Chineselanguage forum

Thanks Sim. Yeah, I found references for both your chhiâm or her chhiâng. :mrgreen: Thanks for your explanations too, amhoanna. It's really weird that one of my textbooks does have kam-á-chiap 柑仔汁 translated as orange juice. Maybe they got it wrong? (some translations seem a little bit off, probably...

BTW, how do you guys say orange juice in your variants? Taiwanese seem to call it 柑仔汁 kam-á-chiap, but my teacher from Cebu uses chhiang-chiap 橙汁. Coincidentally, Cantonese also has 橙汁. It wouldn't be weird if they adopted that term from Cantonese, given it's the second Chinese group in the PH, even...

It was only when I was in my late-20's early-30's that I even began to have the degree of linguistic sophistication and awareness which you already have. I just wanted to say that - with your talent for languages, your interest in "smaller" languages, your knowledge of linguistics, and your underst...

Hi, Sim. I don't really know. Even if you say so about your Hokkien, I'm always under the impression you've this kind of insight from a native speaker. Perhaps with more practice and exposition you'd manage to make use of all your Hokkien knowledge (the kind of thing you can't do living in the NL)? ...

SimL wrote:Actually, it's NOT so!!! I miscalculated. I will be 70 in less than 15 years.

For a sec I was really shocked to read you'd be 80 in less than 15 years, as I myself had done my own calculations from some temporal references on your stories and it'd be really impossible

BTW - FutureSpy: Does Japanese have "主義" for "-ism" From my limited knowledge, I can't really tell there isn't. But most -ism I know in Japanese don't take -主義. Looking at some words in the dictionary, some concepts have multiple words, but I'm only familiar with the one without -主義. My impression ...

You may be shocked to hear that that long piece that I wrote most recently took a total of about 9 hours work (spread over Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday) to write. Sim, you should write a book! I wonder if nobody had this idea before: inviting a few Penangities to write some stories about old...

I think I agree with this idea. So, in that sense I have less objection to the "-eng" in POJ not reflecting the actual pronunciation in Amoy. As long as it's standardized to something , then each area can read it out the way they normally pronounce it. I know what you mean here. In Romance language...

All the more so for non-standardized languages like Hokkien / Taiwanese (though undoubtedly the Taiwan Ministry of Education is working in this too). I'm not sure if they're trying to establish a single standard form. MOE's dictionary actually gives a lot of variations for each word, what comes in ...

I prefer to allow diversification as to spell a variant more accurately, e.g. 明 as bêng for Ciangciu, Penang/Medan, Tailam and as bîng (or even bîerng) for Cuanciu, Emng/Amoy, Tang'uaⁿ, Taipak; 嬰 eⁿ for the former and iⁿ for the latter; etc. I still don't understand why Amoy POJ spells bêng/sêng in...

By the way, my teacher said in her dialect she says "khì-un kui" instead of "氣溫高" "khì-un koân". Is that kui is kùi 貴 meaning expensive?

Thanks, niuc! 2. So you don't use tó-lo̍h there? Interesting. I thought only (most parts of) Taiwan (and at least Cebu in the Philippines) used tó-ūi. 4. I thought starting a sentence with mā wasn't right 'cos once a Taiwanese told me it sound awkward to him. But then today, I came across to the sen...

3) It's actually kè 過, so: 汝過咧(leh)怎樣的？ lí kè leh chiù--ê? 4) It really is "mā", so "mā hó", so 嘛(mā)好。 That reminds me of this weird pattern of starting sentences with "mā". Tsinoys do say "Mā chin to-siā". I guess that's not used in other variants, right? PS: She isn't familiar with the expression...

A few more questions: 1. A question for those who speak Hokkien variants other than Taiwanese: do you use the expression "猶會得過垃。" "iáu ē-tit kòe--lah." meaning "getting by" to answer "汝好無？". Any synonyms to that expression in your variants? 2. One of my textbooks has tò-ūi with tone 3 in "to". Appar...

The Mandarin term is 陀螺. Interestingly, according to Wikipedia, it is written as 独楽 in Japanese (but read as こま"koma"). Coincidentally, "kan" (干?) in Hokkien is somehow related to 独 (獨), e.g. "kan-taⁿ"; and 楽 (樂) can be pronounced as "lòk" in Hokkien (for happiness, but "gàk" for music)! May be Fut...