Classical Chinese and Hokkien

[Aurelio]

Hi everybody!

I recently embarked on studying a little bit of beginner's Classical Chinese and found some interesting parallels to Hokkien - though I'd share them here:

(1) 'Literary' pronunciation vs. 'colloquial', i.e. ai-LIN vs. simmih-LANG

Whereas today's Mandarin does only know colloquial pronunciations, Classical Chinese requires 'literary' pronunciations, e.g. ta1 (he,she) is tuo1, zhengzhi de zhi4 (govern) is chi2 & so on. Of course, that doesn't give the interesting mix of 'colloquial' and 'literary' in the same language, as it is in today's Hokkien, but I found it interesting that there is a 'colloquial' vs. 'literary' split in the language of the North at all.

(2) 'typically' Hokkien words

I found it interesting, too, that some typical Hokkien words like 'lu' (you) and 'i' (he) are perfectly normal words in classical Chinese. Not surprising, because it's common where-ever a language splits into several daughter languages that some carry one word from the mother language and some carry another - but somehow, still neat!

Another thing I found interesting in classical Chinese (although there's no link to Hokkien here, at least that I know of): the multiple tones for one character, like e.g.

yu3 (the rain) vs. yu4 (to rain)
wang2 (the king) vs. wang4 (to be king)
yi1 (clothes) vs. yi4 (to wear clothes)

As a beginner in Hokkien, I wonder: are there examples of this in Minnan?

Regards,
Aurelio

[hong]

we do have wen/bai du in taiwanese mandarin like 抇 which is different from putonghua.I think there is a book given the date for china to retain only bai du or wen du in putonghua.It seems like around 1930s.

[qrasy]

"ai" is "who" in Vietnamese in the flat tone.
"y" is "he" in Vietnamese in the flat tone.

All the literal-reading Verbs have the qu tone?
Grammatical inflections in Old Chinese may come to this.
From "tonogenesis" it is said -h/-s became the qu tone and disappeared.

But we have sao3 "to weep" sao4"broom"

"Lu" is not very strange but it is more likely to start with something like "ny-" I know that "N-" have merged with "L-" in Hokkien, but how about "i"? What is its characters?

[hong]

I think what aurelio trying to say about is ru in mandarin 汝which is wendu lu in xiamen and cuanchiu but in ciangchiu it is li.

[qrasy]

Look at the Sino-Xenic Forms of "ru", "ni", it can be concluded that it started with "ny-".

[qrasy]

"Ru", "Ni", "Er", all were something like (no one knows exactly) "Nyü","Nyi","Nyi", and all are in Yang-Shang tone. All were just "dialectical difference" in Middle Chinese, but now they have become "unintelligible" to each other.

[Andrew Yong]

In Hokkien there are the same variants: I think lu2 corresponds to 汝, ni"2 你 and ji"2 ??. But as you say, they probably have the same origin.

I have heard that Mandarin 的 originated a dialectal variant of 之.

Can someone give more examples of bai/wen du in Mandarin? I find this quite interesting, because I have always wondered why Hokkien maintained this distinction.

[hong]

http://www.hebyw.net/showfybz.asp?id=9 heibei province wenbaidu

[hong]

剥 wen-bo, bai-bao
澄 wen-cheng,bai-deng
嚼 wen-jue,bai-jiao
颈 wen-jing,bai-geng
勒 wen-le,bai-lei
落 wen-luo, bai-lao and la

[hong]

熏 wen-xun1,bai-xun4
钥 wen-yue bai-yao
削 wen-xue,bai-xiao
血 wen-xue ,bai-xie
熟 wen-shu,bai-shou
色 wen-se,bai-shai
we can check the older dict from Taiwan for the different meanings in wen bai but not in modern putonghua dict.