Penang Hokkien Vocabulary Questions

[Ah-bin]

I'd say the only thing that gets even close to a standard numbering is that used in the ROC Ministry of Education Tailo input system which is the second system I described:

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

But to speak of standards, we would mean something that is imposed and required by an institution or state in and used in an education system. Only the Taiwanese have done this so far, but they haven't given anything "official" status like they have done for pinyin and 注音符號, they have only recommended things so far.

[Mark Yong]

SimL wrote:
My only query now is that 五，做，册 are low for me, but 讀 is high.

Okay, now you had me doubting for a moment there!

I tried mumbling 讀册 to myself a few times a moment ago. Unfortunately, they both register low-level tones for me (unless I have been saying it wrong all this while!). At best, 讀 is tone contour 21 and 册 is tone contour 11, but 讀 is definitely not tone contour 55 for me (so far).

Again, I am not a cradle Penang Hokkien speaker, so if my pronunciation is out-of-line, please let me know. As you can tell by now, I am etymologically-obsessed, but phonologically-incompetent (which is why my wife can never understand how she speaks much better Mandarin than me, and yet I can read much better than her)!

[Mark Yong]

Ah-bin wrote:
...it's interesting that ló-kun 老君 is from the Malay dukun, which meant a traditional Malay medicine man...

For quite a while, I thought that 老君 lō kūn was unique to Penang Hokkien, given its generous borrowings from Malay vocabulary.

However, when I watched the Singapore movie 那個不夠 by Jack Neo in 1999, one of the Hokkien-speaking housewives in the movie said, “汝【之】朋友定著是𢶀平【之】老君、啦！lu e peng-iu tiaⁿ-tiok si choe phiⁿ e lo-kun, la!”. The only difference being, her lo was mid-rising (34) and her kun was high-level (55), whereas Penang Hokkien's is mid-level (33) for both morphemes, or in some cases high-descending (53) for lo (depending on the speaker).

Has anyone heard the term used in Mainland China or Taiwan? niuc, what do they use in Bagansiapiapi, and siamiwako, what do they use in the Philippines?

* I am going to try and avoid using tone numbering (tone contours being the exception) and marks for now, as it is apparent that I am creating more confusion than clarity! And since most of the Forumers can read at least entry-level 唐儂字, I will use that as my clarification tool!

[amhoanna]

Guess I'll throw my nō͘ sián cîⁿ in the ring too.

I'd say the only thing that gets even close to a standard numbering is that used in the ROC Ministry of Education Tailo input system which is the second system I described:

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

I'll have to question Ah-bin's judgment call. I think the numbering found on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hokkien#Tones) is way more widespread, including w/i Taiwan, i.e. among the few, brave POJ-literate quacks in TW. It also corresponds to the most widespread numbering used for Cantonese, with a difference in how checked tones are dealt with.

I recommend this system even more strongly for someone who's familiar with the 阴阳/平上去入 terminology.

I would suggest a somewhat hands-on way of hardwiring the tones to their numbers and marks. Using the Firefox browser* -- I use 3.6 at this pt b/c 4.0 seems to have had some late bugs -- install and activate the "Transliterator" plug-in, also known as "ToCyrillic". Then go to the 工具 menu and go into "Transliterator Options". Scroll down and pick the 閩南白話字 option. Set a key to "toggle keyboard mode". I use the default, which is F2.

* It's better than the rest anyway, except maybe Google Chrome.

Now, toggle into Transliterate mode. Now, if U type, for example, kau2, it will come out káu. When U type ta3, it'll come out tà. U could for example just start typing syllables that all have the same tone as káu, DOG. After typing the initial and the rhyme, add a "2" to the end. Bang. There U have it on-screen: káu, lú, kí, ló͘, té, téngténg. Next move to another toneme, say anything with the same tone as khì, TO GO. Add a "3" to every syllable. Bang. Khì, àⁿ, soè chù, etc.

As far as associating tone marks to tones, I'll just add one thing to Sim's "exposition" -- maybe it would be easier to associate the "running", "sandhi'd" tones to the marks instead of the citation tones?

...

I acknowledge there's an argument to be made in favor of systems that mark tone contours, or "sandhied tones" -- such as what U guys describe of Bodman -- I read Bodman too back in the day, but don't remember much. But on this forum most seem to prefer to mark tonemes. I think that has the advantage of being more consistent on the cross-dialect tip, as well as being more consistent with the rest of POJ, where we write phonemes, e.g. dūnpiáⁿ 潤餅, not lūmpiáⁿ.

[amhoanna]

Ah-bin, U might want to consider translating ANIMAL in this context as cengseⁿ 精牲. This is the go-to word for FARM BEASTS in colloquial TWese Hoklo. This is the word that people use to compare other people to animals, maybe since most Hoklo don't have much experience w/ wild animals anyway.

The Barclay Bible always used the word cháusiù 走獸 for BEASTS OF THE WILD. 禽獸 is also a great word. It means BIRDS AND BEASTS, right?

Other words that might come in handy: tiâu 椆 PEN (FOR 精牲); po͘ 埔 FIELD (FOR 精牲 TO GRAZE). Tiâu also has several other sets of meanings, one being BEING STUCK SOMEWHERE and, by extension, ADDICTION. Once I was stuck at the airport on Kimmn̂g in the fog with a bunch of TWese businessmen all talking about other times they "tiâu Kimmn̂g".

Tōngbu̍t lôngtiûⁿ indeed. Someone seems to've had too much Mandarin education.

Re: dukun, no form of the word is used in TW, but ... one night in Swatow 汕頭, I walked into a dingy little bookshop in the old quarters of the city and found this fat old Teochew dictionary in there. I remember leafing through it and seeing the word lokun in there for DOCTOR. I don't remember what the tones were. I'm under the impression that homeland Teochews have been much more influenced by their diaspora than homeland Hokkiens...

And, Niuc and Mark, I always order my Malay with extra Sanskrit and extra Java; no English, easy on the Arabic, and one shot of Hokkien, please.

[Mark Yong]

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

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

Oops... out of my vocabulary range, too! I guess among the *more senior* Penang Hokkien speakers here, that leaves Andrew and aokh1979!

[Mark Yong]

amhoanna wrote:
禽獸 is also a great word. It means BIRDS AND BEASTS, right?

From what I read, etymologically, not quite so. 禽 originally meant specifically the wild beasts, while 獸 meant specifically the domesticated ones. Compounding both together gave the collection of all animals. Perhaps that is the reason why only the domesticated animals visit the 獸醫 siu-i ‘veterinarian’. Another easy way that I employ to remember which is which, is to associate 禽 with 擒 ‘to seize’ (like an eagle seizing its prey with its talons), and 獸 with 秀 ‘gentle’ (from the Hokkien 幼秀 iu-siu).

It's sort of like 沐浴. 沐 means ‘washing the hair’ and 浴 means ‘washing (the rest of) the body’, and compounding both gives ‘bath’. For some reason, only the second morpheme 浴 is used in other compounds, e.g. 浴室 ‘bathroom’ and our Hokkien 沖浴 cang ek (as if someone decided that between the two, having lice (‘kutu’) was more tolerable than body odour! )

amhoanna wrote:
tiâu 椆 PEN (FOR 精牲)… Tiâu also has several other sets of meanings, one being BEING STUCK SOMEWHERE

I use tiau24 very regularly in the context of ‘being stuck’ (both literally and figuratively), normally as 著椆 tiok22-tiau24. We used it a lot in the factory, when foreign matter got jammed in between machine components, grinding everything to a halt (“機復再著椆”).

amhoanna wrote:
…po͘ 埔 FIELD (FOR 精牲 TO GRAZE).

Also another word I use regularly, most of the time in 草埔 chau44 pO22.

amhoanna wrote:
And, Niuc and Mark, I always order my Malay with extra Sanskrit and extra Java; no English, easy on the Arabic, and one shot of Hokkien, please.

Now you're talkin’ my language, Mr. Bond.

[SimL]

SimL wrote:
My only query now is that 五，做，册 are low for me, but 讀 is high.

Okay, now you had me doubting for a moment there!

I tried mumbling 讀册 to myself a few times a moment ago. Unfortunately, they both register low-level tones for me (unless I have been saying it wrong all this while!). At best, 讀 is tone contour 21 and 册 is tone contour 11, but 讀 is definitely not tone contour 55 for me (so far).

Again, I am not a cradle Penang Hokkien speaker, so if my pronunciation is out-of-line, please let me know. As you can tell by now, I am etymologically-obsessed, but phonologically-incompetent (which is why my wife can never understand how she speaks much better Mandarin than me, and yet I can read much better than her)!

Hi Mark,

No, no, your ears and accent are prefectly good. In the phrase "thak-cheh", both are low-short, because the thak has sandhied. So, it's "thak8-cheh4", which sandhies to "thak4_cheh4". When I first queried your example, it was because the 4 characters were in a list, separated by commas, so I used citation tone in all 4, and hence got confused. To see that it's "thak8" in citation tone, you could say: "tng-lang-ji, i be-hiau thak" (= "he doesn't know how to read Chinese characters"), and hear that it's high-short.

BTW, has anyone else heard the pronunciation "chet4" for 册 in Penang Hokkien?

[SimL]

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

Haha! Thanks. Actually, you might be thinking of my other explanation, of how I map Mandarin tones to Hokkien tones (I think I wrote that up here too, somewhere) .

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!

Very valid point. I like the diacritics too, but I find it a bother to have to set my keyboard to allow them, and I have no trouble remembering the numbers so I usually use numbers. In fact, I mastered the (POJ-)numbers long before I mastered the diacritics - the 'other' number system I have never mastered (nor the Bodman diacritics). I guess anyone who wishes to consider himself reasonably knowledgeable in the area of Hokkien linguistics should really know them all!

For talking about Hokkien, I think either numbers or diacritics are fine, but for writing in Hokkien, I think the diacritics are far better.

[amhoanna]

Here's a Hokkien vocab question for everybody. In Han medicine and diet practices, there's this concept of foods being either "cool", "fiery", or "warm". Sometimes the body goes out of balance and becomes "hot".

1) In your Hokkien, or the Hokkien of those around U, how do U refer to these three classes? I'm not really sure how to say it in any kind of Hoklo. I'm guessing maybe liâng and dia̍t for the first two?

2) How do U describe or refer to foods that escalate the "fire" of the body?

3) How do U describe or refer to foods that quell the "fire" of the body?

And, I'd like to re-ask another question. What do U guys call the four suits (diamonds, spades, etc.)? What about terms like FOUR OF A KIND, STRAIGHT, ROYAL FLUSH, etc.?

And thanks to Sim for answering that Penangites say "pung" (T1) when they want to pick up a cast-away mahjongg piece.