

What interested me when I looked back much later, was that in the cases where the 講話音 colloquial pronunciations were employed, the 師公 sâi-kŌng's pronunciations mapped almost precisely to the standard 漳州 Ciang Ciu 讀册音 pronunciations. To cite an example, my friend's surname is Por 傅, which would be pronounced Po (and not PO) in 夏 or 泉. Her father's surname was pronounced by the 師公 sâi-kŌng as PO, per the 漳州 Ciang Ciu 讀册音 pronunciation.

Similarly, during my late maternal grandmother's funeral last year in Bidor (she was 98, but Chinese custom normally adds 3 years, thereby bringing it to 101 - her making it to 'centurion-ship' therefore qualified the funeral as a 喜事 happy occasion rather than a 喪事 sad one), the rites were said entirely in Hakka. And the troupe of girls who read the rites were all in their 20's (and I venture to guess that one of them might have still been of high-school age!). Same-same, quite literal language employed.

[Yeleixingfeng]

Reply to Siml,

Yes, khau-peh is very common. We just don't know it is 哭爸. Haha.

[amhoanna]

Siamiwako,

Always interesting to hear about Pinoy dialects of Hokkien.

九品蓮花為父母 - "kiu p'in dian hua ui hu bio"

Does diânhoa here refer to whores? Compassionately said.

Yelei,

U seem to live in a different Penang than what the other guys describe. And maybe U really do. Mark and Sim are usually talking about Penang the way it was. It's possible that it's changed a lot in ten years. From Mark's description of the sales pitches, I know he's talking about the exact same thing I'm talking about, this kind of smooth, snaking, "quintessentially Hoklo" freestyle poetry. Yet I don't think I've heard that kind of thing in any market in Tâipak since about ten years ago. And yet it never struck me till now that maybe that kind of thing is on the way out.

I "seem to recall" hearing those kind of pitches in smaller towns over the past couple of years.

As Ah-bin has said, if U feel the urge to "invent a better Hokkien", then by all means U should go ahead and do that.

This makes it difficult for pure-Hokkien rhyming, with 'Hokkien' defined as words of Sinitic roots.

By your definition, many everyday words in "pure Hokkien" are actually not Hokkien, b/c they're not Sinitic. And many more words would be in limbo, since it hasn't been settled that they're Sinitic. Go ahead, tell us that's not what U meant.

[Yeleixingfeng]

By your definition, many everyday words in "pure Hokkien" are actually not Hokkien, b/c they're not Sinitic. And many more words would be in limbo, since it hasn't been settled that they're Sinitic. Go ahead, tell us that's not what U meant.

Honestly, look at Ah-bin's link. The Ko Ai aunty uses English words (Ferrari?) for rhyming. Non-Sinitic refers to that.

[Ah-bin]

Just as an aside.....
Poor Amhoanna won't be able to see that video for ages...you do realise Youtube is completely banned in China, as well as Facebook, Twitter, and Blogger. I'm only mentioning it because every time I told it to to people in Malaysia they seemed really surprised to hear it, so I'm guessing it is not common knowledge.

[Mark Yong]

Sometime in the recent past, this topic was debated before by another Forumer, on what should constitute ‘pure’ Hokkien.

The problem is, even without factoring in the loanwords from Malay and, later, Mandarin and English, Hokkien as spoken and brought over to 南洋 Lam-IOⁿ already had a significant proportion (albeit a minority, thank God!) of words that were of non-Sinitic origin, and therefore could not be written using Chinese characters.

Honestly, I root religiously for Hokkien to be written purely in 唐儂字. I really want for tâ-pŌ to be 丈夫, câ-bǑ to be 少婦, būeh to be 必, and a plethora of other intuitive characters. But they are not (well, okay - last I heard, the jury is still out for the tâ-pŌ 丈夫 one), and I have to accept that. So, the best I can do is persuade Hokkien-philes to learn the Sino-literary aspects of Hokkien (i.e. how to read Literary Chinese texts in Hokkien), by way of pulling Hokkien back to its Sinitic roots.

Opinions differ among the Forumers on where the cut-off should be. I know Sim advocates that his tolerance level is up to any Malay loanwords that his late grandmother understood and used as part of Baba Hokkien, which is reasonable. Given my penchant for all things Chinese, my tolerance level is perhaps a bit lower, and I would place my cut-off point at whatever lexical and grammatical elements that were transplanted over by the 漳州 Ciang-Ciu ancestors of the majority of today's Penang Hokkiens - but that's just me. Even then, for me to say that Penangites should emulate the speech of 漳州 Ciang-Ciu would be futile, as even today's 漳州 Ciang-Ciu residents probably speak it with a lot more Mandarin intrusions.

Let me give you an example outside of Hokkien. In my family dialect (惠州城話) as spoken by my family members here in Malaysia, 字 is pronounced chî, simple as that. However, somewhere along the way, presumably after my great-grandfather came over to Malaya, a temple called 永福寺 was erected in 惠州城. Now, 字 is a homonym with quite a number of other words in 惠州城話, including 寺, So in order to disambiguate, the latter-day speakers would say 永福 vîng-fŭk for ‘word’. I once asked my father if he knew that 永福 vîng-fŭk is another way of saying 字 chî, and he gave me a blank stare.

The point I am trying to make is, Hokkien, like any other language, is in a constant state of flux, and constantly being bombarded by the influences of other languages, as well as the passage of history. But at the same time, I also acknowledge that this injudicious absorption of English and Mandarin terms into Hokkien, especially given that the Hokkien equivalents exist and are readily available, is not a good thing. Why give a man a crutch when he has two perfectly-fine legs to walk with?

To be fair, it's the same thing with the Malay language today - kanser, kolej, geografi, matematik, dokumentari, aktiviti, etc... what happened to wholesome words like barah, maktab, ilmu alam, ilmu hisab, rencana, kegiatan, etc. that my cikgu used to rap into my head when I was in school?

[siamiwako]

Siamiwako,

Always interesting to hear about Pinoy dialects of Hokkien.

九品蓮花為父母 - "kiu p'in dian hua ui hu bio"

Does diânhoa here refer to whores? Compassionately said.

It's a line found in Buddhist text. Below is the full text:
願生西方淨土中
九品蓮花為父母
花開見佛悟無生
不退菩薩為伴侶

[SimL]

Hi Mark,

Very valid points you made, and you might be surprised to hear that I'm quite supportive of your ideas.

Let me try to explain. You see, I call myself a descriptive linguist, but I'm not one as a matter of blind / dogmatic belief. So, while my basic stance is that of accepting what is being said (= 'the spoken language of any particular group IS the spoken language of that particular group'), I also acknowledge the fact that - for many, many languages - the written language does affect (and has affected) the spoken language in the course of history. Furthermore, ever since the 18th century, prescriptive grammarians in the West have fought battles about what is good/correct usage, and these battles have had an affect on the course of language development. (The same happened in Mandarin, in the "forging of the standard language" out of the spread and variation of the "Mandarin dialects"; e.g. "How much colloquial Beijingese should be incorporated into the standard?", "Where - i.e. how far 'down' - on the sociolinguistic spectrum do we draw the cutoff line?".)

And a lot of this prescriptiveness has been "good", in the sense that it led to a more unified, streamlined, (sometimes) more logical language. When you want to make a single language out of a spread of dialects - i.e. you want to let disparate groups of people communicate who speak very different variants from one another, then you must per se cut and trim, axeing features of one group in favour of another, choosing between alternatives, etc, etc. Doing so gets a result much faster than just muddling through with all the different usages, and hoping for something to crystalize out (which might never happen).

So, just to sum up: I don't have any objection to "language planning", when it comes to trying to forge a common language out of disparate variants; and "restoring" old, forgotten, unknown sinitic forms in preference to later Malay and English borrowings seems to be as good a method of deciding as any. I see no reason to impose my "tapi" and "suka" on the Taiwanese and Chinese Filipinos, if there are perfectly good sinitic equivalents (in the same way as I wouldn't imagine that Indonesian Hokkien speakers want to impose Dutch borrowings on to me, or Filipino Chinese Tagalog or Spanish ones). The sinitic ones have the benefit of once having belonged to us all, and seem not to be an imposition of the same nature, perhaps not an imposition at all.

This has actually always been my position, but perhaps I was more aggressively "descriptive" in the face of rudeness and ignorance on the part of some people who treated my variant with contempt. With someone like you, who amply demonstrates that he/she understands the fundamentals of descriptive linguistics, I have no problem accepting criticism/rejection of my variant, because I know that that criticism/rejection comes from a perspective of informed and intelligent thinking.

[AndrewAndrew]

In my experience, I have only heard khau being used in set phrases, e.g. khau-pE khau-bu.