Peculiarities of Penang Hokkien Pronunciation

Discussions on the Hokkien (Minnan) language.
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Ah-bin
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Joined: Mon Aug 21, 2006 8:10 am
Location: Somewhere in the Hokloverse

Peculiarities of Penang Hokkien Pronunciation

Post by Ah-bin »

Here was something I wrote out a few days ago when someone was asking about how Penang Hokkien pronunciation differed from that of other varieties. Some of it repeats information found elsewhere. I was wondering about some of the examples like thâ-mô• for hair and am-mô• for Westerner, but I think those might also be typical of other Hokkien dialects as well, and not restricted purely to northern Malaysia.

Results of dialect mixing
Pronunciation follows Chiang-chiu style except in the following cases

Chiang-chiu final -i is often a -u (lú, tu, hû) this may have something to do with early Choan-chiu influence.
Chiang-chiu -iang is uncommon, the Choan-chiu/Amoy/Taiwanese -iong is the usual form (siông rather than siâng 常)
Choan-chiu/Amoy l- is used in one case (chū-liân rather than chū-jiân 自然, but I have heard both)

an Innovation not found in other Hokkien Dialects
Chiang-chiu final -ioⁿ (Amoy/Taiwan/Choan-chiu -iuⁿ) becomes -iauⁿ

Innovations in the tonal system

The two 去 tones have merged in citation form, in Amoy/Taiwanese they are distinct
The 陰入 tone always sandhis to an 陽入 tone, no matter whether it ends in a glottal stop or not. In Amoy/Taiwanese the 陰入with a glottal stop sandhis to 上 and the glottal stop is elided
The 陽去 tone does not sandhi, in A/T it sandhis to 陰去 - a distinct tone
The 陰去 tone sandhis to 陰平 tone, in A/T it sandhis to 上

The quality of some tones is different also, especially the 上 tone, which does not fall to the same extent as it does in A/T (the exact tone varies with each speaker). The 陰平 is a little lower in Penang Hokkien than in A/T, 44 rather than 55

Innovations in individual words

These are more distinctively Penang, and I have not heard them in other Hokkien varieties:

Loss or addition of final glottal stop
joah-ku, A/T joa-ku 偌久
chia-lat A/T chiah-lat 食力
lau-joa A/T lau-joah 鬧熱

Loss of initial g-
kam-oān 甘願 A/T kam-goān

Tone changes in individual words
chùn-kèng A/T chun-kèng 尊敬 there are more of these

Elision of medial -i-
medial -i- is often elided –
tong-ng from tiong-ng 中央
khi-hông from khi-hiông 起雄
chúi-lông-keng from chúi-liông-keng 水龍間

I hope this is a useful little reference. I'm sure there are some things I have missed, though.
AndrewAndrew
Posts: 174
Joined: Mon Aug 09, 2010 10:26 am

Re: Peculiarities of Penang Hokkien Pronunciation

Post by AndrewAndrew »

Ah-bin wrote:Here was something I wrote out a few days ago when someone was asking about how Penang Hokkien pronunciation differed from that of other varieties. Some of it repeats information found elsewhere. I was wondering about some of the examples like thâ-mô• for hair and am-mô• for Westerner, but I think those might also be typical of other Hokkien dialects as well, and not restricted purely to northern Malaysia.

Results of dialect mixing
Pronunciation follows Chiang-chiu style except in the following cases

Chiang-chiu final -i is often a -u (lú, tu, hû) this may have something to do with early Choan-chiu influence.
Chiang-chiu -iang is uncommon, the Choan-chiu/Amoy/Taiwanese -iong is the usual form (siông rather than siâng 常)
Really? I thought -iang was more normal, e.g. siang-sin, hiang-káng, etc.

Choan-chiu/Amoy l- is used in one case (chū-liân rather than chū-jiân 自然, but I have heard both)

an Innovation not found in other Hokkien Dialects
Chiang-chiu final -ioⁿ (Amoy/Taiwan/Choan-chiu -iuⁿ) becomes -iauⁿ

Innovations in the tonal system

The two 去 tones have merged in citation form, in Amoy/Taiwanese they are distinct
Douglas mentions that the two tones are difficult to distinguish in Chiangchiu also.
The 陰入 tone always sandhis to an 陽入 tone, no matter whether it ends in a glottal stop or not. In Amoy/Taiwanese the 陰入with a glottal stop sandhis to 上 and the glottal stop is elided
The 陽去 tone does not sandhi, in A/T it sandhis to 陰去 - a distinct tone
As above.
The 陰去 tone sandhis to 陰平 tone, in A/T it sandhis to 上

The quality of some tones is different also, especially the 上 tone, which does not fall to the same extent as it does in A/T (the exact tone varies with each speaker). The 陰平 is a little lower in Penang Hokkien than in A/T, 44 rather than 55
Again, you need to be comparing also with Chiangchiu.
Innovations in individual words

These are more distinctively Penang, and I have not heard them in other Hokkien varieties:

Loss or addition of final glottal stop
joah-ku, A/T joa-ku 偌久
chia-lat A/T chiah-lat 食力
lau-joa A/T lau-joah 鬧熱
Never heard the last example.
Loss of initial g-
kam-oān 甘願 A/T kam-goān
Isn't this normally elided to kam-boan?
Tone changes in individual words
chùn-kèng A/T chun-kèng 尊敬 there are more of these

Elision of medial -i-
medial -i- is often elided –
tong-ng from tiong-ng 中央
khi-hông from khi-hiông 起雄
chúi-lông-keng from chúi-liông-keng 水龍間

I hope this is a useful little reference. I'm sure there are some things I have missed, though.
Ah-bin
Posts: 830
Joined: Mon Aug 21, 2006 8:10 am
Location: Somewhere in the Hokloverse

Re: Peculiarities of Penang Hokkien Pronunciation

Post by Ah-bin »

Thanks for these comments Andrew, I was sure I had missed some things.
Really? I thought -iang was more normal, e.g. siang-sin, hiang-káng, etc.
Ah, of course! I was trying so hard to think of examples where PGHK deviates from Chiang-chiu usage in this section, that I forgot about these ones. It's interesting to see where the Amoy/Taiwanese forms won, I would have been tempted to say that it was less commonly-used and more Mandarin-like vocabulary, like má-siōng 馬上, and chùn-liōng 盡量 (this last one is chùn-liāng in Chiang-chiu!) but then chham-siông 參詳 doesn't really fall into that category.
Douglas mentions that the two tones are difficult to distinguish in Chiangchiu also.
I didn't notice that before. I had been looking at the 漳腔閩南話辭典 which gives the values 21 and 22 to 陰去 and 陽去 respectively.
Again, you need to be comparing also with Chiangchiu.
Oh, another comparison I forgot to add is the difference in the quality of the 入 tones from Chiang-chiu. Chiang-chiu has 陰入 32 and 陽入 121, where PGHK has the same at 2 and 4 (the same pitch as the 去 and 陰平 tones respectively).

lau-joa A/T lau-joah 鬧熱 I have heard from a few of the Penang Hokkien podcast people. I think I once asked about here in the past, because I couldn't work out what they were saying.
isn't this normally elided to kam-boan?
The g is elided, but it doesn't produce the usual glottal stop, and this is where the excresence of b occurs (I had to look that word up, it's the opposite of elision for consonant sounds, despite what it sounds like!). It sounds like an -m- to me when I say it, but by POJ rules it must be a b-, because the syllable is not nasalised.

The -iang/-iong and -u/-i phenomena are really interesting, as they show that certain forms of words "won out" over others over time. I wonder what this says about the population mixture and migration history of Northern Malaysia over time?
SimL
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Joined: Mon Jun 26, 2006 8:33 am
Location: Amsterdam

Re: Peculiarities of Penang Hokkien Pronunciation

Post by SimL »

This seems the right place for this question.

I've noticed 2 morphemes which are voiced in Penang Hokkien, but unvoiced in other variants.

- būi: in Amoy apparently pūi [Douglas p386: "pūi 吠 (R. hui), to bark; to bark at"]

- gun: in Amoy apparently kûn [Douglas p254: "kûn 裙 (R. id.), a petticoat. sann-á-kûn, woman's gown and petticoat"]

In the latter case, Penang Hokkien even has a different tone, as it's definitely tone-1, not tone-5. [The Amoy tone even matches the Mandarin tone, and quite often Hokkien tone-5 matches Mandarin tone-2 (because they are both 陽平, right?)]

1. Could a Penang Hokkien speaker confirm that these are the right pronunciations of these words, and that it isn't the case that I happen to pronounce them incorrectly.

2. Any idea about why this should be so? I mean, absence and presence of nasals is an occasional discrepancy across Hokkien variants (鼻 being one example that springs to mind), but differences in voicing is not something I've seen that often.

3. Are there any other examples of this? (Not necessarily between Penang Hokkien and other varieties, but between any two varieties of Hokkien.)
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