Penang Hokkien Vocabulary Questions (Part 2)

[Mark Yong]

At 15 pages, our first thread on the same topic has grown a bit too big, so am starting a new one for good order.

I heard this word spoken aloud for the first time yesterday morning, and in Sydney of all places (there you go, Sim - it is possible for the Hokkien crusade to continue here!): 井 cεⁿ2. Yes, I am aware that it should be a very common word, but amazingly I never heard it used in my 6 years in Penang. Maybe wells fell out of vogue by the 1990's.

Given that 福建 Hok-Kien is China's tea province, how would 龍井 be pronounced - liong5 ceng2 or leng5 cεⁿ2? The reason I am asking is because I absolutely hate it when I have 點心 tiam2 sim1 in Penang, and the waitresses end up using Cantonese for all the food and drink names!

niuc and siamiwako, would it be ciⁿ2 in your variants?

Note: I have retained the anachronistic reference to "Penang Hokkien" only for topical continuity, and in no way is it meant to exclude the other variants. 四海爲家 su3 hai2 ui7 ka1.

[Ah-bin]

it is possible for the Hokkien crusade to continue here!): 井 cεⁿ2. Yes, I am aware that it should be a very common word, but amazingly I never heard it used in my 6 years in Penang. Maybe wells fell out of vogue by the 1990's.

I've heard the morpheme in the context of:

Chhim-ché•ⁿ 深井 – the inner courtyard of a traditional Chinese house　(dictionary entry)

in the Penang Hokkien Podcast Episode 291, This episode is all about old houses.

John Ong was wondering (at 18:20) what the big threshold stone was called on the main gateway to an old house. Does anyone know what that is called? He thought it began with mûi 門, but couldn't remember the rest of it.

[niuc]

It's even stronger than that. Many "linguistically naive" native speakers of Hokkien will insist that the sandhi rules are "natural", i.e. "it's much easier to say the words with the shifted sandhi", or "it sounds more elegant to say the words with the shifted sandhi". They don't realise that Hokkien sandhi rules are "arbitrary" - a result of the historical development of the language.

Thanks, Sim, for sharing your knowledge about linguistics. I also don't think that sandhis are there to be more elegant, because if that's so, why the sandhi itself usually is another citation tone. In fact I don't understand why Wu & Min languages have sandhis but not Yue, Hakka or Mandarin. Anyone know how sandhi tones developed? And how the early speakers applied those sandhis during the "implementation" period? Actually, I also would like to understand how English etc got the inflections?

For example, in German and Dutch, voiced stops at the end of a word become unvoiced. So, in German, "baths" - "Bäder" - is pronounced with a "-d-" (i.e. voiced), but the singular "bath" - "Bad" is pronounced with a "-t" (i.e. unvoiced). This means that "Bat" (a word meaning "to ask / to request") and "Bad" are pronounced identically in German. Similarly for "-b-" vs "-p" and "-g-" vs "-k": the voicing disappears, if the voiced consonant is at the end. Now, this "rule" doesn't exist in English, so "God" and "Got" are not pronounced identically in English. But, German speakers feel that this "rule" is so "natural", that when they speak English, they will pronounce "God" and "Got" identically. As with linguistically naive Hokkien speakers thinking that "tone sandhi is natural", linguistically naive German speakers think that "devoicing of voiced consonants at the end of words is natural". In both cases, they are simply arbitrary (but essential) rules for good pronunciation.

In this case, Indonesian shares the same tendency with German. In fact, Singlish pronunciation of "bat" and "bad" is the same!

There's no single word for this in TW Hoklo, AFAIK. I would use a variety of structures to get this across, depending on the situation, e.g. whether it was visual confusion, cognitive confusion, etc. My impression is that while MIXING TWO THINGS TOGETHER and MISTAKING ONE THING FOR ANOTHER are semantically related in English (and Mandarin: 搞混 gao3-hun3), in Hoklo they're not. We'll see what Niuc and others of the Penang persuasion have to say.

True for my variant. MIXING TWO THINGS TOGETHER = cham1. MISTAKING ONE THING FOR ANOTHER -> usually we say: (ciōng) A liàh/khuàⁿ/thiaⁿ-cuè B; alternatively we say: nā-cún (A sī) B.

Don't know, but there's usually some kind of method behind the madness. There's a whole set of etyma that go -eng in some dialects and -aiⁿ in others:

hêng / hâiⁿ
cheng / chaiⁿ 千
keng / kaiⁿ 間 (Coanciu proper: kuiⁿ)
tēng / tāiⁿ
seng / saiⁿ 先 (not 100% sure about this one)
cêng / câiⁿ / cûiⁿ 前

My variant uses both -aiⁿ & -ing above except for hîng & tīng (may be for 讀冊音 but on daily life we only say hâiⁿ & tāiⁿ).

Is colloq 反 is páiⁿ in the -aiⁿ dialects? Maybe Niuc can shed more light.

Yes. 倒反 = tò-páiⁿ.

井
niuc and siamiwako, would it be ciⁿ2 in your variants?

Yup.

[Ah-bin]

I have just remembered another phrase I heard Bhante Dhammavudho say twice:

"Pocket chít-chiam pún bô" Which I interpret to mean "not a cent in one's pocket"

Does anyone have an idea what the "chiam" is? Is it needle 針?

Also....is a note from the doctor a 老君字?

[Mark Yong]

Ah-bin wrote:
Does anyone have an idea what the "chiam" is? Is it needle 針?

On the basis of finding a character where the pronunciation matches in both Hokkien and Cantonese, 針 was what I postulated. However, I have not been able to find any citations to confirm or refute it to date.

Also, the usage of 針 ciam for a unit cent is unusual in Penang; they normally use 鐳 lui. The only exception I know of is when they say “一針錢、一針貨。 jit ciam ciⁿ, jit ciam hoe.”.

[aokh1979]

Given that 福建 Hok-Kien is China's tea province, how would 龍井 be pronounced - liong5 ceng2 or leng5 cεⁿ2? The reason I am asking is because I absolutely hate it when I have 點心 tiam2 sim1 in Penang, and the waitresses end up using Cantonese for all the food and drink names!

龍井 is not from Hokkien but Hangzhou. Anyway, I heard lêng-tséⁿ in Penang. And 龍井 is a place so the pronunciation should be 白讀, usually-lah.

[SimL]

Ah-bin wrote:
Does anyone have an idea what the "chiam" is? Is it needle 針?

On the basis of finding a character where the pronunciation matches in both Hokkien and Cantonese, 針 was what I postulated. However, I have not been able to find any citations to confirm or refute it to date.

Also, the usage of 針 ciam for a unit cent is unusual in Penang; they normally use 鐳 lui.

Indeed, the North Malayan "lui1" and "puat8" are "ciam1" and "kak4" in South Malaya.

[SimL]

Thanks, Sim, for sharing your knowledge about linguistics.

Hi niuc,

You're very welcome! It's nice that I have a group of people for whom this is interesting. Most of my friends get glazed eyes, if I start to talk about linguistics...

I also don't think that sandhis are there to be more elegant, because if that's so, why the sandhi itself usually is another citation tone.

Yes, it's not more natural or elegant, because Hokkien has "se3" (= "small") and "tiau5" (= "measure word for clothing"), and that sandhis to "se1_tiau5" (non-Penang Hokkien "se2_tiau5"), but Mandarin "xiao3" and "tiao2" (with roughly the same tone contours respectively) doesn't sandhi at all. Does this mean that Mandarin speakers are speaking "unnaturally" or "inelegantly", whenever they have a (Mandarin) "T3" + "T2" combination ?

In fact I don't understand why Wu & Min languages have sandhis but not Yue, Hakka or Mandarin. Anyone know how sandhi tones developed? And how the early speakers applied those sandhis during the "implementation" period? Actually, I also would like to understand how English etc got the inflections?

A very good question, and it's never occurred to me before! Does anyone else know? I could ask Henning Kloeter if he knows.

The only thing I seem to recall is that the Wu languages have even more complex tone-sandhi rules: there (apparently), groups of 2 and groups of 3 syllables have different effects, and the actual combination also affects the change, i.e. tone-X with a tone-Y following would sandhi to something different than tone-X with a tone-Z following. Sounds hideously difficult. Even Hokciu is supposed to have more complicated tone-sandhi rules than Hokkien, IIRC.

[Mark Yong]

aokh1979 wrote:
龍井 is not from Hokkien but Hangzhou. Anyway, I heard lêng-tséⁿ in Penang.

Oh, thank God for that. At least now I know that should I ever have 點心 tiam2 sim1 at 大東 Tai Tong in 日本街 Cintra Street, I can say 龍井 lêng-tséⁿ and not have the waiter think I am a retard.

aokh1979 wrote:
And 龍井 is a place so the pronunciation should be 白讀, usually-lah.

This is an interesting point. In Bodman, 北京 is pak-kiaⁿ, but 上海 is siOng hai (i.e. not chiOⁿ hai). Also, 廣東 is kuiⁿ tang, but 廣府 is kOng hu (this one is not from Bodman).

[Ah-bin]

I think that might be something to do with the relative newness ot Shanghai compared to the other places. Isn't Tientsin 天津 Thian-chin, rather than Thiⁿ-chin? Those two places are of a similar age I guess.

I remember that 屏東 in Taiwanese is Pîn-tong, but 臺東 is Tâi-tang, I have no idea why. It may be that the first one was in a Hakka-speaking district at one time and retained a Hakka-like name.