HO̍KLÓ, HO̍HLÓ, HŌLÓ

[niuc]

Hi Yeleixingfeng

I am happy to know that a bright young man (or do you still consider yourself a teenager?) like you care about Hokkien and interested in historical development of 漢字.

Detested everything Chinese until Form 2 (14 years old) when a devoted Christian 'advised' (= very mild term) me to be baptised, by telling me everything Chinese is cursed and damned to hell. (He himself is a Chinese.) That ignited my love of everything Chinese.

I am "offended" that you considered him devoted rather than deluded! Just kidding! But, yes, being a Christian [(Eastern) Orthodox - (東)正教會], I would say that the guy is misguided. Isn't it great that even behind the darked cloud, there is a silver lining i.e. because of his wrong belief, you were "provoked" to love your own heritage?

Besides, in Form 5 Malay Literature, there is a poem called Dirgahayu Bahasa.

Oh, so "dirgahayu" (meaning: "panjang umur" -> long live) is used in Malaysia too. From the word structure, I believe it is not a Malay word, most probably Old Javanese.

When I stood up and refuted her (yeah, I am recklessly brave when it comes to raising awareness of Hokkien-is-a-proper-language-too ideology, even if that means offending the teacher and risking your grades) by writing 桌頂 for toh-teng - a random request of the teacher, she snorted by saying that is Chinese, not Hokkien. She wants me to represent Hokkien in "Hokkien script". And, I admit I am a little bit VERY rude, I proceed to writing: 先生無相信福建會用唐人字寫，當今我用唐人字寫… I didn't have the time to finish it - I was called off.

Bravo!

[Ah-bin]

Well done Yeleixingfeng! That's a wonderful story!

Of course, if the teacher was saying things in English you could have also corrected her by noting that a dialect is by definition "a variant of a language", so Standard Mandarin must also be classed as a "dialect". Unfortunately Chinese "fangyan" is not quite so democratic, and usually excludes the state "language".

Polite Hokkien still exists in Taiwan, and it existed in China as well. Have you managed to get hold of a copy (digitised or otherwise) of Douglas and Barclay? That has many polite words and expressions in it.

[amhoanna]

I agree with most of what's just been said here. A few things I want to add:

1) Cantonese vs. Hoklo; vitality, etc. -- I agree with what Mark said. The topic also brings to mind "the tradition of southern kingship" in the Canton area. Time and again, there've been wealthy sovereign states based around here. I think this is part of the cultural DNA. I recommend Ah-bin and his colleagues' papers, for those who haven't read some of them yet. They discuss these things. Is there hope for Hokkien? Maybe a new "tradition of island rebel kingship"?

2) The effects of Mandarin -- I won't really get into this here. I just realized the other day that although most "Amoy Taiwanese" pronunciations have gone away in Taiwan in favor of Ciangciu pronunciations, there are several that are still used by lots of people: chē (SEEK), coē (MANY), etc. What do these have in common? No Mandarin cognate! Is it possible that hoé for FIRE won out over hé b/c it's more similar to the Mandarin? U heard it here first.

3) "Shallow-variant" Hokkien -- I agree, I think most Straits Hokkien and North Straits Hokkien as spoken by young people is a shallow variant. This is why even Indians and Malays in M'sia have told me that Hokkien is easier to learn than Canto, whereas the man on the street in Tn̂gsoaⁿ believes the opposite. I think this shallowness is good in one sense and maybe bad in another. It's good in the sense that it levels out the rampant exceptions and grammatical complexity of "original Hokkien". It's maybe bad in the sense that much of the "original Hokkien" vocab is dropped. Comparing Banlamese with Teochew, and then Canto, we find so much unique Banlamese vocab. This is the vocab that's been dropped, not only in the Straits of Melaka ports, but also in Tn̂gsoaⁿ contact zones like Lo̍k'hong and Lâm'ò. The result is that the vocabulary skews toward "General Old South Chinese". One last comment on this, though. There are lots of middle-aged (not old) people in M'sia/Sg that speak "deep-variant" Hokkien, right? Take for example the loan shark in MONEY NO ENOUGH (Jack Neo). He was speaking pretty deep Hokkien, right? Or maybe he just fooled this non-native?

Once again, great to hear the Malay-country perspectives.

An interesting appendix to this thread would be something I saw on the same site that hosts the Tai-Hoa dictionary: a Hokkien POJ math textbook from a hundred-odd yrs ago. It was printed in Amoy or around there. All the math terminology was pure, original, uncut Hokkien. Even the examples in the book had a Hoklospheric slant, like if a certain ship travels at a certain speed, and the distance from Ēmn̂g to "Pin'nn̂gsū" is however much, then how many days will it take the ship to arrive?

[Ah-bin]

3) "Shallow-variant" Hokkien -- I agree, I think most Straits Hokkien and North Straits Hokkien as spoken by young people is a shallow variant. This is why even Indians and Malays in M'sia have told me that Hokkien is easier to learn than Canto, whereas the man on the street in Tn̂gsoaⁿ believes the opposite

I would say it's because North Straits Hokkien is creolised to some extent, because of longer contact with Malay and longer use as a lingua franca among different groups. It's like Baba Malay compared to Classical Malay (but Hokkien grammar has changed less than Baba has from Classical)

It's also I think because NS Hokkien is inclined to express things in a simple manner constructing ideas from more common spoken words, where Cantonese takes words and expressions directly from written Chinese (usually written Mandarin) and pronounces them according to Cantonese. Hokkien makes better use of its own resources.

Example:
"cho chhan e lang" = farmer Cantonese and Amoy Hokkien prefer their versions of 農夫 農民, but I bet "cho chhan e" is what ordinary Hoklo speakers were saying 200 years ago, and Cantonese and Mandarin used to say it differently too.

Just because creole languages (n.b. distinguish from pidgins) have a smaller base vocabulary, people tend to look down on them or consider them easier, but they forget that everything can be expressed in these languages, even the individual words do not exist. Why does Hokkien have to have a word for "accommodation"? when "koe ME e ui" does just as well (and in fewer syllables)? There are subtleties in Northern Straits Hokkien expressed by particles and intonation that are incredibly hard for an outsider to learn properly. "Soah" is one example, and I was thinking today about the difference between "m-thang" and "be-sai" and I still have no idea what it is.

In my experience mostly people will say things are harder to learn when they are not used to them. Not because they are actually harder to learn. People used to tell me all the time when i was first in Taiwan and learning Hakka "Oh Hakka is so hard to learn compared to Taiwanese" - they had no idea about the complexities of tone sandhi in Taiwanese compared to the very limited changes in Hakka, and they just said it was difficult because they weren't used to speaking it themselves. Of course there are degrees of difficulty (Wenzhou tone sandhi looks impossible, and Georgian grammar does too) but people's perceptions about complexity don't necessarily reflect actual linguistic complexity.

[SimL]

In my experience mostly people will say things are harder to learn when they are not used to them. Not because they are actually harder to learn. People used to tell me all the time when i was first in Taiwan and learning Hakka "Oh Hakka is so hard to learn compared to Taiwanese" - they had no idea about the complexities of tone sandhi in Taiwanese compared to the very limited changes in Hakka, and they just said it was difficult because they weren't used to speaking it themselves.

Hear, hear! The other way round (but making exactly the same point), I met a very intelligent, artistic man in a cafe in Amsterdam once. He was a photographer and came from Taiwan. When I said Chinese characters were difficult to learn, he say "Nonsense, that's what many people think, but it's not true. It's no more difficult than learning to write Dutch."

He knew Chinese fluently, and knew no Dutch, so he felt that this was the case. But Dutch is very well spelled, with almost no inconsistencies or doubtful cases, and we have already spoken enough about the difficulties of learning (and remembering) Chinese characters. [Note: I'm not talking about the ease or otherwise of learning the Dutch or Chinese *language* (i.e. the forms, what to say, how to say them, vocabularly items, etc). I'm talking only about how, if you have learnt a Dutch or Chinese word or sentence, how hard or easy it is to remember how to write (or read) it.]

So yes, people's pronouncements on linguistic matters (especially if they have no special interest in language(s) or linguistics) are notoriously inaccurate.

[amhoanna]

Hokkien makes better use of its own resources.

Just because creole languages (n.b. distinguish from pidgins) have a smaller base vocabulary, people tend to look down on them or consider them easier, but they forget that everything can be expressed in these languages, even the individual words do not exist.

Totally agree! Creoles do it better. They make U move your mind. As long as the "creolees" don't short-circuit themselves and start sucking ten-cent loanwords in through a boba straw. Not sure if "Country Cantonese" is really "that bad"...

Then again, maybe there's something about Homo sapiens, something almost biological, that makes us look down on the smooth, lean elegance of a creole?

One last thing. I still think Straits Hokkien is easier to learn to use than "original Hokkien". I will even guess that it's easier to master than original Hokkien. Just as many tough nuances are right there in original Hokkien too... Along with way more exceptions that make no sense, and more vocab, etc. I think this actually makes Straits Hokkien more compelling. It seems "extra-human". It was "built for communication". Hopefully the Hoklo Renaissance will take that route.

[niuc]

... 桌頂 for toh-teng - a random request of the teacher, she snorted by saying that is Chinese, not Hokkien. She wants me to represent Hokkien in "Hokkien script".

Though in many contexts the term Chinese means Mandarin, but in context like this I think we can argue that Chinese is not limited to Mandarin, and 漢字 is not merely "Mandarin script".

Unfortunately Chinese "fangyan" is not quite so democratic, and usually excludes the state "language".

My impression, not sure how accurate, is that we can call Mandarin a 方言 "fangyan", or at least saying that 國語/普通話 is actually from 北京方言. Or am I wrong?

Is it possible that hoé for FIRE won out over hé b/c it's more similar to the Mandarin? U heard it here first.

Good analysis, lets see! Does it mean that generally speaking, Ciangciu pronunciations are closer to Mandarin?

There are lots of middle-aged (not old) people in M'sia/Sg that speak "deep-variant" Hokkien, right? Take for example the loan shark in MONEY NO ENOUGH (Jack Neo). He was speaking pretty deep Hokkien, right? Or maybe he just fooled this non-native?

Not too many, if my impression is correct. Yet may be due to work environment etc, those I know mostly speak Mandarin.

An interesting appendix to this thread would be something I saw on the same site that hosts the Tai-Hoa dictionary: a Hokkien POJ math textbook from a hundred-odd yrs ago. It was printed in Amoy or around there. All the math terminology was pure, original, uncut Hokkien. Even the examples in the book had a Hoklospheric slant, like if a certain ship travels at a certain speed, and the distance from Ēmn̂g to "Pin'nn̂gsū" is however much, then how many days will it take the ship to arrive?

Wow, great! So there was textbook, even math, in Hokkien! With the centralization, I guess even now the Mandarin textbooks hardly mention about 廈門. Taiwanese mostly know the history of China (Mainland) instead of Taiwan, right? In Indonesian history books, we learned about empires of Srivijaya, Majapahit and many Javanese kingdoms, but hardly about Riau or Kalimantan or eastern provinces.

"cho chhan e lang" = farmer Cantonese and Amoy Hokkien prefer their versions of 農夫 農民, but I bet "cho chhan e" is what ordinary Hoklo speakers were saying 200 years ago, and Cantonese and Mandarin used to say it differently too.

We heard both in Bagansiapiapi, but it seems that the former is indeed the ordinary one.

Just because creole languages (n.b. distinguish from pidgins) have a smaller base vocabulary, people tend to look down on them or consider them easier, but they forget that everything can be expressed in these languages, even the individual words do not exist. Why does Hokkien have to have a word for "accommodation"? when "koe ME e ui" does just as well (and in fewer syllables)?

The problem with Hokkien-Teochew spoken in Singapore now is that lots of people just use Mandarin or English terms. So most would just say "accommodation" and not even "koe ME e ui". [Btw is this still considered a creole?] This is why most think that Hokkien is outdated and incapable of expressing lots of things.

[amhoanna]

Does it mean that generally speaking, Ciangciu pronunciations are closer to Mandarin?

I think it has something to do with the Sinification of Ciangciu. It happened in Tn̂g times. There was input from local "Hans" (Coânciu lâng, if U will) as well as Hans from points north. The resulting dialect was a step closer to the Tn̂g koine than Coânciu was. And the Tn̂g koine is the mother of the Hoklo literary layer. This Tn̂g koine happens to be closer to Mandarin than pre-Tn̂g Hoklo elements are (to Mandarin).

Take 地 EARTH for example. The Ciangciu pronunciation is tē in all cases, but in Coânciu it's tē in the literary layer, but toē (right?) in the colloquial.

...

TW Hoklo also has cohsitlâng alongside cohchânlâng / cohchân--ê, plus literary lôngbîn.

I'll have to look for the math textbook sometime... It's really interesting to look at, and to think about the kinds of people that wrote it and used it.

With the centralization, I guess even now the Mandarin textbooks hardly mention about 廈門.

People everywhere need to assert themselves in their own history. Hanoi has lots of stories, Amoy less stories, and Cyhoi (Zhuhai) hardly any. And we get the "New Chinese" myth that if U just build the right buildings and roads, the city will happen. And, it always surprises me how Hokkien geography doesn't play any part in Hoklo folklore. As for the situation in TW, it's sad indeed.

[Ah-bin]

My impression, not sure how accurate, is that we can call Mandarin a 方言 "fangyan", or at least saying that 國語/普通話 is actually from 北京方言. Or am I wrong?

We can, of course, but PRC scholars either don't (or aren't allowed to) call 普通話 "fangyan" for them is is always 語言 and "fangyan" is used for any related. Only in Chinese translations of English books like Trudgill's "Sociolinguistics" actually point out that a dialect is "any variation of a language", not just a non-standardised or localised one, but any prestige version or standardised version as well.

One last thing. I still think Straits Hokkien is easier to learn to use than "original Hokkien". I will even guess that it's easier to master than original Hokkien. Just as many tough nuances are right there in original Hokkien too... Along with way more exceptions that make no sense, and more vocab, etc. I think this actually makes Straits Hokkien more compelling. It seems "extra-human". It was "built for communication". Hopefully the Hoklo Renaissance will take that route.

Ah well, if you explain it like that, I don't think I can really disagree!

[Mark Yong]

Yeleixingfeng wrote:
By the way, Mark, why do you say that the grammar of Hokkien is more different from Mandarin than Cantonese?

I gave my original post a bit more thought, and realised that I might have made an incorrect statement there. The relative-bigger difference between Hokkien and Mandarin vs. between Cantonese and Mandarin is lexical, not so much grammatical. We already have a plethora of examples in the literature and throughout this Forum, so I shall avail myself of listing any examples!

My bad, I was trying to paraphrase Jerry Norman's book "Chinese" without actually having the book in front of me! Anyway, to put things in proper context, I dug out the citation online, it reads:
"In the mountainous areas of Fujian and Guangdong, the Old Southern Chinese element has survived to a greater degree, to the maximum extent in Min, somewhat less so in Kejia, and only vestigially in Yue." (Norman 1988:214)