Getting angry in Penang Hokkien

[SimL]

I've discussed with Sim sometimes about how to write the word khí-hōng "to get angry", and my instinct when I heard it was to write 起風, but Sim pointed out that the tone is different, (hòng or hōng, not hong)...

and

I think it's to do with the fact that in Penang Hokkien you often 起風共儂 khí-hng kah lâng, (get angry WITH people), and it causes the tone of "hong" to sandhi to "hōng".

and

I'm not sure this is the reason (i.e. I'm still not sure it's from 風). If we look at "khi kiaN ka i" (起行共伊) - "go and walk with him", or "khi ciah ka i" (起食共伊) - "go and eat with him", then we don't see any tone-sandhi on the 行 and 食. Now, I do acknowledge that these may be grammatically (but primarily semantically) slightly different from the proposed 起風共儂, but I still think that this should be taken into consideration.

After thinking about this a bit further, I want to retract my statement / counter-argument. This is not so much because I think it's wrong (it's not), but because I realised that I don't say khí-hōng or khí-hòng anyway, but rather khí-hông. That being the case, it can't be the sandhi-tone of anything, as tone-5 is not the sandhi-tone of any tone in Penang Hokkien (hence sort of removing the need for me to provide a counter-argument).

So, we need to find a syllable pronounced hông in citation tone (based on the argument I just retracted ). aokh1979's 惶 does fit the pronunciation and tone, but I'm not sure if the meaning fits well enough (I acknowledge that it is close in meaning).

[SimL]

It's another possibility, but I see 癀 is also a different tone (hông) as well, so it could be 氣癀 with a changed tone as well.

Don't know how I missed seeing this earlier! Indeed, combined with my assertion that I in fact do pronounce it with a tone-5, I think we have the solution!

Furthermore, I found in the Douglas with handwritten characters (p153): 癀 hoat4-hong5 burning with rage.

[aokh1979]

發癀 is my example for the 癀 where it matches perfectly with the hong we're searching.

However, 癀 is a disease, a sickness. It does not make much sense to me if khi-hong is 氣癀 or 起癀...... Personal opinion, I will vote for 惶 as "worry" or 遑 as "hurry".

I live in China. When someone's furious at me, we say in Mandarin: 他跟我急......

遑 is explained as 急也 in 說文解字 and the pronunciation should be exactly the same as 癀 or 惶......

Your thought ?

[SimL]

Hi aokh1979,

Sorry, I missed seeing your posting of 癀 also. I don't have an opinion about either 癀 or 遑 or 惶 because my knowledge of Chinese characters is very, very basic. I tend to trust the people in the field who know more about it than me. For me, that's Douglas, Barclay, and Mark Yong. If Mark cares to comment on this, then I'd value his opinion a lot. Other than that, I'm happy to use whichever one most other people are using.

When you say "癀 is a disease, a sickness", do you mean that you know it as a Hokkien word with this meaning? Or do you say that because it has the "disease" radical? (Please forgive my ignorance of Hokkien.) Or perhaps because of its meaning in Mandarin or Cantonese.

If you are basing it only on the meaning of the radical, then I think it is wise to be cautious. After all, 瘦 shou4 in Mandarin has the "disease" radical too, but it only means "thin". Of course, one can see the connection - if one is sick then one could become very thin, but still, the presence of the radical itself doesn't mean that the character is necessarily related to disease. Similarly, I feel that the meaning of 癀 in either Mandarin or Cantonese shouldn't weigh too heavily in deciding whether it's suitable for writing the "hong5" of "khi-hong" in Hokkien. After all, we know also that the meaning of a character can drift in relation to other dialects; the classic example being 走 for "walk" in Mandarin and "run" in Hokkien. (If I recall correctly, it's the Mandarin meaning which has drifted, and the Hokkien one preserves the original, but I may be wrong.)

[aokh1979]

Hi SimL:

I know it's a disease based on a few things.

You're right, from its radical 疒 which relates 99.99% (dare not say 100% but I believe so) to sickness. 瘦 does mean thin, and that's a sickness because traditionally, Chinese believe 瘦 is due to malnutrition. 瘦 is used on human and animals. When it comes to describing a pen or even a plant, we usually tend to use 細 if those things are "meant to be" thin. However, if the ground is not fertile, we do in fact say it's 瘦田. You can see that 瘦 does express sickness.

癀 is 疸病. I was sick by 黃病 when I was born, my whole body was yellowish. I have not seen anyone with 黃病 in my life, but that's what I know from my mother. Hoat-Hong is "swelling". Therefore, I personally do not think 癀 is the right character for khi-hong. Funny enough, I ask around all my Hokkien friends from all over the province, different cities, including Teochew from Guangdong, so far none of them comes back with khi-hong. The term seems somewhat unique to Malaysia, or just Penang ? Perhaps, friends of mine have all been heavily "brainwashed" by Mandarin.


There are tons of characters used in Mandarin that do not make any (or much) sense to me. I truly believe that, when Chinese characters were created - there were rules and pattern. So I tend to think in Hokkien each time I come across any unreasonable character. Like 短 means "short" in Mandarin, but it's not a commonly used word in Hokkien. Besides, all characters with 豆 basically sound similar, like 逗, 頭, 鋀, 荳 etc, except 短. I believe it was a corruption when Hu and Manchu people tried to pronounce Han language in the past, when they took over northern region. And during that time, Hokkien should be the official language used.

Feel free to correct me if you think I am not making sense.

[SimL]

Thanks for taking the time to give your explanation. You made complete sense!

So, there are a number of alternatives for the "khi-hong" problem. We can continue looking for the "correct" character, but seeing as the usage is so restricted (not even the south of mainland Malaysia uses it), perhaps it's not even worth doing this. Alternatively, we can just agree on one of the candidates and "misuse" it. I'm not against that solution, because I believe in a practical approach. I think it's much more important to get Hokkien spoken and written, even slightly "incorrectly" (either grammatically, in terms of vocabulary, borrowed words from other languages, borrowed characters, etc, etc) than to sit around and watch it die out. (I am not however avocating "anything goes", as I've tried to point out in the past - standards and good/careful usage are important.) Yet another alternative is that we can coin our own character, and use it. But in this modern age of computer standards and Unicode encoding, this seems like quite a pointless direction to go in. There are already so many "dialect" characters needed for Hokkien which haven't yet been accepted in Unicode. Am I right in thinking that this is one of the areas of interest to you? If so, then I encourage you to try and get as many of them accepted as possible!

[niuc]

Hi Aokh1979 & Sim

Aokh: Thanks for the 徦 & 挴, it is interesting to know these less known hanji (regardless if they are indeed the original characters for those Hokkien words).

Sim: 發癀 huat4-hong5 in my variant means inflammation (assuming 癀 is the correct hanji). Another homonym 'huat4-hong5' means to get very angry (furious).

Although they are pronounced identically (and 'huat4' in both is 發), I agree with Aokh that 'hong5' should be different. However, I don't think it is 惶. 惶 means fearful, in colloquial is 'hia*5' -> 驚惶 'kia*1-hia*5' = fearful. I am not sure about 遑.

Even 走狗 ('cau2-kau2') in Mandarin (zou3gou3) means running dog (traitor) and not "walking dog", so we can be sure that 走 originally means to run (as it still does in Hokkien).

短 is commonly used as hanji for 'ter2' (short) in Hokkien (ref. http://solution.cs.ucla.edu/~jinbo/dzl/lookup.php & http://203.64.42.21/iug/ungian/SoannTen ... taihoa.asp ). Aokh may be right on possibility of Manchu influence in its pronunciation (duan3 in Mandarin), but I think the meaning is still there, as it is a "combined picture" of an arrow and a bean -> if the arrow has the same length as the bean, it indeed is short!

While it is true that majority of hanji are 像聲 (phono-semantic), many of them at the same time are also 像形(pictographic) or 會意(ideographic), e.g. head is 頭, with the phonetic part linked to 豆 (bean) rather than (part of) 斗, 投, 兜, 偷, because the shape of head is more similar to 豆 rather than 斗 etc.

Aokh: 黃病 'ng5-pi*7' is jaundice, I got it too as a child and recovered after eating quite many doses of Chinese medicine, but yours is neonatal jaundice (usually harmless). Anyway, it seems to be rare nowadays.

[SimL]

Hi Niuc,

Another homonym 'huat4-hong5' means to get very angry (furious).

Wonderful to know this! The "hong5" here is almost definitely the same one as Penang Hokkien "khi2-hong5". I now accept both your and Aokh's assertion that this should be different from 癀.

Even 走狗 ('cau2-kau2') in Mandarin (zou3gou3) means running dog (traitor) and not "walking dog", so we can be sure that 走 originally means to run (as it still does in Hokkien).

I'm glad you pointed this out to me. It will be a good way for me to remember from now on which dialect has the original meaning.

While it is true that majority of hanji are 像聲 (phono-semantic), many of them at the same time are also 像形(pictographic) or 會意(ideographic), ...

I've always wondered why 海 is pronounced "hai3", when most of the similar characters I know are pronounced "mei" (每, 梅, 霉, 莓). I checked zhongwen.com, and it turns out that 每 isn't functioning as a phonetic in this case. It's contributing a semantic meaning, along with the radical: it's "where ALL 每 WATER 氵 goes"!

[SimL]

PS. Actually, it appears to be my lack of knowledge of Chinese characters which made me wonder this... I did some more investigation, and it turns out that there are quite a lot of characters based on 每 which are not pronounced "mei": 海 (hai3), 悔 (hui3), 侮 (wu3), 晦 (hui4), 毓 (yu4), 誨 (hui4), 烸 (hai3).

[niuc]

Hi Sim

The top part of 每 "every" (ref. zhongwen.com) is derived from a blade of grass. That probably is historically correct. Some suggest that the top part resembles 人, so the character is a combination of 人 and 母, "every human has a mother". Similarly "warm" 溫 can be written as 温, so water 氵 inside a vessel 皿 under the sun 日. This is probably historically incorrect (pseudo-etymology), but it helps us to remember the meaning of the word more easily.