Help with a few words

[SimL]

Hahaha!

Hi Niuc,

Let's wait until I'm 80 (less than 15 years away - what an amazing thought!!!).

Sim, do you mean this literally? Hmmm, how did I get the impression that you were in your late 40s?

Yes, it is so.

Actually, it's NOT so!!! I miscalculated. I will be 70 in less than 15 years.

[FutureSpy]

Actually, it's NOT so!!! I miscalculated. I will be 70 in less than 15 years.

For a sec I was really shocked to read you'd be 80 in less than 15 years, as I myself had done my own calculations from some temporal references on your stories and it'd be really impossible

[Ah-bin]

Hi Niuc,

Let's wait until I'm 80 (less than 15 years away - what an amazing thought!!!).

Sim, do you mean this literally? Hmmm, how did I get the impression that you were in your late 40s?

Yes, it is so.

Actually, it's NOT so!!! I miscalculated. I will be 70 in less than 15 years.[/quote]

Unker Sim án-ne• iân-tâu, khoàⁿ liau° siâng-kà sì-cháp-kúi hòe niā! Tòa cheng wá ê bat tú tioh° i ê pêng-iú pún sī kóng án-ne•! (É•...chhìo-bīn ê smilie chò-hâ-míh-sū bē chhut-hiān ni? Lú-lâng khoàⁿ 'ē tioh° á bô?)

[SimL]

Ah-bin: BLUSH!:oops:

Yeah, the smileys and blushies and frownies don't seem to be working at the moment...

[FutureSpy]

BTW, how do you guys say orange juice in your variants?

Taiwanese seem to call it 柑仔汁 kam-á-chiap, but my teacher from Cebu uses chhiang-chiap 橙汁. Coincidentally, Cantonese also has 橙汁. It wouldn't be weird if they adopted that term from Cantonese, given it's the second Chinese group in the PH, even if very minority. Naturally, she also calls an orange chhiang 橙.

[SimL]

I'm on a Blackberry, so will keep this short.

Penang Hokkien makes a strong distinction between "kam1" (peelable, mandarin/tangerine) and "chhiam5" (non-peelable, orange). So orange juice is "chhiam5-chiap4".

They wouldn't say "chhiam5-a2-chiap4" because Penang Hokkien uses far fewer diminutives than (say) Taiwanese. And "kam1-chiap4" sounds funny because people hardly ever squeeze mandarins .

[amhoanna]

Taiwanese for ORANGE is liu2-teng. TANGERINE / MANDARIN is kam5-a2. The two are clearly distinguished in daily life. I'm guessing oranges are new to the Hoklosphere, hence Taiwan has one loanword for it, and Cebu has another. ORANGE JUICE: liu2-teng-ciap. I could imagine someone saying "kam5-a2-ciap" instead, but they would probably get corrected a lot. If someone offered me "kam5-a2-ciap", I would assume it was artificial. If you go to a tea stand and see items with 柑 or 橘, you can be sure it's either the real thing (mandarins/tangerines), or artificial, but not oranges.

[FutureSpy]

Thanks Sim. Yeah, I found references for both your chhiâm or her chhiâng.

Thanks for your explanations too, amhoanna. It's really weird that one of my textbooks does have kam-á-chiap 柑仔汁 translated as orange juice. Maybe they got it wrong? (some translations seem a little bit off, probably done by a non-English native) Anyway, I'll try to order an orange juice next time I go to a Taiwanese restaurant!

[SimL]

Hi FutureSpy,

Thanks Sim. Yeah, I found references for both your chhiâm or her chhiâng.

Are "chhiâm" and "chhiâng" variants of the "same character", or are they distinct morphemes/characters? The fact that they have the same tone makes me think the former.

[FutureSpy]

Are "chhiâm" and "chhiâng" variants of the "same character", or are they distinct morphemes/characters? The fact that they have the same tone makes me think the former.

I'd go for the former too, but I'm not the best one to answer this question. Well, both are in dictionaries, so... I was pretty sure to have heard her say chhiâng, but my teacher says it's chhiâm, same as you (her romanization is a little bit different, but at least her distinction between -ng and -m is the same as POJ).

She told me she uses phòng-ka (I think that's it, but I need to hear her pronouncing it to make sure the aspiration is there, as she never writes them), probably the same as phòng-kam 椪柑. I'm not sure if there are different kinds of tangerine, but at least here a "ponkan" (it's also the Japanese word, and what Brazilians use too) and a "tangerine" are actually different.