Rice Cooker

[aokh1979]

Happy Chinese New Year !

I have been teaching "missing" Hokkien words of Penang in Facebook, I plan to collect about 300 words and publish a book. Those are words I hear from older generation but not younger.

Oh, I mean to ask a question about Rice Cooker. Has anyone ever found out how Bòk-Kèng is written ? I have been asking around my China friends and no one seems to know what a Bòk-Kèng is. Do you use it in your variant alongside with Puīnn-Ue ?

[Mark Yong]

Definitely. I heard and used the word bòk-khèng in Penang regularly. However, I always knew it in the context of 'tiffin carrier', not 'rice cooker'. Unless the person(s) whom I heard use it were actually mis-using the word.

[SimL]

For me, it was a large cooking pot (holding, say, more than 3-4 litres), typically earthenware/ceramic, but perhaps could be metal/enamel too. There's an additional association of "round-bottomed", so it's really one of those very old-fashioned cooking pots, e.g. for cooking rice for a family of 10 in. However, I don't have aspiration on the second syllable, so "bok-keng" (as aokh has it), not "bok-kheng" (as Mark has it).

A tiffin-carrier was called a(n) "uaN2-can5", in my usage.

Here are some references from google (again, what CAN'T one find on the net these days...). I've included the original quote from each page, so that if the page disappears, the citation is still known here.

http://allenooi.com/page/31/ & http://allenooi.com/2008/08/chong-qing-hot-pot/
"I went to the market to get the fish ball and other ingredients that I like. Since it’s only me and my mum, I cook it by using the normal wok. (Is it call wok? I don’t know how to say “bok keng” in English. Anyone?)"

http://pmaymac.blogspot.com/2009_09_01_archive.html
"It 'Chai Boi' time! After the prayer one week ago, Snoopy bring us some "Chai Boi" cook by Mrs. Snoopy. I tell you, it gooooood. Hehehe..... We all love it. Thank you Mrs. Snoopy for the effort, some more she cook two "bok keng" @ pot (;p) - one with roasted duck and another one without it. TQVM. Mwuah..... mwuah...."

The first link might suggest that the meaning is "wok" (though perhaps the author has 'my' bok-keng in mind, and mistakenly thought it was called a "wok" in English). The second link shows a photo of a very large metal pot, roughly what my image of the word is (though a earthenware/ceramic one is more "architypical" to me). This one has a roundish bottom.

PS: Brilliant initiative aokh! I really look forward to seeing the book when it's ready.

[niuc]

I seldom heard of bok8-khing7 in my variant, usually only in the phrase er/ə1-a2-bok8-khing7 鍋仔[][] to mean cooking pots. I wonder if bok8 there is 木. We usually just say er1 鍋; and 飯鍋 png7-er1 or 電鍋 tian7-er1 for rice cooker.

[SimL]

I wonder if bok8 there is 木

Hmmm... wouldn't last very long on an open fire .

[niuc]

Hmmm... wouldn't last very long on an open fire .

Hahaha! I meant may be, just may be, bok8-khing7 might originally refer to wooden pots used as containers for food/dishes, much like 飯桶 (literal meaning) or Japanese bento box / wooden bowls, but of course not put on open fire.

[SimL]

Hmmm... wouldn't last very long on an open fire .

Hahaha! I meant may be, just may be, bok8-khing7 might originally refer to wooden pots used as containers for food/dishes, much like 飯桶 (literal meaning) or Japanese bento box / wooden bowls, but of course not put on open fire.

Oh, good point! Indeed, there have long been wooden bowls and containers for holding food. There's absolutely no reason why the name of an object which started out as only a wooden container for holding food might not have shifted to refer to an object in which the food is cooked in.

[Ah-bin]

The article on Sumatran Hokkien says this is a Malay loan, but I haven't been able to find the original word (for cooking pot) in a Malay dictionary so far.

[aokh1979]

Exactly. I have never heard anyone saying anything that sounds similar in Malay. Frankly, I quite believe that the 1st character is 木 and it just makes so much sense.

[Ah-bin]

Hôa-î-thong-gú 華夷通語 (p.19b.) has thô•-tiáⁿ 塗鼎 defined as 勿聾仔 (bút-lâng-á) in Malay. There is a circle under the 聾 which indicates "Kái-séh" 解說 meaning kóng-ōa-im (lâng) rather than literary pronunciation (lông).

…looks like they were trying to write “blanga”, which isn't close enough to Bok-keng to be plausible.