Hoklo in Canto Land, reports from the field

[Mark Yong]

In Penang Hokkien, there is a bit of a grey area in the use of thėh, the character of which I have so far assumed to be 提:

1. The normal/default meaning is simply 'to take', in the specific context of retrieving something (to distinguish it from 'gia').
2. The extended meaning is 'to steal', e.g. thėh lang e lui 提儂【之】鐳. It is actually a contraction of thau-thėh 偷提.

[SimL]

So much to reply to!

Indeed! I think Yeleixingfeng is partially responsible, because he stimulates us with his ideas as a new member.

I've always had lots of rats in my bins, but I've never checked if any are actually shrews.

Yeah, hard to really tell, as one has to have a close look at the nose.

Yes, taking photos is always hip siauN-eng

I'm beginning to suspect that "theh foto" might be restricted to my family! As discussed in an earlier thread, I pronounce(d) it "sO1_eng2", and used to wonder what that "sO" was. Other Forum members (Ah-bin?) - and my newly improved knowledge of Mandarin - made me realise that it's "image". [I don't pronounce the "sO" with any nasalization, so without knowing the equivalent Mandarin characters, I would never have been able to even begin to guess.]

I use joȧh and kún for hot and scalding respectively. Sio sounds very TW/Sg.

Yes, used as an adjective, it has a very non-Penang feel about it. But quite normal as a verb, of course: "i cu-ciah e si tioh sio" (= "(s)he got burnt while cooking").

Poat-tó and kā-laúh to me are clearly different, though I have heard someone say poat-tó instead of kā-laúh once.

Both you and Mark have said "poat", whereas I've always thought of it as "poah". Perhaps that's contamination for "poah-kiau" (= "gambling"), where it really is a "-h". The etymology site seems to think that both the falling one and the gambling one are the same character though. [Though of course there's nothing to stop it being pronounced "poah" in the gambling sense (which it undoubtedly is), and "poat" in the falling sense, so you and Mark could still be right.]

I would say giâ/thėh lui - I don't really distinguish between thėh and giâ.

That's exactly what I thought of my own usage too, until Mark pointed out his nice little subtlety about "stealing". Indeed, "e! lu-e mah bo kah lu kong be-sai cin-chai theh pa(t)-lang e mih-kiaN" (= "hey! didn't your mother tell you that you can't just take other people's things?") is fine, whereas I would not be inclined to say *"e! lu-e mah bo kah lu kong be-sai cin-chai gia pa(t)-lang e mih-kiaN". Other than that, in "normal" uses of taking (i.e. just picking up some object and moving it somewhere else), I too use "theh" and "gia" interchangeably.

Yeleixingfeng - I have Douglas/Barclay on my computer, but it's 1GB, so you'll have to wait till the next time I'm in Penang.

I'm planning on asking the very friendly owner of the Chinese bookshop (here in Chinatown, Amsterdam) if he knows a book binder in Amsterdam who will print and bind from pdf files. If so, I intend to get my with-hanzi Douglas printed and bound. I'm fed up of failing to look up some interesting Hokkien word, just because I haven't got the PC booted. Also, I think that with a physical copy, I'll be more inclined to browse through it in my spare time, and in this way learn a lot more about Hokkien. Of course, I browse the non-hanzi version, which I have at home, but the characters in Douglas are the big bonus in the pdf version. [Yeleixingfeng: you may not like one aspect of the characters in Douglas (and Barclay as well), namely some of them are "borrowed for meaning, based (probably) on normal usage of the time", rather than 本字.]

[niuc]

What I meant to type was 乳罩.

Oh, this one, yes I ever heard, but much rarer than 胸罩.

It means "to accept bribes", right? As in: "hi(t) (l)e ma1_ta5 ciah lui e" (= "that policeman accepts bribes").

Yes, it does.

**: I say "approximately" / "borrowed into Hokkien" because otherwise it would be "ko(u)" rather than "kO"... (or maybe the difference is just part of the pun, as puns don't have to be exact homonyms...)

From what I heard in Taiwanese tv, some (who usually speak Taiwanese Hokkien) pronounce Mandarin "kou" as "kO".

LOL! Love of coarse humour, a trait of the Hokkiens ??? .

Great jokes! I believe most like coarse humours that actually are about misunderstanding (like all the jokes cited in this forum), rather than those of another type which sound polite but actually perverted.

Beside ka-laùh & puàh-tó, do you guys use chia-tó (usually used for fluid)?

[SimL]

What I meant to type was 乳罩.

Oh, this one, yes I ever heard, but much rarer than 胸罩.

Ah, thanks. How much confusion I caused, by getting it wrong in the first place. [BTW, I think my mistake is one consequence of Chinese characters less reflecting the pronunciation: if English had been a foreign language to me, and I had just learnt the word "robot" in English, I would never make the mistake of typing it as "botro" and not notice for so long! I knew - and was saying in my head - "ru3zhao4"; I wasn't misremembering and saying "zhao4ru3".]

Beside ka-laùh & puàh-tó, do you guys use chia-tó (usually used for fluid)?

Yes, definitely. For me, it's the equivalent of English "spill" (but for cups of coffee or buckets of water, not for an "oil spill" from a tanker). [Though the use of the word "spill" in the latter context is also a bit 'stretched' from its core meaning in English. In a pure physical sense, these events are more "leaks" than "spills" (though perhaps "leaks" de-emphasizes the amount and how serious it is, and hence "spill" is used.]

Example sentences with "chia-to" (because I know Ah-bin likes example sentences ):

1. "i an-nE se-han nia - bo kau lat - be taN an-nE tua thang e cui, sua(h) chia-to ka liau khi" (= "He's only so small and weak, trying to carry such large buckets of water, he spilled it all"). 伊 an-nE 小漢 nia - 無夠力 - be 擔 an-nE 大桶的水, sua(h) chia-倒到了去. (If anyone feels called to supply more TLJ for this sentence, please do!)

2. "i bo a-gak / la-sa i-e ko-pi e an-nE juah. i lim e si, thng-tioh i-e chui, i tioh chEN-kiaN ka sua(h) chia-to khi" (= "he didn't realise his coffee would be so hot; when he drank it, he scalded his mouth and got such a fright that he spilled it").

Notes:

1. In sentence 1, the "be" is bueh4" = "to want to", not "be7" (= "to not be able to"). Notice how "be" in this sense can be used to indicate "to try to", which is something Ah-bin has been looking for ways of expressing in (Penang) Hokkien.

2. In sentence 2, "a3_gah4" and "la3_sa2" are from Malay "agak" (= "estimate"), and "rasa" (= "feel", "sense", "taste"). The latter borrowed and changed in meaning to become "figure, reckon, realise, think", and used very largely in the negative "bo3/7_la3_sa2" (= "didn't realise, didn't reckon", etc).

[amhoanna]

In TW, sio is for liquids and solids, joa̍h is for a general state, like, "It's hot." Sometimes in small restaurants, U hear the staff in the kitchen going "Sio, sio, sio" all the time. It means, "Watch out because I'm crossing this tiny kitchen with hot soup, girls."

Hang (T1) or hanghang is used for WARM, but I'm not sure how broad the usage is, esp. whether or not it applies to the general state context. One word I learned in print was siolō, but nobody ever understood me when I used it except maybe really old people with massive passive vocab.

In TW the general word for TO BURN is hiâⁿ. Plenty of Mandophones use sio instead, or use sio and then correct themselves. In fact one Hoklo writer, I think it was Lokkangsian, said he realized he had to learn POJ and save the Hoklo tongue when he heard one of his kids at home saying "sio cúi" for TO BOIL WATER. But I think the correct verb for TO BURN PAPER OFFERINGS is sio.

Poa̍htó should be correct, pan-Hoklo. In TW, glottal stop endings tend to disappear in "running/sandhi position", so from the TWese pronunciation of poa̍htó (same as if it were "poātó"), it's pretty clear that poa̍htó and not poa̍ttó is the underlying set-up.

[SimL]

In TW the general word for TO BURN is hiâⁿ.

Wow! In my usage, it's specifically restricted to boiling water, i.e. the verb of putting the kettle on. But then, I don't know if I get this from my Amoyish mother, or if it is genuine Penang Hokkien usage. Mark, Andrew, care to comment?

[Mark Yong]

Same here. The only time I have heard, and use, hiâⁿ is in 燃水 hiâⁿ-cui. But again, that is based on my limited 6 years of regular exposure to Penang Hokkien.

[niuc]

Hiâⁿ 燃 in my variant is mainly used for boiling water. It is also used to mean heating up for soup and those with gravy e.g. ló·-bah. For cooking soup, ló·-bah, etc, we say 煮 cí· or 炕 khòng.

Other words' usage are as described by Amhoanna. 'Hang' 烘 in my variant is also used for heating up. Che· 炊 is used for both cooking rice/cake and heating up by steaming. Sio-lō is used in my variant, usually repeated as sio-lō sio-lō.

[SimL]

Hi Mark and niuc,

Thanks for sharing your usage of "hiaN5".

For cooking soup, ló·-bah, etc, we say 煮 cí· or 炕 khòng.

In my family, we have a series of dishes called "<X> khong1_a3_sam1", where <X> = "hu5" (= "fish"), or "hE5" (= "prawn"), etc (or even some specific fish sort); and "a3_sam1" is simply the Malay "asam jawa" (= "tamarind"). [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamarind]

Now, I've never thought about what the "khong" might mean, because I never knew the word in any other context than with this range of dishes. For me, it's not a "free morpheme", which can be combined with other words, so I never thought of it as having any particular meaning (one only needs to think about the meaning of a word if one wants to freely combine it with a whole variety of others).

So, for all I knew, it might have meant "combined with", or "marinated in", or anything; but I never really thought about it.

Now - out of the blue, in another context - I learn that it has the meaning of "to cook" (which of course makes sense in my context). So, this is all very enlightening to me.

This is one of the reasons I love this Forum!

[SimL]

... I think you will also be disappointed to know that with the heavy industrialisation of Bayan Lepas, the number of snakes at the Snake Temple has dwindled to the point where you will be lucky to even see more than two or three (and that includes the one that is deliberately handled by the caretaker in the back room for the tourists to see). .

Hi Mark,

Thank you for sharing that. Indeed, I am sad to hear this. However, this new piece of information does actually *detract* from a theory / belief which I have had for the past 30 years.

You may or may not recall that I wrote about the Penang Snake Temple in a reply to one of Ah-bin's threads - about 白無常 - at the beginning of this year:

- viewtopic.php?f=6&t=11050

In it, I said the following:

[In contrast, I remember being probably in my late teens before it struck me as being "scientifically unlikely" that the snakes at the famous Penang Snake Temple would all crawl out of the jungle and gather at the temple on the day of the god's birthday. I was listening to a conversation between my parents and uncles and aunts, and they were talking about this annual phenomenon. One of them said: "Of course, the temple authorities place the snakes there overnight, the night before his birthday". It was only when I heard the statement that I thought "Hey, that's probably true". Up to that moment, I had cheerfully accepted the story as being true - part of my inner wish to have "magical things" exist in the universe, I guess.]

Now, your new piece of information would imply that the snakes - on non-feast days, in any event - actually do come from the surrounding countryside. So, my theory for the last 30 years (since my "eye opening" experience in my late teens) - that the temple authorities got the snakes commercially, and planted them there for gullible worshippers - might actually be wrong! For, if they could plant them for the sake of the feast day, they could plant them for the rest of the year...

So, maybe my pre-late-teens belief - that these snakes really are attracted to some spiritual aspect of the place - is not completely whacky after all.

While writing this, I realised that I actually don't know much about the background of the snakes in that temple (probably part of not being able to read Chinese, especially in my youth). My original belief (i.e. up to my late teens) - and that of my parents and uncles and aunts in the story quoted above - was that there is a "Snake God", who is the main deity of that temple (and for whom the snakes came to the temple generally, and in larger numbers during his birthday). Does this bear any relationship to what the "official" reason is for the presence of the snakes in the temple?

Perhaps even a visitor like Ah-bin could supply me with the information. Note that I'm not asking if there is a Snake God in reality(!), only whether that is the common belief / official story for the reason for the snakes in the temple.