"easy" and "difficult" in Penang Hokkien

[Ah-bin]

Chiāⁿ kú bô post liáu…

I'm wondering how to say "easy to..." and "hard to..." in Penang Hokkien

'Difficult" by itself is "kang-khó• " or "khang-khó•" (I have heard both), but how about "difficult to..."

"Chinese characters are hard to learn"
I think I could say it
"Tng-lâng-jī pháiⁿ-óh"
or
"Tng-lâng-jī bô-hó-óh"

But I haven't heard anyone say these. Maybe there is a different way to say it like:

"óh Tng-lâng-jī chiāⁿ kang-khó•"

Then what about "easy" as in "easy to learn" "easy to say" etc.?

Thank you all in advance for your help...

[SimL]

Hi Ah-bin,

Always delighted to see you post here.

"kang-khó• " or "khang-khó•" (I have heard both)

Actually, I've never heard the former, and indeed, I say the latter. Or, more accurately, I say the aspirated version "kh-", but I say "khan-khO", with an "-n" rather than an "-ng". If I do say "-ng" (which I would in normal, rapid speech), then I think of it only as assimilation to the following "kh-", but in citing the word, I think of it as "khan-khO".

"Tng-lâng-jī pháiⁿ-óh" or "Tng-lâng-jī bô-hó-óh"

The first one sounds ok to me (though I would not say it that way). The second one I've never heard anyone say. Instead, I would use the alternative you give later.

"óh Tng-lâng-jī chiāⁿ khan-khó•"

So, yes, this would be fine, but I would see this as "fronting of the topic", so this renders "LEARNING CHINESE CHARACTERS is very hard". Perfectly adequate for "It is very hard to learn Chinese characters" would be "Tng-lâng-jī chiāⁿ khan-khó• óh"

Then what about "easy" as in "easy to learn" "easy to say" etc.?

The word for "easy" is "eng5". (It is also used to mean "to have spare time", "to be free", but I'll come back to that at the end.)

So, "Chinese characters are very easy to learn" would be: "Tng-lâng-jī chiāⁿ eng5 óh" or (with fronting of topic) " óh Tng-lâng-jī chiāⁿ eng5" (= "LEARNING CHINESE CHARACTERS is very easy").

BTW, unlike Mandarin, where (if I understand correctly) "hen3" can be used with monosyllabic adjectives without particularly meaning "very", I think Hokkien "cin-nia" would be used only when one wants to say "very" in the English equivalent.

So, the above sentences could have been just:

"Tng-lâng-jī khan-khó• óh" / "óh Tng-lâng-jī khan-khó•"
"Tng-lâng-jī (eng5-)eng5 óh" / "óh Tng-lâng-jī (eng5-)eng5"

However, there still seems to be a slight tendency to avoid monosyllalabic adjectives, which is why I've doubled the eng5, but it's much less needed in the non-fronted version, perhaps slightly more needed in the fronted version. If one wanted to avoid doubling, then "eng5 nia3/7" (= "easy only", with no sandhi-tone for the "eng5") would be ok as a solution, without the use of "cin-nia", but this only works for the fronted version "óh Tng-lâng-jī eng5 nia3/7". Also acceptable would be both doubling and adding "nia" for the fronted version: "óh Tng-lâng-jī eng5-eng5 nia3/7"

Just to round off, "u7-eng5" and "bo5-eng5" mean "to have free time" and "to not have free time / to be busy" respectively. E.g. "lu ma-cai u-eng bo?" (= "do you have (some) free time tomorrow?" - say, for us to go and see a movie), or "wa ca-huiN cin-nia bo-eng" (= "I was very busy yesterday"). I've always assumed that these two "eng5" are the same character as the "eng5" meaning "easy", but as I write this, I'm unsure. Perhaps one of our more learned Forum members could tell us if both "eng5" are the same character.

SimL

[Ah-bin]

Thanks Sim, that is a wonderful explanation again.

Some of my suggestions were from Taiwanese (I think). If you have never heard them, then they probably are not Penang constructions to start with. The dot after the "o" in khang-kho was my way of doing the "O".

Khang-khO becoming kang-khO was not the only example of a lost aspirate that I've heard. When I remember what the other ones I'll post them. They were from the PHK podcast.

That is almost all the sentence constructions I can think of for the moment.

regards,
Ah-Bin

[SimL]

Hi Ah-Bin,

You're very welcome. I'm glad you like my explanations.

>> The dot after the "o" in khang-kho was my way of doing the "O"

Yes, I did realise that, and my "O" wasn't an attempt to correct your spelling. I imagine it's the computer equivalent for the "dot" after the "o", as used in the POJ orthography. I even read a couple of years back when that dot was incorporated into Unicode (though I don't know if it's the same dot as the one you use).

The absence of the aspiration that you heard for "k(h)an(g)-khO" in the podcast is also interesting. I don't recall hearing anyone say it like that when I was young, but that was up to the early 1970's in Penang, so a lot can certainly have changed since then. The next time I'm in Penang, I want to listen for the loss of distinction between tone-4 and tone-8 which I read about somewhere. I was there in 2007 and didn't notice, but then, I was only there for about 5 days, and didn't speak PgHk to that many young people, and I wasn't listening out for it, so I may very well have heard it in the streets without noticing.

SimL

[Ah-bin]

Now that merger of the two tones is interesting. I haven't noticed it yet myself. It may only happen in a final position too, and the difference may only be preserved in the tone sandhi changes.

By the way that "eng" for easy is "êng" in POJ isn't it? The character they often use to write it is 閑, which is also used for siān "boring" in Campbell. In the green Chiang-chiu dictionary they have a new character made up of 疒 and 善 for "siān".

[SimL]

Hi Ah-Bin,

It may only happen in a final position too, and the difference may only be preserved in the tone sandhi changes.

I know a descriptive linguist is not supposed to feel this, but I would find that horrible (I find it irritating enough with tone-3 and tone-7). Well, I guess it's better than no distinction at all, I mean "total merger", both in final and non-final position...

Two further elaborations:

1. The unaspirated form of "khan-khO"

As for the "k-" vs "kh-" in "khan-khO", it looks as if the unaspirated form is actually "more standard" than the aspirated form! I found the unaspirated form in Douglas, which lists the term "kan1-khO2" - with the meaning "difficult" - under both "kan1" and "khO2" (as you know, Douglas does this in principle for all multi-syllabic words).

"kan1" Douglas p194 "calamity; suffering; difficult":
- "kan1-khO2" = "misery; suffering; grief; miserable; sore trouble; troublesome; difficult"

"khO2" Douglas p279 "bitter; wretched; distressed; (very earnest); to grieve about; to murmur or fret at":
- "kan1-khO2" = "miserable; wretched; difficult (v. 'kan1')"

Not only that, but I didn't manage to find the aspirated form listed in Douglas at all. It's certainly not given as an alternative to the unaspirated form, nor have I been able to locate it under another entry with "kh-" - I looked under both "khan" and "khang" and I looked under both tone-1 and tone-5 (the two tones which would yield sandhied tone-7).

So, it would appear that my own pronunciation is the non-standard one - my apologies!

Also interesting to note that the construct you were interested in is given in one example by Douglas, under "kan1", namely "kan1-khO2-kong2" = "troublesome or difficult to speak about".

Unfortunately, there weren't any additional compounds of this "kan1" which Barclay needed to record, so I haven't been able to find the character for it. Based on the meaning of the compound and the Mandarin pronunciation, I ventured to think that it might be 尷苦, but http://www.internationalscientific.org gives the Hokkien pronunciation of the first character as "kam1", so, sadly, it's not that.


2. "easy" / "having free time"

a.

By the way that "eng" for easy is "êng" in POJ isn't it?

Yes, that's right.

b. Do any of your dictionaries explicitly say that the "êng" of "easy" and the "êng" of "to have free time" are the same character?

SimL

[duaaagiii]

In Taiwan, 艱苦 (kan1-khoo2) means "arduous; painful; in misery; sad; to not feel well".

To say something is "easy/hard to + verb", we would say "ho2/phainn2 + verb".

[SimL]

Hi duaaagiii,

Thanks for supplying the hanzi for "kan1". That's great!

One of the difficulties of Hokkien is this huge variation in the term to be used for even the most basic concepts.

AFAIK, "ho2/phainn2" are only used for a number of verbs in Penang Hokkien. I don't know if they are just lexically determined, or if there's some pattern behind them. Off the top of my head:

ciah8 (eat), lim1 (drink), khuann3 (look), thiann1 (listen), sai2 (drive/steer, e.g. a car), iong7 (use).

And even here, the meaning of these is not so much: "easy to <X>" and "difficult to <X>", but rather: "pleasant to <X>" and "unpleasant to <X>", rather like the way "hao3" is used for these verbs in Mandarin.

Hmmm... thinking about it a bit, I'd say that "ho2/phainn2" are used with "experiential verbs" to describe whether the experience is pleasant or unpleasant. This produces a sort of odd one out in the set, for "khun3" (sleep). There's certainly "ho2-khun3" but I'm not sure if there's a corresponding *"phainn2-khun3". This could be because there's no direct object for "khun3", and the pattern of the "ho2/phainn2" modifiers is to indicate whether the object of the verb produces a pleasant or unpleasant feeling in the doer of the verb. This hence doesn't apply in the case of "khun3", so "ho2-khun3" just idiomatically means "to sleep well, comfortably, soundly". Of course, there's no a priori reason why "phainn2-khun3" might not mean "to sleep badly, tossing and turning all night, with nightmares", but (in my usage) it just doesn't happen to; i.e. it doesn't exist as a combination at all.

Anyway, I should probably have a good think about it, instead of thinking out loud as I'm doing here.

Cheers,
SimL

[Andrew]

Being English-educated, it wouldn't immediately have sprung to mind, but phaiN-oh to me sounds more genuine Hokkien than kan-khO-oh, though I would understand the meaning of the latter. Certainly it is widely used in Penang, as is phaiN-co, although that could mean either difficult or unpleasant or unprofitable to do. Ho-oh seems less obvious for some reason - perhaps there is less reasons to use the phrase or perhaps I assumed it could plausibly mean 'good to learn'.

I would say kan(g)-khO, but this may just be because I am familiar with the Chinese character. The ng sound is a natural product of the n-k juncture.

What is this merger of tones that Sim talks about? I have not come across it.

[SimL]

Hi Andrew,

What is this merger of tones that Sim talks about? I have not come across it.

The frustrating thing is that I can't remember where I heard or read it. From memory, it's the claim that young Hokkien speakers (I can't even remember if this was meant to be Taiwan, Amoy, or Malaysia...) no longer distinguish tone-4 from tone-8.

Perhaps Ah-bin can say a bit more about it.

SimL