Penang Hokkien Vocabulary Questions

[niuc]

Before anyone accuses me of talking politics, I think since it is over thirty years old the above qualifies as history now, rather than politics.

Haha, you remind me of our past "disagreement" or probably misunderstanding (unfortunately your long reply was logged out) about Mandarin being made compulsory in schools for minorities in PRC.

Recently I read in news of Beijing's plan to route water from 長江 to Northern China, while recently area around 長江 also suffered from drought. What an irresponsible & idiot plan!

[Ah-bin]

Hehe...actually I felt a bit bad for having done it.....but it was good to have an excuse to put a bit of Animal Farm into Hokkien!

I also have to apologise about the famine thing as well, as I remembered that the Nationalist government soldiers also did their fair share of stealing food off the poor people, and created localised famine by doing so. Not quite on the scale of the Great Leap Forward famines though!

[niuc]

Thank you, niuc. You have no idea how long I have been mulling over the 本字 punji for this one. I even read somewhere that it was 唱, which I found totally unacceptable. The j-/d- relationship between Penang vs. Ba-Gan-Ue Hokkien does reinforce it.

You are most welcome, Mark. Yes, I think most r- in Mandarin correspond to j-/d- in Hokkien. Is 茸 (diông in Bagan) jiông or jiâng in Penang?　

[niuc]

Hehe...actually I felt a bit bad for having done it.....but it was good to have an excuse to put a bit of Animal Farm into Hokkien!

I read your Hokkien translation before I read the English original above it, and I could understand fully! May be you should translate the whole book?

[amhoanna]

Is the Mandarin a1 mo2, which presumably is 阿嬤, unique to Taiwan, then? I recall hearing it in TV commercials dating back to the late 1980's / early-1990's.

Never heard a1 mo2 in Mandarin. A TV character, maybe?

[SimL]

Is 茸 (diông in Bagan) jiông or jiâng in Penang?　

Nice to see you back here posting a lot again, niuc!

Sorry, don't know this word in Hokkien, so have to leave it to the others...

[AndrewAndrew]

Mark - I think either of the following set of tone conventions is acceptable, as long as it's consistent:
POJ Bodman
1 a â
2 á à
3 à ǎ
4 ah ǎq
5 â á
7 ā ā
8 ȧh âq

POJ always indicates the citation tone, Bodman the sandhi tone.

Until recently I thought you used Bodman, but then your ˆ and ˇs appear to have flipped.

[SimL]

Okay, Mark... New Year's resolution: Get your tone conventions right!

Will a resolution made so long before New Year survive...?

Below, I explain my system for remembering them. It's an odd system, because it uses the fact that some things are not what one would expect them to be (tone2, tone4, and tone8). Part of the secret of mnemonics is supposed to be that one remembers something odd about the situation - the odder it is, the easier to remember, is the theory. The only problem is that in my system, some things are normal and some things are odd, so you have to remember which is which, haha! But, it worked for me.

non-ru-tones
a - tone1 - doesn't need a mnemonic, because it's unmarked.
â - tone5 - is the rising tone, because the first half of "^" rises.
à - tone3 - is the low level tone, because it ENDS low; and it's the one which changes in sandhi, because the shape changes (i.e. is not level).
ā - tone7 - is the low level tone, because it IS low (pressing on top of the vowel); and it's the one which doesn't change in sandhi, because the shape doesn't changes (i.e. is level).
á - tone2 - is the falling tone, because it's the OPPOSITE what the shape suggests. [Again, I apologise, as Ah-bin has now pointed out to me that it isn't really a falling tone - just a high-level or high-very-slightly-falling - but I developed this system before I had met Ah-bin.]

ru-tones
ah - tone4 - is the low one, because it's the OPPOSITE to what one would expect (one would expect tone1 and tone8 - both highish - to have similar tone marks)
áh - tone8 - is the high one, because it's the ru-tone which isn't tone4!

Honestly, that's how I remember them, but I don't know if my telling you this helps you in any way !

Sorry, Sim. What I marked as a rising tone for maq (mother) should really have been a low-level tone, i.e. same as for 五，做，讀，册。.

Ok, thanks. My only query now is that 五，做，册 are low for me, but 讀 is high.

[Ah-bin]

That system is far more complex and clever than I guessed from your explanaions to me Sim!

The reason why I have trouble with number systems is because the dictionaries I own from China do the 1-8 thing differently from each other...in one system (also the computer input system) the tones are arranged yin first yang second:

a = 1 á = 2 à = 3 at = 4
â = 5 (á = 2) ā = 7 át = 8

and the other is yin-yang yin-yang yin-yang etc.

a = 1 â = 2 á = 3 à = 5 ā = 6 at = 7 át = 8

One and eight are still the same...but I get so confused that end up looking for other characters on the page with tones that I know. That's why I stick with tone marks!

I read your Hokkien translation before I read the English original above it, and I could understand fully! May be you should translate the whole book?

Sim knows I have been thinking about that for a while. The first problem I'd have to solve is how to say "Farm". My Taiwanese version was "Tōng-bút lông-tiûⁿ" 動物農場 (presumably, since the whole book was written in characters with POJ for the "unknowns") but I don't know how to say it in Southeast Asian Hokkien. De Gijzel has "lông-tiâuⁿ" but I always need to check first.

I suppose it would be "Khîm-siù" 禽獸 rather than Tōng-bút 動物 since the second word is a loan from Japanese and ultimately a calque from "animal", and did not replace 禽獸 in most Chinese languages until the first decades of the twentieth century.

How would one say "vet" I wonder? I can think of a few ways....

Khîm-siù ê ló-kun 禽獸个老君
Khîm-siù ê i-seng 禽獸个醫生
Siù-i 獸醫

But I made them all up myself!

and to digress.....or perhaps it's not really digressing since this thread has gone from vocab to bandits to tone marks....... it's interesting that ló-kun 老君 is from the Malay dukun, which meant a traditional Malay medicine man. Since a doctor of Chinese medicine is a 唐儂先生 tn^g-lâng sin-se•ⁿ, it leads me to the idea that the Chinese believed that western doctors were on the same level as Malay medicine-men (or women? I don't know whether women were dukun as well) when compared to their own style of medicine.

[Mark Yong]

Hi, Andrew & Sim,

Thanks for your outlines, will endeavour to adhere to an accepted standard from now on!

AndrewAndrew wrote:
Until recently I thought you used Bodman, but then your ˆ and ˇs appear to have flipped.

Actually, yes - I thought I was adhering to Bodman's convention, until very recently when, as you said, I deliberately flipped ˆ and ˇ in response to a post from someone correcting my tone marks (sorry, I will have to check who it was). Anyway, just for clarification, what I have been using so far (i.e. prior to the flip) is:

ǎ - high-level tone, e.g. 我, 滿, 等
ā - mid-level tone, e.g. 芳, 花, 沙
â - low-level tone, e.g. 大, 慢, 送
á - rising tone, e.g. 麻, 蛇
All the above are citation tones, and if they are sandhi-ed in a particular context, then I change the tone marks accordingly.

I am aware that that apart from likely being totally incorrect, this is hardly adequate to cover the eight (8) standard tones in Minnan, so I will need to break out of this, and learn a proper system.

My copy of Bodman is back in KL, will re-look at it on my upcoming trip back to Malaysia.

Is the tone numbering system in the Wikipedia article on Hokkien the accepted standard today?