Best way to educate people in the Hokkien dialect?

Discussions on the Hokkien (Minnan) language.
Locked
Mark Yong
Posts: 684
Joined: Fri Apr 29, 2005 3:52 pm

Best way to educate people in the Hokkien dialect?

Post by Mark Yong »

Ever since posting some replies to the thread "help with romanisation for Penang Hokkien" (viewtopic.php?p=21566), as well as the following articles in The Star:

1. Penang Hokkien in peril (http://thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?fi ... sec=nation)
2. 'Pass on Penang Hokkien to children' (http://thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?fi ... sec=nation)
3. A dialect that is easy to learn (http://thestar.com.my/metro/story.asp?f ... southneast)

I have been mulling over the subject of the best way to learn the Hokkien dialect.

Now, I am not talking about learning the dialect at a basic, 'bazaar' level - which is, sadly, what the dialect has descended to in the eyes of many speakers. No, I am talking about really learning the dialect properly - correct vocabulary, correct pronunciations and tones, and to a level where the topics of conversation can penetrate more complex areas like politics, economy and technology - and not just the weather, your health and the neighbour's gossip.


Insofar as this Forum goes, I have noted that there are basically two (2) groups of contributors:

1. The 'elite' group, who are sufficiently-scholared in Hokkien - having spoken the dialect as their native dialect and, even better, if they are educated in the Chinese language. Hence, this group does not really require any significant amount of education in Hokkien, except perhaps to clarify a few things here-and-there.

2. The 'beginner' group, who participate in the Forum with little or no knowledge of Hokkien, and hope to learn the dialect here. I venture to guess that in many cases, the group does not end up learning very much, because the information contained in the Forum may be too high a level for them to grasp or appreciate, and they eventually end up being marginalised to some degree.

So, the question is, how do we educate Group #2 to a high-enough level comparable to Group #1? And correspondingly, how do we develop a model for Group #1 to facilitate discussion, dissemination of knowledge and finally, perpetuation of the dialect by means of a structured and formalised system/model of education?


In very rough terms, I can only think of four (4) possible models for teaching the dialect to a high level:

1. The Classical / Literary Chinese model

Throughout the history of the Chinese language, most of the dialects have not been written. At least not in a formal or serious contexts, anyway, and limited to plays and notes. Up until the May 9th Movement, if Hokkien was ever 'read' at all, it was in Classical Chinese, and read using the literal pronunciations (文讀 wendu).

The basis for the viability of this model lies in the fact of its long history. The literal pronunciations (文讀 wendu) of words have preserved the so-called 'correct' sounds of Hokkien pronunciations for words, thus providing a stable 'standard'. An example of the preservation of the literal pronunciations (文讀 wendu) today is in proper names for people.

Also, this model preserves many of the archaic terminologies once used in Old Chinese, that are no longer found in Standard Modern Chinese, yet still extant in Hokkien.

The disadvantage of this model lies in its being dated. The vocabulary is trapped in the pre-modern era, and lacks many of the modern creations. The obvious way around this problem is simply to adopt the modern terminology as they are, and simply map the morphemes to the corresponding Hokkien pronunciations.

In addition, the identification of these etymologically-correct Chinese characters, however, remains an ongoing exercise for Sinologists, and a possible stumbling block if one aspires to write completely and correctly in Hokkien using Chinese characters (and even this is impossible, given the large number of morphemes without any, or currently-known and correctly-identifiable Chinese characters, e.g. ch'it-th'o "to play".

Therefore, the prerequisite for reading and writing in this model would have to be the exclusion of all morphemes without known Chinese characters. In this case, not only will these be substituted with the Classical Chinese equivalents, but will also be read exactly as they are written, using Hokkien pronunciation.

E.g. "He played with his friend"
彼與其友玩 pi u kh'i iu uan

2. The Modern Standard Chinese model

This is the model adopted in Hong Kong today. The grammar and vocabulary is essentially Modern Standard Chinese (Mandarin), but read out using Cantonese pronunciation.

The obvious advantage of this model lies in its ability to allow the dialect to keep up in parallel (or at least almost-parallel) with the evolution of Modern Standard Chinese, especially in the ever-expanding stockpile of new technical and commercial jargon. Texts written in Chinese by the Hokkien speaker, because they follow the Modern Standard Chinese model, would be comprehensible to other readers in China and around the world.

Also, the adoption of this model means that the reader need only map the pronunciations to words in the Modern Standard Chinese vocabulary only, and can do away with those words peculiar to Hokkien, many of whose Chinese characters have been obscured by time. This is the case with Hong Kong, e.g. "things" is in spoken Cantonese, but is written (and correspondingly read out) as 東西 tung-sai per Modern Standard Mandarin.

The disadvantage of this model lies in the extreme distance between the vocabulary and grammar of Modern Standard Mandarin - based upon the Northern dialect - and Hokkien. This is already apparent in the Hong Kong model - one only has to listen to pop songs being sung word-for-word in Cantonese to hear the stifled awkwardness. But it will be even more severe with Hokkien, whose vocabulary and grammar is even more divorced from the Northern dialect than Cantonese is.

As per the first model, all morphemes without known Chinese characters will be substituted with the Modern Standard Chinese equivalents, and will also be read exactly as they are written, using Hokkien pronunciation.

E.g. "He played with his friend"
他跟他的朋友玩 th'a kun th'a tek peng-iu uan

3. The Romanised colloquial model

This is the model adopted in most of the Romanised texts today. Unlike the above two models, it has the advantage of avoiding the problem of the lack of Chinese characters to represent certain morphemes in Hokkien, thus allowing a complete colloquial sentence to be phrased out just using Romanised alphabet with tonal marks included.

The non-use of Chinese characters also becomes a disadvantage in itself. Because of the large number of homonyms 異義同音字 in the Chinese spoken languages (admittedly more so in Mandarin than Hokkien or the other Southern dialects), it becomes difficult to ascertain which word a Romanised morpheme refers to, unless the context is clear.

Overall, this model suffers the clear disadvantage with respect to to the first two models - which use Chinese characters - by divorcing the dialect from its Chinese roots. The psychological inability to map spoken words to their corresponding Chinese characters will inevitably lead to a weakening of the speakers' vocabulary. For it is common knowledge that there is a direct correlation between one's spoken vocabulary in a language and one's ability to read the language.

E.g. "He played with his friend"
i ka i e peng-iu ch'it-th'o

4. The hybrid colloquial model

This model assumes that the dialect is written in a purely colloquial "as-spoken" fashion. It uses as many etymologically-correct Chinese characters as possible (e.g. writing tue "to follow" as , and not simply using the Mandarin gen1 as a substitute), and supplementing it with some phonetic or Romanised system for morphemes without known Chinese characters. You will find this model adopted in the articles found in some of the Taiwanese websites, e.g. http://www.de-han.org/.

This model would combine the advantages of the use of Chinese characters, while capturing using Romanised alphabets the morphemes un-writable in Chinese characters. This is particularly relevant for the local Malaysian/Singaporean patois of Hokkien, which - whether we like it or not (and here I vehemently declare that I don't! :evil:) has absorbed a significant number of non-Sinitic words.

The disadvantage lies in the messiness of such a hybrid system that combines two writing systems - not very unlike the mixture of Kanji and Kana in Japanese writing (no disrespect meant to the Japanese or their writing system).

Another disadvantage is that it assumes the reader is already familiar with the etymologically-correct Chinese characters for Hokkien-specific words, e.g. 共 for ("and" / "with"). While some characters have already been established by Sinologists and can be accepted as etymologically-correct, many others are still under contention and being researched upon. In Hong Kong, colloquial Cantonese writing uses many Chinese characters employed to represent the sound of Cantonese-specific words, rather than being etymologically-correct.

E.g. "He played with his friend"
伊共伊 e 朋友 ch'it th'o
i ka i e peng-iu ch'it-th'o

The point I am trying to make is, in order to properly educate speakers in Hokkien, there must - amongst other things - be a proper writing system, and preferably one that harks back as much as possible to Hokkien's Chinese roots.


As mentioned in the above thread, the three (3) challenges I see in the formulation of an ideal platform for effective Hokkien dialect education lies in:
1. The onslaught of Mandarin as the standard for Chinese in Malaysia and Singapore.
2. The loss of many etymologically-correct Hanzi for Hokkien words, resulting in the need for substitutes, e.g. incorrect Hanzi, Romanisation.
3. The intrusion of foreign substitute words (many of which I deem unnecessary).

There is a 4th complication. Because the distribution of Hokkiens (and here, I stand guilty of being a tad anachronistic when I refer only to Malaysia and Singapore) in Malaysia and Singapore has not been well-defined, it is difficult to determine which standard colloquial pronunciation to adopt (i.e. 廈門 Amoy, 漳州 Chiang Chiu or 泉州 Chuan Chiu) - without even going further into the sub-groups for the above three! Unless, say in the case of the Northern states (Penang, Kedah, Perlis and the northern half of Perak up till Taiping), one adopts the majority, i.e. 漳州 Chiang Chiu as the standard... likewise for the rest.

The fixing and adoption of fixed standards would, to my mind, solve the problem that our senior Forum member Ong/Hong has pointed out, i.e. the many incorrect pronunciations so prevalent in the Penang Hokkien dialect.


This has been a long post, and without much semblance of order. Just my thoughts (will probably edit this post as I derive more inspiration later!). Comments welcome. After all, we are all here to promote and preserve the Hokkien dialect. And if proper education is not one of the ways, then I don't know what is. :D
Andrew

Re: Best way to educate people in the Hokkien dialect?

Post by Andrew »

I thought I replied to this ages ago, but obviously the post didn't work.

The obvious answer to me would be option no. 5, 伊共伊的朋友[⻌日][⻌月], i.e. a combination of benzi and new/borrowed characters. If your aim is to teach Hokkien, then it seems to me that options 1 and 2 are hopeless. Option 1 could be an optional subject, but to me a combination of 3 and 5 are necessary.

The only issues that arise are:

1. Which romanisation? I think we have no choice but to use that which is most common

2. Which dialect? The benefit of option 5 is being able to use it to represent different Hokkien dialects, so in class students could be taught the Amoy or Taiwanese standard, while continuing to use their local dialect out of class. Alternatively, the local dialect could be taught in class.
Mark Yong
Posts: 684
Joined: Fri Apr 29, 2005 3:52 pm

Re: Best way to educate people in the Hokkien dialect?

Post by Mark Yong »

Andrew wrote:
The obvious answer to me would be option no. 5, 伊共伊的朋友[⻌日][⻌月], i.e. a combination of benzi and new/borrowed characters.
Actually, this is the method that 湯志祥 employed in his 3-volume text on spoken Shanghainese. For all the dialogues featured in the text, every morpheme is assigned a Chinese character - whether or not it is etymologically-correct (but wherever possible, they are correct) - along with the Romanisation and tone numbering. E.g. for the word le (the equivalent of in Shanghainese), he uses the character , borrowed for its sound.

Nowadays I prefer to use 佚佗 over [⻌+日]迌... what do you think? :)
Andrew wrote:
Which romanisation? I think we have no choice but to use that which is most common
This is interesting. Which Romanisation would you consider as the most common? Dictionaries from China appear to use a system somewhat similar to hanyu pinyin, which is different from both the Missionary and Bodman systems.
Andrew wrote:
Which dialect? The benefit of option 5 is being able to use it to represent different Hokkien dialects, so in class students could be taught the Amoy or Taiwanese standard, while continuing to use their local dialect out of class. Alternatively, the local dialect could be taught in class.
For practical reasons, given the different sub-dialects used in different parts of Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and Philippines, I would opt for the local dialect to be used, rather than artificially impose the Amoy/Taiwanese sub-dialect as the standard.

And by 'local dialect', we also have to bear in mind that for instance in Northern Malaysia, the patois is not 100% 漳州 Chiang Chiu, but has intrusions of 廈門 Amoy and 潮州 Teochew. And even within Penang Island itself, there are subtle differences in pronunciation from one speaker to another. Therefore, on that basis, I agree with you that Option 5 is most suitable, as it does not require that the dialect be artificially locked-in to a specific pronunciation.

There is another complication, how to include the words of clear non-Sinitic origin. How do we include them for the purpose of formalised Hokkien education - do we would want to include them in the primary lexicon, or relegate them to an appendix?
tadpole
Posts: 31
Joined: Thu Oct 09, 2008 10:39 am

Re: Best way to educate people in the Hokkien dialect?

Post by tadpole »

Andrew wrote: 1. Which romanisation? I think we have no choice but to use that which is most common
2. Which dialect?
1. Many people say there are too many romanization schemes out there. I for one say there are too FEW of them.

2. Interdialectal romanization can be done to certain degree.

Please visit http://www.tadpolenese.com/

(1) 26 letters are enough to write Hokkien, no diacritics needed, no special input methods, no special fonts.
(2) Tonal phrase structure can and should be written out.
(3) Interdialectal romanization possible to certain extent.
(4) Homonym problems can be handled to certain extent, especially in colloquial-style writing.

I don't expect people to write the way I write, but I do wish they are more self-confident, and have the "just-do-it" spirit, instead of waiting for a miracle to happen. How do you guys think I came up with Tadpolenese, if not little by little, year after year, trial after trial? You start to write, and you'll know the right way to go. If you don't, then you'll never know.
Locked