More words...about 300 I can't track down.

[SimL]

1) Tidy adj. i.e. the room is very tidy

I would be forced to use a circumlocution: "i e pang-keng khioh ka cin-nia ho-si" (= "his room picked-up until very good-situation").

Of course, this doesn't work as well for "tidy" in the meaning of (for example) "tidily dressed" or "neat and tidy handwriting".

3) To urge or push for

There is the word "ngiOh8" which I think means "carping" or "harping" on an issue, or "nagging" or (constantly) "criticizing" someone.

Does anyone else know this word?

5) Worn out (clothes) chhēng-phòa? for other things is it just V+phòa

We Babas use "lu1-put8", which I believe comes from Malay "ruput", which means "threadbare", "thin", "worn out" (of clothes). But I'm pretty sure it's a baba-ism (purists would say barbarism )

6) Work day or weekday I know pài-lák lépài 拜六禮拜, but what about the other days

How do you feel about the circumlocution: "pai-it kau pai-gO"?

This works for sentences like "he goes every weekday to Butterworth" and "does he do that on weekdays or weekends" (i.e. when talking about all weekdays), but not for sentences like "which weekday is your favourite day?" (i.e. when talking about specific weekdays).

7) To yawn phah-something, I guess

Not using "phah4". Definitely "ha2/3-hi3/7".

I don't know the standing tone of the first syllable. The sandhi-tone is "ha1", which in Penang Hokkien can be from either "ha2" or "ha3". I don't know the standing tone of the second syllable, as I only know it in final position.

a dozen is this chít-lô?

I think this is right, but would have to check.

[Mark Yong]

Ah-bin wrote:
Tukung, like an expert or artisan.... is the word saihu used?

Yes, I have heard 師傅 sai1-hu3 used before, but I am not sure if it is widespread.

Ah-bin wrote:
To urge or push for

If I stuck strictly within colloquial boundaries, I would just say 追 tui1. As to whether it is a corruption of 催 and started off life as thui1, I am not sure.

Ah-bin wrote:
Worn out (clothes) chhēng-phòa? for other things is it just V+phòa

Yup，that’s how I would say it. V+破.

Ah-bin wrote:
To yawn phah-something, I guess

You guessed right! I believe it is phah1-ha3-hi1. Several websites I have seen write it as 拍哈唏, but I suspect it is just phonetic borrowing.

Ah-bin wrote:
a dozen is this chít-lô?

This one I have my doubts. In my experience, lo5 has always been used as a common contraction of the Metric weight unit-of-measure ‘kilogramme’ (I often heard it in downtown sundry and hardware shops). Local Cantonese use ta55 (this one is definitely a contraction of the English ‘dozen’), but I am not sure if it was adopted into Penang Hokkien.

SimL wrote:
I believe that the characters in Douglas were provided by someone else, some time after the original publication of the dictionary. I have no idea if Douglas was aware of this happening and if he was, whether he approved of it at all.

Sim, just to clarify - would that happen to be Barclay’s supplement? Because my single-volume hardcopy of Douglas is actually “Douglas-Barclay”. The first half is Douglas’ dictionary in fully-Romanised form. The second section is Barclay’s supplement. Barclay’s lexicon is not as exhausive as the Douglas section, but it has the characters for all the morphemes that it lists out (though, not all are reliable 本字).

SimL wrote:
Perhaps it's influenced by the totally different morpheme "mua5", which is a kind of cloth worn during mourning, which I do use in final position.

Ah, I believe that might be 幔. Assuming it is so, then the 反切 fanqie reading for it （𠀤莫半切） suggests that it should have a nasal ending, i.e. muaⁿ7, which may have been gradually lost over time.

** EDIT ** Looks like Sim and I both posted our responses to Ah-bin concurrently!

[Ah-bin]

Thanks to both of you again.

Ah-bin wrote:

Ah-bin wrote:
a dozen is this chít-lô?

This one I have my doubts. In my experience, lo5 has always been used as a common contraction of the Metric weight unit-of-measure ‘kilogramme’ (I often heard it in downtown sundry and hardware shops). Local Cantonese use ta55 (this one is definitely a contraction of the English ‘dozen’), but I am not sure if it was adopted into Penang Hokkien.

During the time I wrote my post and now I actually heard it used for dozen in the latest Penang Hokkien podcast!

I suspect it is also a contraction of "dozen" since Malay initial in duit and dukun becomes a initial l- in Hokkien (lui, lokun).

Then there was the cartoon I've heard of of the M'sian Chinese guy getting knighted as a datuk, who says "Guah lapat latuk!" I wonder why Datuk Kong, the local deities became "Natu Kong" though. I can see at at least how the final k would have been elided into the initial k of "kong".

[Ah-bin]

I get the feeling that the doll ones you spoke about don't have a spring at all, right? The space between the two legs is tapered - wide at the bottom of the peg, and narrowing as it gets towards the top of the peg, and it's the pushing action of wedging the cloth/material between the washing-line itself and two legs of the peg which holds the item of clothing in position. I.e. the further you push the peg "down", the tighter the peg grips the cloth to the washing-line. I have a vague memory of seeing pegs like this.

I missed this, sorry.

That's right, it was this kind of peg. They were still selling these in NZ in the early 1980's.

I wonder about those characters in Douglas. The author of the dictionary of loanwards in Indonesian and Malay writes that the digitised version is in fact his own copy of Douglas, but notes it somewhere in the preface that an 1899 printing has been used for the sources of loans. Carstairs Douglas died in 1877, so i think the characters were probably written by another conscientious student of Hokkien (or perhaps of English, I'm sure some presbyterians used it to look up English words at one time).

[Mark Yong]

Ah-bin wrote:
Then there was the cartoon I've heard of of the M'sian Chinese guy getting knighted as a datuk, who says "Guah lapat latuk!"

This one?

It was a parody on the lack of proficiency in the national language even among the country’s elite. The illustrator is Lat (pen-name for Mohammad Nor bin Khalid), the celebrated Malaysian cartoonist.

Ah-bin wrote:
I wonder why Datuk Kong, the local deities became "Natu Kong" though.

Actually, “Natu Kong” is the Mandarin-ised version. You will find the tablets for Datuk Kong inscribed with the characters 『拿督神爺』, and sometimes with the effigy adorning a white head-piece. You will find Datuk Kong’s shrines at the corner of virtually all residential construction sites, and oftentimes, the shrine is left there long after the construction project has been completed, and local residents continue to look after them.

Virtually all the local Chinese pronounce 督 with the final -k (be it in Cantonese, Hakka or Hokkien). I have a feeling the name Datuk Kong could be a circular translation - in the sense that the Chinese transliterated the Malay word Datuk into Chinese and tagged on the suffix 公 Kong, whereas when the Malays refer to the same diety, it is the reverse, i.e. they transliterate 公 into Kong (as if it were any given Chinese name) and prefix it with the Malay word Datuk (well, that’s the impression I got when I read about Datuk Kong in my Malay language textbooks at school).

[Ah-bin]

That must be the one! I actually had only heard of it second-hand but I knew it was by Lat as well, so it must be this one.

I first heard of the Latuk-kong in Jean de Bernadini's book on religion in Penang, and I'm aware her spelling is often Mandarin-influenced. I had no idea there were characters for it.

This is my dictionary entry now. But I'd love advice on whether the pronunciation is close enough (plus tones and sandhied tones) to what people actually say.

Na-tuk-kong 拿督公 – a local deity, sometimes the deified founder of a particular community (Malay)

[SimL]

That's right, it was this kind of peg. They were still selling these in NZ in the early 1980's.

Hi Ah-bin. Thanks for confirming.

Sim, just to clarify - would that happen to be Barclay’s supplement? Because my single-volume hardcopy of Douglas is actually “Douglas-Barclay”. The first half is Douglas’ dictionary in fully-Romanised form. The second section is Barclay’s supplement. Barclay’s lexicon is not as exhausive as the Douglas section, but it has the characters for all the morphemes that it lists out (though, not all are reliable 本字).

and

I wonder about those characters in Douglas. The author of the dictionary of loanwards in Indonesian and Malay writes that the digitised version is in fact his own copy of Douglas, but notes it somewhere in the preface that an 1899 printing has been used for the sources of loans. Carstairs Douglas died in 1877, so i think the characters were probably written by another conscientious student of Hokkien (or perhaps of English, I'm sure some presbyterians used it to look up English words at one time).

I wrote a long and detailed reply to Mark's original reply on this subject, but the **** system timed-out and lost all my text (hasn't happened to me for a long time, but I was away from the keyboard for a longish period).

Yes, you're quite right. In my original explanation (in my usual ponderous and prolix style) I explained that the original Douglas had no characters, whereas the original Barclay did. (An unnecessary explanation for the regulars of this Forum like you and Mark, of course, but I felt it was helpful to explicit say it; both to explain where I was coming from, and for the benefit of less regular readers of the Forum.)

Anyway, for years after getting my copy of the Douglas/Barclay, if I found an interesting entry in the Douglas part, and wanted to "find out the character" for it (in as much as this is possible, for the ones which are not clearly cognate to Mandarin), then I would fervently pray that there were compounds with that (Douglas) morpheme which Barclay decided were worth listing in his dictionary. Because that (i.e. the Barclay part) was my only access to "characters for Hokkien morphemes". It was only years later, after meeting you, Ah-bin, that I realised that there were some Taiwanese dictionaries which gave characters as well.

For this reason, I refer to the characters in Douglas/Barclay as "Barclay characters" or "the characters in Barclay".

In any case, what I mean by "Douglas characters" or "characters in Douglas" are indeed those beautiful brush-stroke ones, handwritten in, on the margin of one particular copy of the Douglas. I believe I had learnt on this very Forum about the existence of this wonderful work.

Once, I saw an old copy of the Douglas being offered for sale on an antiquarian bookseller's site on the Internet. It was US$800 or US$1,000 or something like that. I was so keen on getting the characters that I would have considered paying perhaps up to US$1,000 for it. I emailed that bookseller, asking if indeed it was the one with the handwritten characters, but he said that it wasn't (it was only that exorbitant price because it was a first edition). So I was never faced with the difficult decision of whether I would be willing to pay that price for the added-character version! In that sense, finding out that that wasn't the much-desired character-added version was both a disappointment and a relief!

In any case, by some miracle of life, you found exactly that version digitized as a pdf-file on a CD-ROM, as a supplement to that "Indonesian Etymological Dictionary" which you came across at Leiden University, when you were on a visit here.

I've now managed to get that printed and bound, so I don't have to start up my PC every time I want to look for a "Douglas character". Instead, the paper version is at my bedside, and I spend many evenings just browsing through it before falling asleep.

So, I call these the "Douglas characters", but these were not really characters given by Douglas, and I speculated (in my now lost reply) whether he ever even knew that this had happened, and also whether he would have approved of it, if he had known. You have now provided very good additional information on that aspect, for which, many thanks.

I seem to remember that he (i.e. Douglas) said in his introduction that he had originally considered providing characters in his dictionary, but had decided against it, partly because of the extra time and energy that that would have entailed (and also the problems of typesetting that, perhaps?), but also - from a principled point of view - because "Hokkien was an independent language, perfectly capable of standing on its own merits, orthographically rendered in roman letters, without reference to characters" (my paraphrase, obviously).

Hope this throws a bit more light on where I was coming from, when speaking about Douglas characters.

To yawn phah-something, I guess

You guessed right! I believe it is phah1-ha3-hi1. Several websites I have seen write it as 拍哈唏, but I suspect it is just phonetic borrowing.

Interesting! In my family's usage, there is never a "phah". E.g.:

- "i ti(t)-ti(t) ha-hi, in-ui i cin-nia ai-khun" (= "he kept yawning because he was very sleepy")

This could of course be English influence, where "yawn" is both the noun and the verb.

This is my dictionary entry now. But I'd love advice on whether the pronunciation is close enough (plus tones and sandhied tones) to what people actually say.

Na-tuk-kong 拿督公 – a local deity, sometimes the deified founder of a particular community (Malay)

Everyone I know (family and friends) says "datuk kong" with a completely conventional "d-" (and these are people who say "lo-kun" for "doctor", with a definite "l-", never a "d-"). Again, this might be a reflection of the fact that I moved around in Baba / very anglicized circles (i.e. people who use a "d-" in their English or Malay on a very regular basis, and for whom it isn't a 'foreign' sound in any way). For example, pandan leaves were called "pan7-dan2(-)hioh8", also with a completely Malay-sounding "d" as the initial of the second syllable.

Also, I wonder whether the influence of Malay orthography should be totally ignored or indeed deliberately adhered to... Separate from the "d-"/"n-"/"l-" issue, I feel that the middle syllable would be spelled "toh" rather than "tuk" in POJ...

[AndrewAndrew]

Na-tuk-kong 拿督公 – a local deity, sometimes the deified founder of a particular community (Malay)

In Penang it is often seen written as 哪啅公

[amhoanna]

Definitely "ha2/3-hi3/7".

In TW it would be ha3/4-hi3. According to my trusty 白話小, some say -hi7 instead of -hi3.

There's never a phah, AFAIK. I wonder if that might be a Cantonism. For the record, I ain't against Cantonisms.

But I'm pretty sure it's a baba-ism (purists would say barbarism )

I've been accused of purism, and maybe I deserve it, but I kind of like the baba-isms. The Teochewisms, though -- those are really cool.

(or perhaps of English, I'm sure some presbyterians used it to look up English words at one time).

Seriously cool to think about -- back in the day, these dictionaries were somebody's gateway to learning English through Hoklo.

Even my non-sandhi tone for "mua5" might be wrong, as I hardly ever use it as a final syllable.

Well... That mua1/5 only occurs in a single two-syllable loanword from JPnese... I guess we'll never know its true tone.

Instead, the paper version is at my bedside, and I spend many evenings just browsing through it before falling asleep.

Wow! Cit ể ahiann bổ kántoann!

Hê sĩ Tảikàupõ ễ sủtián ·la', cit cụn dú lải dú ciảucủinn.

I have to admit that my Hokkien (and POJ reading ability) isn't good enough to know what you were saying here. Sorry ! I tried to look up "ciaucuinn" in Douglas/Barclay, but couldn't find it (partly, I wasn't sure of the tones, as the tone marks come out looking slightly strange on my browser).

In "standard" POJ it would be: "He sī Tâi-kàu-pō͘ ê sû-tián--lah, chit-chūn jú-lâi-jú-chiâu-chn̂g." Chiâu-chn̂g means COMPLETE.

The romanization I used the other day ... is adapted from Vietnamese romaji. I use it b/c the Amoy-type POJ is missing a tone and several vowels. The idea of using -ir and -er for the central vowels is way too Anglocentric for my blood, although some orang Coanciu I've come across online seem OK with it -- then again, they never actually write in romaji. Interestingly, Vietnamese romaji has the perfect number of vowels and tones -- it's like it was tailor-made for writing a pan-dialectal Hokkien. The central vowels, the open o and open e, everything is right there -- and no need to download anything to use it in Windows or a Mac, since newer systems ship with Vietnamese romaji installed...

"d" for "j" is also Viet-spired. "d" in VNmese romaji is [z] in the Red River dialects. The Coanciu-type reflex for POJ "j" is [l] or in some cases [d] -- see Niuc's posts. I just like the way the "d" looks.

[SimL]

Hi amhoanna,

Thanks for your inputs.

Definitely "ha2/3-hi3/7".

In TW it would be ha3/4-hi3. According to my trusty 白話小, some say -hi7 instead of -hi3.

There's never a phah, AFAIK. I wonder if that might be a Cantonism. For the record, I ain't against Cantonisms.

On a side note, what's the punji for "phah4"? It seems to be commonly written as 打, but this surely must be using the character purely for its meaning, not a punji at all...

(or perhaps of English, I'm sure some presbyterians used it to look up English words at one time).

Seriously cool to think about -- back in the day, these dictionaries were somebody's gateway to learning English through Hoklo.

Cool thought .

In "standard" POJ it would be: "He sī Tâi-kàu-pō͘ ê sû-tián--lah, chit-chūn jú-lâi-jú-chiâu-chn̂g." Chiâu-chn̂g means COMPLETE.

Thanks for the re-rendering into "standard" POJ (plus explanation of Vietnamese romaji), and translating chiâu-chn̂g. I still need some help with Tâi-kàu-pō͘ ê sû-tián , sorry!