Hoklo-Hokkien loanwords in Indo./Malay and v.v.

[Ah-bin]

Thanks for the interesting etymology. Did it indicate that primary food for Anglo-Saxon was meat (animal flesh), therefore the shift in meaning? For today's native speaker, does "meat" have implied meaning of beef or pork etc?

I think it is more likely that the wider meaning of "food" became restricted to "meat". as meat was too expensive a luxury too be eaten every day for most people even within living memory. "Meat" has no implied meaning that i know of. An interesting and oft-repeated snippet of historical information explains to children why there are the words "pork" "beef" and "mutton" as opposed to "pig-meat" "cow-meat" and "sheep-meet" was because the English speakers farmed the animals, but only the French speaking Norman nobility got to eat the meat, so the French names for the animals became the names for the meats. Just like Normans sat on French "chairs" while the English had to be content with "stools".

[niuc]

Ah! Thanks, Ah-bin. I used to wonder about that! And I thought (wrongly) that English & other European languages had a set of specific words for each kind of meat (much like e.g. I was told that Javanese had different words for phases of coconut)!

[amhoanna]

For today's native speaker, does "meat" have implied meaning of beef or pork etc?

Well, it does kind of exclude fowl in some contexts ... although chicken is the original "white meat".

I see. Not sure about Jogja, but northern coastal area of Java (including Jakarta) and eastern coastal area of Sumatra usually have rainy season around Oct to Apr.

I think the Jogja rainy season runs from Jan thru Mar. Since 2009, though, seems like it's rained right thru the dry season.

So you are well informed about "tarif uang damai"!

I guess so! Synthesizing conflicting information is more like it.

To have an "Indo" (in this context meaning Eurasian) look is a strong selling point in entertainment circle there, though some achieve that by cosmetic surgery.

There's just something about colonialism. We love it, we hate it, we can't get enough of it.

The example I remember often quoted is "eye" VN "mat" Tai "ha/tha" Austronesian "mata"! Mata means "face" for some Maori, and "eyes" for others. The funniest thing for Malay/Indonesian speakers is the word for eyes in central North Island Maori, which is "whatu"......the cognate in Malay is "batu"!

I have a paper somewhere that connects the Hokkien words for "male" and "female" to Austronesian (I saw it a few weeks ago while sorting through my drawers), and I always think of "babi" as related to "bah", since "bah" used to refer to pork. That is just my own pet theory though.

Always interesting. How about Thai pheet and Malay pedas, or Malay terang and VNese trang? After Bali and Java, I arrived in Bangkok totally tongue-tied. Whenever I opened my mouth, Malay words tried to come out. When I sent signals to my brain saying this was the wrong language, by brain gave me VNese words instead. And I would still be looking at the person, saying to myself, "Nah. Doubt s/he speaks Teochew." Then they'd say something and I'd go Ya, ya.

There seem to be many Tai loans, but then there is the theory that Austronesian and Tai are related...then there is the Austric hypothesis that relates all of them together with Austroasiatic.

Is always seemed to me that the "assumption" that language families exist, through time, may be a little naive in the Southeast Asian context, and many others. Bilingualism, mixed languages, creoles, and all kinds of sprachbund effects seem to water down the classic stem-tree theory. Take for example the case of VNese. (Still haven't gotten a chance to read those papers---my Android can't open them.)

[niuc]

Well, it does kind of exclude fowl in some contexts ... although chicken is the original "white meat".

I see... Does it exclude fish also?

After Bali and Java, I arrived in Bangkok totally tongue-tied. Whenever I opened my mouth, Malay words tried to come out.

Ah! Similarly, when my family moved from Bagansiapiapi to Jakarta, I sometimes found myself talking to my classmates in Hokkien although they talked to me in Bahasa Indonesia. Or recently during lunch with my Singaporean colleagues, I received a call and talked in Indonesian, afterwards I talked to my colleagues in Bahasa!

Is always seemed to me that the "assumption" that language families exist, through time, may be a little naive in the Southeast Asian context, and many others. Bilingualism, mixed languages, creoles, and all kinds of sprachbund effects seem to water down the classic stem-tree theory. Take for example the case of VNese. (Still haven't gotten a chance to read those papers---my Android can't open them.)

Please share more!

[amhoanna]

I see... Does it exclude fish also?

Yeah, and all other seafood. Usually. For most people. But if someone asks whether a dish has "meat" in it, e.g. a vegetarian, s/he might expect to be told whether it has fish or fowl in it too, w/o having to ask separately.

!

Is always seemed to me that the "assumption" that language families exist, through time, may be a little naive in the Southeast Asian context, and many others. Bilingualism, mixed languages, creoles, and all kinds of sprachbund effects seem to water down the classic stem-tree theory. Take for example the case of VNese. (Still haven't gotten a chance to read those papers---my Android can't open them.)


Please share more!

Well, the classic theory is based on the assumption that almost all languages "descend" from an ancestor language, or a series of ancestor languages. Languages can "borrow" words, structures and ideas from any language they're in contact with.

We know a language "descends" from a certain ancestor language b/c it apparently gets its "DNA" of "basic vocabulary" and basic syntax/morphology from a certain source. We've decided what's basic, over time, by looking at the evidence in tandem with historical evidence.

In most cases, there's little or no direct evidence of what the ancestor language was like. We use its daughter languages to reconstruct the ancestor language itself ... after we've decided that the daughter languages are descended from the same language, even though we didn't really know beforehand what the ancestor language was like...

Some languages don't "descend" from "an" (read: one) ancestor language. These include creoles and mixed languages. Chabacano (Zamboanga, Manila) is a famous SE Asian creole. Some of the VNese papers we were treated to last month---I haven't gotten a good look at them yet --- seemed to argue that at some pt, "VNese" (actually, earlier forms that evolved into modern bahasa VN) was actually a creole or a mixed language.

This is cool b/c even though creoles and mixed languages exist today, and everyone knows it, linguists tend to assume that they didn't exist in the past, which seems totally asinine.

If "VNese" was a creole or mixed language at any pt in its evolution, the question of whether VNese "is" an Austroasiatic or Sino-Tibetan language becomes moot, w/i SBT's own framework. But most linguists just kind of assume that there were no creoles or mixed languages besides "the ones that we know about".

Anyway, classic "Stammbaumtheorie" was great for reconstructing Indo-European. It's great for studying Oceanic languages. When languages diverge from an ancestor and develop free of influence from each other, and we can isolate the things that they borrow from "unrelated" languages, then the theory works great as a "one-stop theory".

But when languages breed and cross-breed and mix and creolize and there's too much that can't be isolated, the assumptions of SBT get real shaky. No doubt it's still a great tool in the arsenal.

Now, I'm an amateur, not a true academic. But I also dare say that while SBT is a good tool at a "high level of zoom", i.e. dialect differences, closely related languages, it becomes more "widely applicable" when we "zoom out" ... b/c borrowing and language contact become more "manageable" when we bring lots of space and time into the mix. "SBT relativity"?

When people say that the Taiwanese dialects of Hoklo, for example, are a "branch" of "narrow Banlamese" (i.e. bahasa Coanciu-Ciangciu), we can think of so many ways in which that's not really true. It's not wrong so much as it's kind of irrelevant. At this level of zoom, it's hard to isolate the elements of language contact to a pt where SBT ("the big guns") can shine and be relied on.

Yet effects that took place "at a high level of zoom" ... don't "vanish" just b/c we have a map of SE Asia in front of us, and set out to describe 3000 yrs of linguistic history in one sitting.

We'll see what Ah-bin and other hardcore linguists have to say.

[Ah-bin]

I think the thing about meat might apply only to US English. Chicken is definitely counted as meat in NZ Australia and Britain. I must say I didn't even think of including fish in the meat category though.

We'll see what Ah-bin and other hardcore linguists have to say.

I'm a historian, not a linguist! From what i have read and noticed, what Amhoanna says does make sense though. As far as I know, the academic debates centre around the possible relationship of these families to one another, and I think Amhoanna's explanation fits better than that of the linguists who believe in a single Austric that eventually formed discrete branches, just like indo-European languages did.

As far as basic vocabulary is concerned it is still possible to distinguish between Austronesian, Austroasiatic, Kadai, Miao-yao and Tibeto-Burman languages, and some languages like the Hloi languages of Hainan have been relatively isolated from contact with other languages on the mainland for a long time, and are safer to use for comparative purposes than those on the mainland where mixing was more common. When we zoom out (like Amhoanna says) and look at 3000 or 4000 years ago (at what modern Chinese scholars like to call "Yue" culture, even though there is no evidence such a term was used so long ago), it is impossible to carry out the same sort of reconstruction.....I think sometimes peopel don;t like to admit defeat and say "I don't know", hence the plethora of theories on relationships.

Zooming back in, it is much easier. Even when they are heavily mixed with languages from other families, like the Lai language of north-western Kwangsi (Austroasiatic with heavy Kadai influence) and Huihui of Hainan (an offshoot of cham, which has become tonal and mostly monosyllabic, like Sinitic) it is still usually possible to distinguish what family the parent language belonged to, because it is rare for languages to borrow all of their basic vocabulary. Even the creolisation of proto-Vietnamese didn't result in a wholesale replacement of basic vocabulary, that remained Austroasiatic in character In the Swadesh list, I believe, only the word for head (ddau- don't have VN input on this computer) was borrowed to replace the word. The results of the creolisation took place, according to John Phan's paper, mainly at the level of grammatical particles. Baba Malay is similar in that respect, being mainly Austronesian in basic vocabulary, but mainly Sinitic as far as grammar is concerned, except for the described+description thing, which is characteristically Austronesian.

Forgive me if this was slightly incoherent, it is four in the morning, and my rambling is kopi-fuelled!

[amhoanna]

Thanks, Ah-bin. It's great to be an amateur--talking about myself here--and be able to just say Hey, I don't know.

The assumption that languages don't replace their basic vocab with loans is sure enough solid to the best of my knowledge. However ... I remember reading something written by someone who worked with Aussie or Papuan languages saying that basic vocab has been borrowed all the time in that part of the world ... so why not elsewhere as well? (The follow-up question is probably mine.)

Àmhoanná
back in business with a fresh laptop by MSi, the computer company with the Hokkienese name.

[amhoanna]

One more. Indo "ingin", Hoklo "giàn".

[niuc]

One more. Indo "ingin", Hoklo "giàn".

Interesting! Depends on the context, "giàn" can be "ngidam" (e.g. craving for certain food esp. during pregnancy) or "ketagihan" (e.g. craving for drugs, also means "tiâu", addicted), or indeed "sangat ingin" (Jakarta slang: pengen banget) i.e. really want. One of the Javanese words for "ingin" is "pengin", I am not sure if this is a cognate or a loan from or into Indonesian/Malay; also either coincidence or related to "giàn" through borrowing or at deeper level (kind of "cognate", like "mata" and 目, "ibu" and 母?).

[amhoanna]

Nice! These will have to go in a spreadsheet too sometime.

Khoàⁿkhoán Niuc bat merantau bēció ·ne'!