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Hi A-Tsi!

Sooooooooo nice to see you here! Hope you can help Colin in the coming days and months, though I know that people in the academic world are always overwhelmed with work!

Look forward to seeing your answers here.

Hi Colin, I've been away from this Forum for many months (busy with Mandarin). Your posting seems like a nice trigger to cause me to come back. Abun, it wasn't just you - there was quite a strong feeling of consternation (not to say alarm, panic, and despair) among the "old" regulars (I sa...

Thanks Sim, that's good to know. I think I can call that a TV (transitive verb) now, rather than a verb+preposition, and then it follows the rules of other transtive verbs where it sanhdis before the direct object, but not before a description of the object i.e. siang- ka33 -wa but siang- ka21 wa p...

Hi Amhoanna, Thanks for the detailed information. [Envy, envy, at your linguistic abilities!] Well, :oops: - I always have this trouble with Choan-Chiu! It really hardly even sounds like Hokkien to me... And yet, a native Hokkien speaker I know from KL says that he has absolutely no difficulty under...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQ3L3III6KU

What form(s) of Sinitic is this? I heard one or two fragments of Cantonese, but lots of it ISN'T Cantonese, right? Viewers comments don't help much.

[...] But I also think characters have one huge advantage especially when it comes to finding a standard orthography for dialects. For example, one of the reasons why there is no standard orthography for Low German is that there are so many different ways of pronouncing certain words. If one varian...

OMG! Is it meant to be a parody? Soppy me thought "Oh, how nice. Sweet and romantic!" .

Another thing that I noticed is that written Chinese (in characters) is highly resistant to change in a way that alphabetic scripts are not. If there is no character for a word it will often just get left out of dictionaries until a character comes along, and it is the written character that bestow...

Apologies to aBun for writing so much English, which is non-native for him... I would gladly write in Hoklo, but Sim and Andrew and others tend to fade out when I do that. Thank you for taking my limitations into account. I can't speak for Andrew, but you're dead right when it comes to me. I think ...

And let me get it straight. When you say " X siang5 ka3 Y" in PgHK, are the tone contours on siang-ka actually: siang21 ka33 (low falling and mid level) And yeah, according to my calculations, that would make it T3. 8) Yes... I forgot to answer this... it depends on whether you count it a...

Hi Amhoanna, But does it reflect on the strength of the English language that these concepts are so easy to express, if you should ever need to say them? Once in a while, in real life, I'll hear somebody say: "Oh, __________ (insert name of more dominant language) is just clearer / more flexibl...

Wá bô siâng kà i án-ne tōa. or Wá bô i án-ne tōa siâng kà i [...] Kadri, is that really kà? I thought it would've been kā. Hi Amhoanna, It manifests as a tone-1 in Penang Hokkien (at least, it does the way I say it)... [And I think it's now generally accepted that Penang Hokkien tone-3 sandhies to ...

Moved to after next reply, because too many typos needed correcting.

Hi Pier, Nice. Very glad this guy is doing it. Also a nice variety, some for little kids (the middle one) and some for slightly older people. The first one was the one I liked best: Batman meets The Matrix meets Chinese opera, with fusion costumes :mrgreen:. I heard the "mana e sai!" in th...

Hi Pier, Yes, indeed, it's true that the "economic motive" is the main one behind the current support for Hokkien (plus perhaps a bit of "keeping up with the Joneses" in the face of Taiwan's support for Taiwanese). There are parallels to the gay community's spending power (the so...