Childhood games

[niuc]

Superscript n? Easy. Install and use a Hoklo Latin input. I can find the links if anyone is interested.

Amhoanna, yes, please.

One time on Orchard Rd in Singapore I went up to this guy to ask directions and he answered in Penang/Medan Hokkien.

若佫再來這兜, 呣通無會記个佮阮見一下啊面, 參佮食一下啊laksa!

Niûlé / niûné is fairly general term for MOTHER -- not used much these days, as far as I can tell. The matching term is niûpẽe (open e) for FATHER. Niû is 良, apparently. Some of the sages with pages on Facebook have been going over this lately.

Interesting.

U will notice that Niuc's Hoklo s-, Mand. ch- examples are all in tone 5. This probably tells us more about Mandarin than it tells us about Hokkien. Cantonese also has s- on these.

I was wondering too! Do you know why?

[niuc]

BTW - FutureSpy: Does Japanese have "主義" for "-ism" and "者" for "-er" too?

If I remember correctly, 主義 is a loanword from Japanese.

As I said before, my "gut feeling" made me perfectly sure that "chiáh" was 吃!

Sim, I used to think that way too!

[SimL]

According to online dictionaries, "sēng"/"sīng" (= "indulge, spoil; e.g. a child") is written as 乘 or 倖.

Amhoanna: what do you think is the best character for "sēng"/"sīng" (= "indulge, spoil; e.g. a child")?

[SimL]

... we have one which could be related: "hám". It's used in a very specific context: "bashing particular spices to make them release their flavour when they are cooked".

Thanks for bringing this up. I seldom hear this but my mom confirms your usage. Her sample is to "hám" onion.

Oh, I forgot: doing this to garlic is the "handy kitchen trick" for peeling them easily.

Another one is using 5 fingers, where thumb is elephant and little finger is mouse, and the rest I forget. I think this is Malay or Javanese way of "rock-paper-scissors”... Apparently only three fingers are used, according to my wife. The other is index finger, representing man. I guess we all know what beats what by now.

Yes, there's been a news item recently that because of China's love of ivory, elephants may be extinct in the wild in the next X years... So, the modern version of this would have the index finger beating the other two!

From your list, now I remember marbles. I was more fond of collecting beautiful marbles ("ko-li" in my variant) than playing them. [...] I had the same types, which are quite different from Wikipedia's pictures.

(I see from Wikipedia that the standard Indonesian word for this is "kelereng", which I had never heard of.)

"Kelereng" is standard Indonesian. In Jakarta (Bahasa Betawi), it is often called "gundu". "Gundu/goondu/goondoo" is used to mean "idiot" in Singlish.

Three points:

1. I forgot to point out that I think your "ko-li" is the same as my "bua-gù-lî". Do you think so too?

2. Yes, it was surprisingly difficult to find examples in Google image search of the two types I spoke about. The clear ones, with the "swirls" in the centre were easier to find, but the porcelain ones were difficult to find. And even in the first case, they weren't exactly like the ones of my childhood.
a. clear: http://www.123rf.com/photo_4615120_real ... ction.html (except that mine were only a single colour)
b. porcelain: http://www.flickriver.com/photos/cv_dus ... 938049995/

3. Hmmm... when I was young, the word "dungu" was used to me "idiot", as in: "He's such a dungu" or "Don't be such a dungu". The shade of meaning seems quite close to "gundu'. I wonder if they're related?

Oh yeah, did you play with yo-yo?

I tried to, but my problems with physical co-ordination meant that I could only make it go up and down about 5 times before I lost the rhythm and the whole thing just stopped!

[FutureSpy]

BTW - FutureSpy: Does Japanese have "主義" for "-ism"

From my limited knowledge, I can't really tell there isn't. But most -ism I know in Japanese don't take -主義. Looking at some words in the dictionary, some concepts have multiple words, but I'm only familiar with the one without -主義. My impression is that -義 -gi is much more used than -主義 -shugi for -ism, or it just happen to be that I don't know many words with -主義.

and "者" for "-er" too?

-者 can be pronounced either -sha (記者 kisha = reporter, 医者 isha = doctor [Modern Japanese doesn't use 医生], 科学者 kagakusha = cientist, 支配者 shihaisha) or -mono (the latter for native Japanese words like 若者 wakamono = youngster, 偽者 nisemono = imposter, 浮気者 uwakimono = cheater), and it's used for -er, -or, -ar, but also -ist, -ant, etc. There's also -手 -shu (歌手 kashu = singer, 運転手 untenshu = driver) or -te for native words, but it's not that often used.

I tried to, but my problems with physical co-ordination meant that I could only make it go up and down about 5 times before I lost the rhythm and the whole thing just stopped!

Sounds like me! I had some Coke yo-yos, but never really played with them...

[SimL]

Hi FutureSpy,

Thanks for the insights into Japanese. I tend to think of you as speaking Japanese fluently, but perhaps must adjust that. Perhaps I should think of your Japanese as more akin to my Hokkien? But I think you read and write it ok at basic level, right? (Which was not the case for me and Hokkien for most of my life, because there wasn't really even a semi-standard way to write it.)

It must be fun for you to see the connections between the Sino-Japanese vocabularly and Hokkien. From people who are peripherally interested in Hokkien (but who do not have a linguistics background or a particularly specialized interest in Hokkien) you sometimes hear the comment that Sino-Japanese vocabularly has more parallels with Hokkien than with Mandarin (though of course, they don't say "Sino-Japanese vocabulary"). I seem to recall that it's often said about the (Sino-)Japanese numbers. Perhaps even our morpheme 義 is an example of this: Hokkien "gī" instead of Mandarin "yì".

[FutureSpy]

Hi, Sim.

I don't really know. Even if you say so about your Hokkien, I'm always under the impression you've this kind of insight from a native speaker. Perhaps with more practice and exposition you'd manage to make use of all your Hokkien knowledge (the kind of thing you can't do living in the NL)? That's not my case for Japanese tho. My Japanese comes mostly what I learned during my High School days plus an intensive contact with audiovisual materials during those 3 years. It has the shallowness of a second language learned as an adult never seriously studied. I quit it (or had to quit it to put it in a more realistic way) when learning it was the msot fruitful, and learning more about Asia history plus growing old (back in High School I really wanted to go study in Japan, but in my parents' eyes it was just a waste of time, and I failed to find a way to do it without my parents' financial support; as time went by, I got to university and I was already too old for a High School exchange, so ) and finding out more about my grandparents' speech assured I'd never really feel like learning it again. I knew a number of basic words which were cognates in my grandparents' dialect, but it's hard to me nowadays to measure how helpful it was, as back then I'd always deny to see it in the same level as Standard Japanese.

From people who are peripherally interested in Hokkien (but who do not have a linguistics background or a particularly specialized interest in Hokkien) you sometimes hear the comment that Sino-Japanese vocabularly has more parallels with Hokkien than with Mandarin (though of course, they don't say "Sino-Japanese vocabulary")

Well, that was my first impression, and I still think Hokkien pronunciations are at least pretty close to those from Japanese, but there's a reason for that. Funny thing to me that before, Chinese meant only Mandarin and Cantonese. I knew there was Shanghainese and Taiwanese (the former because of Shnghai's popularity and the latter because once one of my Japanese teachers told me her boyfriend [nowadays, her husband]'s family spoke it at home and it was different from Mandarin) too, but had absolutely no idea of how they sounded. Ah, and I knew Hokkien as a stigmatized language in Singapore, some kind of hate it or just let it silently die, and that it had a huge influence on Singlish. So, my curiosity in comparing Chinese and Japanese back in the days Japanese still was of some interest to me really never went further than comparing it with Mandarin or Cantonese

[SimL]

Hi FutureSpy,

I'm always under the impression you've this kind of insight from a native speaker.

Yeah, I guess you're right about that. My Hokkien is very limited in vocabulary, but for the vocabulary I DO know, it's fluent, and my knowledge of nuances in meaning between two words which I do happen to know is indeed at native speaker level. Furthermore, I would never get the tone of a syllable wrong, nor make a mistake in my application of the sandhi rules (for the words I know, I must constantly stress).

I guess this is a very interesting phenomenon: the difference between native speaker mastery and non-native speaker mastery. You could have Person A who was born in a particular culture / area, grew up there, and spoke the local language natively up to the age of 10, and then left that culture / area, versus Person B who came as a 25 year-old adult to that culture / area from somewhere totally unrelated. Person A might not be able to converse at all about politics or history or literature, but he/she will never make a grammatical mistake or a mispronunciation, in the things they can say. In contrast, Person B might be able to discuss (even fluently) lots of higher level topics, but might occasionally make a grammatical or execution mistake.

I find that difference and contrast quite fascinating.

... finding out more about my grandparents' speech assured I'd never really feel like learning [standard Japanese] again ...

It's rather interesting to hear of your attitudes and ideas (and their evolution) with regards to standard Japanese and your grandparents' speech. In many ways, there are stark contrasts between that and my own attitude to Mandarin and (Penang) Hokkien.

In my case, I always loved speaking Penang Hokkien. It had a nice warm "homely glow" about it. In contrast, I was always a bit disdainful about Mandarin. Up to my teens, I considered it a "weird and difficult foreign language". The occasional feelings of antogonism between Chinese-educated and the English-educated in my childhood obviously helped to re-inforce this.

It was only as an adult that I started to see the value of learning Mandarin - largely due (but certainly not restricted) to the insights it could give me into Sinitic languages in general and Hokkien in particular.

So it seems to me that we're almost diametrically opposite in our paths in this regard. You started with disdaining your grandparents' variant, and wanting to learn standard Japanese, and ended up valueing your grandparents' variant and losing interest in standard Japanese. I started (and remained) loving Hokkien and disdaining Mandarin; and ended up valueing Mandarin while still retaining my love for Hokkien.

[amhoanna]

Amhoanna: what do you think is the best character for "sēng"/"sīng" (= "indulge, spoil; e.g. a child")?

Sim,

First, it may not have a native glyph (púnjī). The lack of a consensus suggests that it doesn't have one. It also lacks a socially established (although non-etymological) "common glyph" such as 厝 for chù.

The N̂g Cìnpo glyphary (http://alt.reasoning.cs.ucla.edu/jinbo/dzl/lookup.php), listed by NIUC last week in some thread or other, has 慂; and this suggests that Mr Ng believes this glyph is native. It seems like a credible etymology to me, but I hesitate to accept it w/o further evidence. What I see is that the tone and the rime are in line with the glyph all the way. However, the expected initial is the zero initial. That means the expected Hoklo reflex (the expected pronunciation) would be *eng6. (T6 is the tone that's merged into T7 in Penang, Amoy and most other dialects. The asterisk means the form is hypothetical, not observed.)

The idea, then, is that at some point an emergent s- got in there. It's not impossible. In fact, Northern Vietnamese has a corresponding z- initial there, which evolved from some kind of *d- initial. Also, there is emergent ts- ("c-") in Hoklo in certain tone classes. The native glyph for " ciũⁿ " is 癢, almost w/o a doubt. The c- was emergent.

I will pass on passing judgment till I've had a chance to better study Sino-Hokkien phonology.

But the TW Ministry of Education's glyph, 倖, seems to be the worst possible kanji for seng6 -- as their kanji choices tend to be, w/ the exception of the 700 officially recommended kanji, which were generally well-chosen and well-justified.

[amhoanna]

Niuc--

我真正欣羨汝个 triangular knowledge of all things linguistic in S'pore, Bagan and the Big Durian (Jakarta).

About the Hoklo (Literary) s-, Mandarin ch- correspondence -- no idea. I don't know much about Mandarin. I just speak it.

若佫再來這兜, 呣通無會記个佮阮見一下啊面, 參佮食一下啊laksa!

好！我干焦叭走去햐一咜，五冬前。

叭：pat
햐：hia
咜：cōa

And here are the input plug-ins, for those that's ready and willing:

"The FHL one"
http://taigi.fhl.net/TaigiIME/

"The MOE one"
http://140.111.34.54/MANDR/download.asp ... ad_sn=3015

Either is capable of outputting either MOE-style romanisasi or Hoklo kanji. The first is also capable of outputting Church-style romanisasi. I have found the FHL one to be a slightly slicker install, overall. But the MOE one seems to be more popular. Pick your poison.

I'm wondering why you feel that a "stereotypically SE Asian" person might not speak Hokkien... [Oh, wait! I got it! You mean a stereotypically non-Chinese S.E. Asian person, right? Because I grew up in S.E. Asia, to me, Chinese are (also) stereotypically S.E. Asian!]

Sim--

Point taken. But maybe U mostly have in mind Penang and Malaya? If we took a "composite" of all phenotypes in ASEAN -- even including Taiwan and Chinese Kwongtung, Kwongsai and Yunnan -- and put that person, either male or female, on a street in Penang, I'm *guessing* people would tend to address that person in Malay. But s/he would probably be able to pass for orang Cina, and no one would be really surprised to hear him or her speaking Hokkien. Esp. not on Greater Kalimantan. Except that Phils Hokkiens might be genuinely surprised to find that s/he speaks Hokkien, given his or her "hwana" good looks. But, point taken.