Some new PDF's I've found

[FutureSpy]

Glad it worked now, Sim!

I'm really happy to have this 三字經 edition with English annotations Cathy posted. Going to print it soon! I still have the audios she sent me one year ago, so it's all perfect. Today during lunch, I was following the book with the audio and it's great! No need to buy those fancy colorful editions for kids with audio CD anymore...

Cathy, is Hakka from Sabah any close to Si-yen and Moi-yen varieties? I'm very addicted to some songs from Sabah, so I'm very inclined to learning it, but so far no lucky finding any Sabahnese. I only knew a few Hakka artists from Taiwan, but finding out some music programs from Hakka TV is really making me feel divided. I'm still trying to find a Hakka to read aloud the sentences and words in the Japanese textbook. From all Hakkas I know, none seem really willing to help me, but I know where to find more Hakkas in my hometown. Just not sure of how am I going to approach them... orz

[EDIT] Okay, according to Wikipedia they speak Huiyang dialect. I'll try to find out more about it...

[amhoanna]

I have been to Sabah. An internet café full of teenagers yelling and screaming in Hakka ... is something I've never seen anywhere else. In a restaurant, almost what they'd call a paladar in Cuba, the housewife that took my order only seemed to speak Hakka and Malay, plus "Cantakka", and she was about the same age as me! All this was in Kudat. I think the Hakka that they speak is basically Hong Kong Hakka or something like it. Probably close enough to Hoiliuk Hakka, with lots of Cantonese influence. A friend of mine has a Hoiliuk Hakka background and when he was working in Hong Kong, his colleagues accused him (just playing) of eavesdropping on their conversations in Cantonese (even though he never really tried to learn it). I imagine it would've been a lot harder coming from a Moiyen bkgrd.

[Ah-bin]

Haha...look what I found:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4iwnmksbb04

Sounds very Moiyen to me. I was listening out for a few special vocab items that are distinctively Hoiliuk i.e. "voi" for 話 and "phon" for 飯. In this song I heard "va" for the former. Hoiliuk also has that "j" sound in Hokkien POJ, so "yit" 一 sounds like "日" in Hokkien. At 1:45 it is definitely "yit"

[FutureSpy]

Haha...look what I found:

Oh, I had seen this one already! The songs I'm addicted to are precisely sung by the same guy: 余畑龙. But of course, it's not Gangnam Style...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czQw4PyW-lU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVrPYWHJz9g
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uiSjwfbKXQo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKnkLlaV7sI

Sounds very Moiyen to me.

So it should be safe to learn some Si-yen given my options. Well, I'm not talking about really "learning" it, just picking up a few sentences and words. I do know a few Hakka, but I always greet them in Hokkien. So it'd be fun to at least say a few sentences in their mother tongue!

I have been to Sabah. An internet café full of teenagers yelling and screaming in Hakka ...

Hakka paradise?

[amhoanna]

Sounds very Moiyen to me. I was listening out for a few special vocab items that are distinctively Hoiliuk i.e. "voi" for 話 and "phon" for 飯. In this song I heard "va" for the former. Hoiliuk also has that "j" sound in Hokkien POJ, so "yit" 一 sounds like "日" in Hokkien. At 1:45 it is definitely "yit"

Sounds like I was wrong. So maybe Hoiliuk is like the Hoisan of Hakka? So close but yet so far?

[Ah-bin]

Here's another interesting PDF which I have tended to overlook in the past. It has some very good

http://archive.org/details/everybodysvocabu00chanrich

It's an English-Malay-Hokkien-Hindi-Japanese vocabulary from the first half of the twentieth century.

http://archive.org/details/everybodysvocabu00chanrich

I've already found a lot of good old Singapore Hokkien words in there, and I guess a lot of the commercial terminology would have been current in Penang (and other parts of SEA) as well.

Interesting terms for some branches of learning:

swan-sut for mathematics = 算術
Kwong-sai for "ambassador = ? 使
lung kang-cho-e for "artificial" 儂工做个

Much more to speak of, but I will add some more later.

[FutureSpy]

Thanks Ah-bin! Didn't know the whole book was available online... I knew that book because limkianhui from 鹭水芗南 made an Amoy version of the sentences in the back of that book. The Japanese column is indeed very bookish, but I'm sure the Hokkien one is of great value. I wonder if they still use these terms in Singapore?

[SimL]

swan-sut for mathematics = 算術

I may be wrong, but I thought "soàn-sút" was "arithmetic" rather than "mathematics".

Perhaps some with a better knowledge of Hokkien could comment...?

[Ah-bin]

That makes sense. I think that back in the past, the more abstract kinds of mathematics were not so well-known. I was basing my translation also on my knowledge of Japanese. Up until 1881 (?) sanjutsu 算術 was the term for mathematics, sansu 算數 followed as the name for the subject in compulsory education and this later became divided according to school level, primary schools now have 算數 sansu and middle schools have sugaku數學 which would be best translated as "arithmetic" and "mathematics" respectively. However, even though there was a tradition of mathematics in China (I'm sure Needham had a whole volume on it) I doubt that most Hokkien speakers back in the nineteenth century had much to do with it, and I would conjecture that they might have used 算術 as a catch-all term for mathematics, even though it specifically referred to only one branch of the subject.