Malay syntax in Penang Hokkien?

[Ah-bin]

Recently I've also been thinking about the Malay influences on Penang Hokkien that go beyond borrowings of vocabulary. There are certain modes of expression in Penang Hokkien (or maybe Penang Baba Hokkien) that I don't think are attested in other varieties.

One of these is the sentence final koh in sentences meaning "not yet" or "still not", which I think may come from the use of lagi as a sentence final in Malay

He hasn't come back yet = I á-bōe túiⁿ lâi = koh Dia belom balik lagi
(I) still don't know = á-bōe chai koh = belom tau lagi

Because my Malay isn't good, I don't know if lagi is used like this in affirmative sentences. Come to think of it, I don't even know if it's used in PGHK.

The other example is the use of kā corresponding to "sama"

He speaks like you = I kóng oā siâng kā lú = Dia chakap macham sama lu
He got angry with me = I khí-hông kā wá = Dia naik angin sama gua
After he had lived with them for two years = I tōa kā i-lâng nō• nî liáu= ?

This last one I heard from Ven. Dhammavuddho Thero.

Other varieties of Hokkien tend to put the kā before the verb or adjective like so:

kā lú sio-siâng
I kā goá khí-hiông
I tōa kā in nng nî -

at least that is my guess how these might sound in some sort of Hokkien that is closer to Amoy or Taiwanese. In these cases, the Hokkien corresponds to the Mandarin idiom.

Some of these similarities will also be due to the fact that colloquial Malay syntax was greatly influenced by Hokkien. Some of them look like English constructions as well, but I think they are more likely to be the result of interference from Malay, especially when considering the deep-rooted Malay influence in function words such as pun, tapi, balu etc.

[amhoanna]

As with all my comments on Holo, an automatic non-native spkr disclaimer goes here.

There is sentence-final koh in Taiwan, and "i iáu m̄ cai koh" would be a well-formed sentence. Probably "i ahboē cai koh" too. But I don't think the meaning is so closely related to the usual koh, which is what lagi means.

You're right about "kah lứ sio siâng / sio kâng". Kā vs kah is significant in TW. The running tone of kah here is high-level and "snappy".

The toà sentence would be "I kah in (còhoé) toà nn̄g nî."

A lot of sentences in Penang Hokkien strike me as being "borrowed" from Malay. Pretty cool, if you ask me. Also usages like ca̍pcheng for 10,000 which are also used in Sg.

[AndrewAndrew]

The phenomenon is not restricted to those words: you have the same issue with time when, e.g. i boeh-lâi tong-kim. This reflects English as well as Malay usage. But the standard "Chinese" word order is also used, and to me at least sounds more "correct".

[Ah-bin]

Lookign through a thesis about the syntax of Bazaar Malay spoken by older people in Singapore, I stumbled upon examples of using "orang puteh" to mean "English language", in much the same way as Penang Hokkien speakers sometimes refer to English as Âng-mô• 紅毛 rather than Âng-mô•-oā 紅毛話

"Dia chakap orang puteh" = "I kóng Âng-mô•" = "He speaks English"

Of course, this could always be interference from "Red Hair" rather than from Malay.

[SimL]

Hi Ah-bin,

I'm very busy at the moment so can't reply at length or in-depth (to any of the other topics either, which are all great, thanks you guys!).

My very quick response to your question would be to turn it around (you suggest it yourself at the end of your initial post): the examples you give sound VERY much like how my grandmother spoke when she spoke bazaar Malay, and very different from how I think a native Malay speaker (even when speaking informal/colloquial Malay) speaks. At the very most, a native Malay speaker might speak like this when talking to someone like my grandmother - just to assume the same idiom (the same way some "memsahib" might deliberately speak broken English to her Indian servants during the British Raj) - but I doubt if he/she would actually use these constructs to a fellow native speaker of Malay. (That's just my gut-feeling, and I make similar qualifications as amhoanna, in as much as I left there in my mid teens, and that I don't even SPEAK Malay really.)

As you suggest, I think it's more likely that these constructs come *from* Hokkien into bazaar Malay, rather than the other way around. (Which of course doesn't answer your question why these constructs exist, varying slightly from the constructs used by "more native" Hokkien speakers - i.e. Taiwan, Amoy, etc.)

[AndrewAndrew]

It's not from Malay, because the bazaar Malay construction "Dia cakap Melayu" is bad Malay - it should be "Dia cakap Bahasa Melayu". Only English has this construction, of all the obvious candidate languages.

[niuc]

It's not from Malay, because the bazaar Malay construction "Dia cakap Melayu" is bad Malay - it should be "Dia cakap Bahasa Melayu". Only English has this construction, of all the obvious candidate languages.

I don't know Penang well so I can't comment much. I am not sure about Baba/Nyonya, but a lot of Chinese who could speak Malay last time, spoke "bahasa pasar" (something like Singlish) rather than "bahasa baku" (standard language). In Indonesia I heard quite a few times of "complaints" from native Indonesians that Chinese (especially older generation) spoke "rude" Indonesian/Javanese/Sundanese (especially the last 2 having multi social registers, cin1-kau7-le2-sor3 真厚禮數)...　

[Ah-bin]

Thanks for all your replies, I am sort of thinking out aloud about some things to see what the reaction is. My own theory is that all of the languages long resident in the Straits (Hokkien, Malay, Portuguese) were converging on each other in grammar, pronunciation and vocabulary for a long time before the new arrivals on the scene (Sinkheh, British) started to change things in a different direction. The general direction was towards the main languages of commerce in urban centres, and Hokkien had a simple grammatical structure that had a formative influence on the structure of Baba Malay, Bazaar Malay, and Kristang.

I think Afrikaans might be thrown into the list too, as it has a picked up a punya-type construction with "se", that is not completely absent from Dutch dialects, but is not used as widely as it is in Afrikaans. It was supposed to have been formed by the Dutch that nurses from Malays spoke to Dutch children. I don't know if any Hokkien words (apart from the obvious "tee") got into Afrikaans though.

Can't remember the Kristang for "man" but will have to look it up when I get home.

There was also a version of "Bazaar English" known as China Coast Pidgin, which had some Hokkien words, Some Portuguese, some Cantonese and some Mandarin. There is a nice article on it here:

sunzi.lib.hku.hk/hkjo/view/44/4402208.pdf

In Indonesia I heard quite a few times of "complaints" from native Indonesians that Chinese (especially older generation) spoke "rude" Indonesian/Javanese/Sundanese

I wonder if it was the "lu" and "gua" thing that got on their nerves? It seems pronoun choice is really important in all SEAN languages except for the Sinitic ones. Mind you, Chinese tend to be taught how to "call" people (like Auntie or Unker) at the beginning of a conversation or sentence even if they don't keep it up through the whole conversation.

I've never learnt how to "call" properly in any kind of Chinese, and sometimes it has made me a bit nervous about how to talk to older people (relatives of friends) in China for fear of using the wrong thing or not using it at all. Penang Hokkien is a bit easier because you don;t need to know the exact relationship and can say "Auntie" or "Unker"(I'm especially fond of the pronunciation "unker" as you can probably tell)

[AndrewAndrew]

I've never learnt how to "call" properly in any kind of Chinese, and sometimes it has made me a bit nervous about how to talk to older people (relatives of friends) in China for fear of using the wrong thing or not using it at all. Penang Hokkien is a bit easier because you don;t need to know the exact relationship and can say "Auntie" or "Unker"(I'm especially fond of the pronunciation "unker" as you can probably tell)

The way I do it in Hokkien is this:

A-peh / A-i ... older than my father
A-chek / A-i ... one generation up but not clearly older than my father

I don't tend to use kong / po, except as suffixes where I already know the name or their relationship. At my age (30), A-peh / A-i is fine even for quite old people.

People my generation but older don't get any address. Possibly because we stopped using ko / chi in my family when we grew up, but mainly because there is not really any need to.

The one I am looking forward to being old enough to use is A-ba / A-nia, which I guess I could use when I am 40 to call someone in their teens or twenties (I have only heard it used in kopitiams, to address staff).

I've never been sure how it works in Mandarin

[niuc]

In Singapore it is easy also, as "Uncle" & "Auntie" are used, even when speaking Hokkien or Mandarin. In Bagan Hokkien our usage is similar to Andrew's, but we don't use "A-ba"/"A-nia".

My own theory is that all of the languages long resident in the Straits (Hokkien, Malay, Portuguese) were converging on each other in grammar, pronunciation and vocabulary for a long time before the new arrivals on the scene (Sinkheh, British) started to change things in a different direction. The general direction was towards the main languages of commerce in urban centres, and Hokkien had a simple grammatical structure that had a formative influence on the structure of Baba Malay, Bazaar Malay, and Kristang.

Most probably!

I wonder if it was the "lu" and "gua" thing that got on their nerves? It seems pronoun choice is really important in all SEAN languages except for the Sinitic ones. Mind you, Chinese tend to be taught how to "call" people (like Auntie or Unker) at the beginning of a conversation or sentence even if they don't keep it up through the whole conversation.

Yes, pronouns are among them, including bad grammar and "rude" words. Chinese is like English in the sense that we can address our parents or elders with pronouns, after opening with "Dad/Mom/Auntie etc". That is not the case in Bahasa Indonesia, as we need to keep using "Dad" or "Grandma" in place of pronouns. To address them with pronouns is considered rude and impolite.