Another Way Out

[Mark Yong]

SimL wrote:
...I noticed that you wrote "ngæh5'', which made me realise that it's strange, as ru-tone words don't normally have tone-5. Do you say it with a rising-tone in "scorpion"?

Hi, Sim,

Sorry, my tone numbering convention is still very weak! Yes, ngæh is pronounced with a rising tone, i.e. same as 龍 and 魚 (assuming no tone sandhi).

ch’iauⁿ is a low-flat tone, same as for 想 siauⁿ.

[niuc]

My apologies, I just realised you actually addressed this 'scorpion' topic before:
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=2091&start=45

No problem at all, Mark. Actually I didn't remember that! So it was almost 6 years ago!

I would be inclined to accept 象蠍 as strong candidate TLJ.

[Actually, "(small) elephant with pincers" makes total sense to me, so I'm quite happy with the 象 too.]

[BTW, I pronounce it without nasalization - gia-kang (= "take work" or "take the male" !)]

Sim, my variant is gia5-kang1 with sandhi gia3_kang1 so sounds exactly the same as yours, because RT of both gia5 and gia8 (take) is gia3.

..then what about people from Quemoy? She said they were ou1-a2-han5-ci5. ...

Amhoanna, how could she call my grandfather (he was from Quemoy/Kim1-mng5) ou1-a2-han5-ci5!

[SimL]

SimL wrote:
...I noticed that you wrote "ngæh5'', which made me realise that it's strange, as ru-tone words don't normally have tone-5. Do you say it with a rising-tone in "scorpion"?

Hi, Sim,

Sorry, my tone numbering convention is still very weak! Yes, ngæh is pronounced with a rising tone, i.e. same as 龍 and 魚 (assuming no tone sandhi).

ch’iauⁿ is a low-flat tone, same as for 想 siauⁿ.

No, nothing to apologize about. If it has the same tone-contour as sandhiless 龍 and 魚, then it *is* indeed tone-5, so you didn't get anything wrong. What *is* strange is that ru-tones (ending in -p, -t, -k, -h) should only be tone-4 or tone-8 (flipped around in sandhied form, as we all know), so sandhied or not, a syllable ending in a stop of some sort should always be high-level-short, or low-level-short (these being the Penang Hokkien forms of tone-4 and tone-8). This makes "ngæh5'' in "scorpion" quite unusual.

This could very well be because of this sort of mix-up resulting from folk etymology. It wanted to preserve the tone contour of the original syllable (I mean before confusion with the folk-etymological "ngEh8" (= "grasp", "pincer", "grip")), while introducing the "-h" of the folk-etymological "ngEh8".

[SimL]

... Not sure why it became 'lang5' in Bagansiapiapi, as they didn't look more humane (lang5) there!

Here's a rather exciting discovery! Mark gave this link:

http://twblg.dict.edu.tw/holodict/resul ... ntpage=c03

and if one clicks on the 1075 in the top right hand side, one gets to:

http://twblg.dict.edu.tw/holodict/cuankho.jsp?no=1075

which gives (among other things):

鹿港偏泉腔 蟮螂　siān-lâng
宜蘭偏漳腔 蟮螂　sin-lâng, 壁虎　piah-hóo
高雄通行腔 蟮螂　sīn-lâng

as alternatives for 華語詞目 壁虎

So this sort of "explains" both your "sin7"*** and your "lang5", niuc !

It's actually a real pity that posted links aren't clickable on this Forum. I have to admit, one big disadvantages of that is that I sometimes get absorbed in reading the rest of the text of a reply, and don't always save posted links to open in a new tab or window. This means that I sometimes miss some important information (like this one). If they were clickable, I think I'd be more tempted (well, I know I do, because it do it on other sites), to just simply right-click on all links, and open them up in a new tab. That way, after I finish reading the main passage I'm reading (in other sites), I just have a series of tabs opened in connection with that page, and came quickly skim and read or ignore them.

***: Though, here - for "宜蘭偏漳" - they give the tone as "sin1" rather than "sin7". Now, we all know that tone-1 -> tone-7, and tone-7 -> tone-3, but in my (and most) versions of Penang Hokkien, tone-3 and tone-7 are indistinguishable anyway, so "sin1-lang5" and "sin7-lang5" would be indistinguishable (in my variant).

[SimL]

First, to answer the million-dollar question... Sweet potatoes are called han5-ci5 in Taiwan. There is a han5-cy5 (back unrounded "y") regional pronunciation (older folks in the hardcore Coanciu areas). Also a han5-cu5 pronunciation that I don't think I've ever heard.

Great to see you posting again, amhoanna. As you might have seen from one of my replies, I had been wondering where you were...

The term I Iearned for POTATO is ma2-leng5-ci5. This is no doubt a Mandarism and I'm not sure how widespread it is. In any case, people in TW seem to switch to Mandarin when they smell potatoes. Something about how the presence of "modern vegetables" makes them temporarily unable to speak Hoklo.

1. Even from my very limited Hokkien, this does sound very much like a Mandarinism .

2. Nevertheless, a very interesting socio-linguistic observation!

I was on Alisan for a few days. It was funny how all the Tnglang (including myself) always paused before saying "goancubin". The word that wanted to come out was always "hoanna".

1. Does anyone know how Malays who might speak Hokkien in Malaysia feel about "hoan-(n)a"? In contrast to Malaysian Cantonese, where I often hear "ma2-lai3-yan3" (1: using Hokkien (non-sandhi) tone numbers and a made-up spelling, because I don't know how to write Cantonese in roman letters! and 2: plus one hears another - "coarser" - term, which I won't post here), I don't know of any more "formal" term for Malay (either the person or the language) in Penang Hokkien. I've never heard anyone say something like "ma2-lai3-lang5" or "ma2-lai3-ua3", only "hoan1-a2" and "hoan1-a2-ua5".

2. What's the TLJ for "goancubin"?

I've also been packing and getting ready to move, so I'll be under southern skies in a few days.

Australia / NZ, or S. America? (Or "just" 臺南 .)

[SimL]

Hi, niuc,

My apologies, I just realised you actually addressed this 'scorpion' topic before:
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=2091&start=45

Re-reading that old thread, it seems that "sin-thang", "sin-lang" has been covered quite extensively too, but I'd completely forgotten about it. As I had about scorpion, and centipede, where we managed to say much the same things again, this time round. Still, there's definitely been some progress. For example, we now have 蟮 instead of 善, which apparently wasn't known the last time.

I've realised that some topics just keep coming around every few years. [What will it be like when we're REALLY old, and are still discussing Hokkien here??? ] I have a (vague) resolution to go through the *whole* Minnan Forum and consolidate everything that has ever been said here into a single document, but I guess it'll never happen...

[BTW, looking at some older posts, they *did* formerly have clickable links in them. That seems to have gone now, perhaps as an anti-spammer measure.]

[niuc]

...
and if one clicks on the 1075 in the top right hand side, one gets to:
http://twblg.dict.edu.tw/holodict/cuankho.jsp?no=1075

Great! Thank you, Sim, I clicked those links but didn't continue with 1075! Apparently my variant is not that wierd at all! So the variations already developed long ago before Hokkiens started to move to Taiwan and SE Asia!

***: Though, here - for "宜蘭偏漳" - they give the tone as "sin1" rather than "sin7"... in my (and most) versions of Penang Hokkien, tone-3 and tone-7 are indistinguishable anyway, so "sin1-lang5" and "sin7-lang5" would be indistinguishable (in my variant).

宜蘭 Gi7-lan5 Hokkien sounds like Penang, e.g. 門 is mui5 instead of mng5 (http://twblg.dict.edu.tw/holodict/cuankho.jsp?no=154).

About the term "hoan-(n)a" or "huan-lang", we usually use it to refer to Indonesian's (including Malaysian) guan5-cu7-bin5 原住民 "native residents" (allow me to put the TLJ here, as Amhoanna may be on his way to SE Asia or further ). It seems not really applied to Thai, though we say they look like "huanlang". When we see Taiwanese aborigines on tv, we refer to them as "Alisan-lang", though we know Taiwanese Hokkiens used to call them "huanna". O yeah, we call Native Americans 'ang5-huan1'. Surely huan1 sounds offensive, except for Amhoanna! I had a Batak classmate in Bagansiapiapi who could speak Hokkien well as he grew up there, and he called Malays (and may be also Javanese) 'huan1-lang5' assuming the term applied only to them and not Bataks. He was partially true as we often referred to Bataks as 'ba5-ta8-lang5'.

I've realised that some topics just keep coming around every few years. [What will it be like when we're REALLY old, and are still discussing Hokkien here??? ]

Occasionally we will still go back to "old" topics, may be even more frequently, as often said of old folks!

[BTW, looking at some older posts, they *did* formerly have clickable links in them. That seems to have gone now, perhaps as an anti-spammer measure.]

I think so.

[SimL]

Hi niuc,

Thanks for all the interesting information. I wasn't aware of the term "huan-lang". AFAIK, it's not used in Penang (Mark? Andrew?).

I had a Batak classmate in Bagansiapiapi who could speak Hokkien well as he grew up there, and he called Malays (and may be also Javanese) 'huan1-lang5' assuming the term applied only to them and not Bataks.

I found this very interesting.

Indeed, perception of "race / ethnicity" is such a subtle thing. We Chinese who grow up in S.E. Asia see ourselves as very different from Malays (or, for the Chinese in Indonesia, from the other ethnic groups there too - is "pribumi" the correct term for this?). However, when I first came to the Netherlands, I was surprise (actually, totally shocked), when I realised that for a huge number of Dutch people (certainly in the 1980's - that's probably changed a lot since the rise of the PRC), "Chinese" and "Malay" (and in the extended sense, the longer-term Indonesians) were all "the same", or at most, minor variations of one another. As recently as 1-2 years ago, I had a colleague who was clearly the descendent of migrants from the Indian sub-continent to the former Dutch colony of Suriname, but another colleague just saw him as "Indonesian" (i.e. (approx) of "Polynesian" descent). [Probably because Malaysia has both Malays and Indians, and we distinguish them clearly, I'm more sensitive to this difference.]

I suppose "we" (I mean the Chinese in S.E. Asia) do the same thing towards people from the Indian sub-continent. Tamils and Gujeratis are both (to me, certainly, and probably to many of us) "conceptually" (minor) variants of being "Indian", whereas if you're a Tamil or a Gujerati, you'd probably consider yourself very different from the other. [Here, where I say "Indian", I obviously don't mean nationality - as Tamils and Gujeratis both clearly have Indian nationality - but more the psychological perception of "ethnic identity".] I wonder if people in the PRC see Scandinavians and Bulgarians as (minor) variants of being "European" (if they think about them at all, that is)?

[xng]

1. Does anyone know how Malays who might speak Hokkien in Malaysia feel about "hoan-(n)a"?

Even if they know how to speak hokkien, they won't know the exact meaning as they don't know the hanzi for it. A lot of chinese also don't know the original meaning of huan na let alone malays.

Just like the 'gwai lou' in cantonese, the europeans don't know the exact meaning until somebody explain to them.

Another analogy is 'keling' where people use it without much thought to its origin.

Ok. Origin time ....

Huan na originates from the word uncivilised/savage 'Huan' 番.

Gwai lou originates when the chinese perceive europeans as 'ugly like ghost'.

Keling originates because of the 'cling, cling' sound tied to the legs of indians when they walk.

[Mark Yong]

xng wrote:
Keling originates because of the 'cling, cling' sound tied to the legs of indians when they walk.

Okay, I really, really feel this needs correction.

It has been suggested that the word has its origins with the Kalinga in the south-east of the Indian sub-continent.
http://www.visvacomplex.com/Keling_English_Version.html
http://www.sabrizain.org/malaya/keling.htm

References to the word 'keling' go back quite a few centuries to the 15th century Malaccan Sultanate, before the wave of migration of Indian indentured labourers in the late 19th century to work in the Malayan rubber plantations, which is where the apparent (and if I must add, derogatory) reference to the chains on their legs comes from.

If the derogatory background behind such historical terms have basis in fact, then I am prepared to accept them (albeit reluctantly so). But especially if they are not proven as fact, let's not go there, shall we?