Chinese (and other Asian) medicinal herbs

[niuc]

Hi Sim & FutureSpy

Thank you for sharing all the interesting points. I like linguistics but my knowledge is very minimum. I still don't know the actual sounds of many IPA symbols. In fact I only came to know the difference between f and v around ten years ago. Both are pronounced as f in Indonesian, do not exist in Hokkien (only f in Mandarin), and I was not sensitive enough to catch the difference in English native speaker’s pronunciation.

You both are right about orthography and transcription. Apparently I regard Hokkien Romanization systems including POJ more of transcription (like IPA) rather than orthography. Like FutureSpy, I prefer 唐人字 as the orthography for Hokkien, yet am open to accept Romanization as one of the systems.

One major revelation (and niuc will probably laugh at me here), is that I had always thought that Paul wrote his letter to them!!! In fact, when I first went to Wikipedia to look up more information on Galician, I just started typing into the search-box: "Pauls letter to ..." (instead of just directly doing a search for Galician, I don't know why). The auto-completion function of Wikipedia then showed "Galatians", and I went "HUH?!?". And that's when I found out that Galatians and Galicians were totally different people's/regions!

Sim, I laugh but not at you. It’s funny (yet naturally) how often we mistaken one word/name for another because they sound similar. I have seen so many people wrote Armenian (a country name) when they actually mean Arminian (from Dutch theologian Jakob Hermanszoon, Latinized as Jacobus Arminius) in theological debates about free will versus Calvinistic (mis)interpretation of predestination.

(Not that I was even very clear who the Apostle Paul was - if pushed, I might have been able to mumble something about Saul-Paul and some sort of dramatic conversion on the road to Damascus.)

按呢着真厲害了, 真濟信徒都呣知影个. 汝是呣是捌讀教會个學堂?

[SimL]

... Like FutureSpy, I prefer 唐人字 as the orthography for Hokkien, yet am open to accept Romanization as one of the systems.

I agree, even though (intellectually) I believe that character-based systems are very hard to master, and place a huge burden on the young of that particular culture (and an almost impossible burden on idiots like me who want to master them later in life, from outside the culture).

But (I believe like a lot of other regular readers of this Forum), I find that 唐人字 carry and convey meaning much better for Sinitic languages, than roman letters do. A page of POJ looks like a sort of porridge of indistinct and indistinguishable letters, not really "carrying the meaning" anywhere as efficiently as 唐人字.

按呢着真厲害了, 真濟信徒都呣知影个. 汝是呣是捌讀教會个學堂?

Thanks! Well, having spoken of my support for 唐人字, it still had to work quite hard to read this sentence (but I'm very glad you wrote it this way ).

No, not really. Well, my parents sent me to Sunday school class when I was very young, but that was from the age of 3-5. I remember being dropped off there, and I remember being picked up again, and I sort of remember playing with other kids while there, but I think we were too young to actually have any instruction in biblical history.

No, any knowledge I have of Judeo-Christian history is purely based on my reading as a young man, continued into the present. I was fortunate to have had exposure to Chinese Folk Religion through my Penang Hokkien Baba paternal side, and to Christianity (specifically, Methodism) from my Amoyish Sin-kheh maternal side. My father took me to temple on the birthdays of various Chinese gods, and my mother accompanied my father to do Cheng Beng every year (as well as in home-sacrifices, on my grandfather's deathday). And I went to Sunday school (and my father followed my mother to Church), and we celebrated Christmas. I find this a very rich background, because I got so much out of both traditions. I love all the incense and paper money and beautiful carvings and figures in temples, and I also love hymns, and the real "community spirit" of the Christian side of my background.

But as a teenager, I gave up both these aspects of spirituality and developed what I consider to be a basically "mechanistic" vision of the universe (atoms spinning around, accidentally combining to make more complex structures). In as much as I have any spiritual feelings as an adult, they have tended to lean in the direction of animism, Chinese Folk Religion, and (in the last 10 years) Native American Shamanism.

[amhoanna]

[Up to 10 minutes ago all I knew (or thought I knew) about Galician/the Galicians was that "it was a Portuguese-like dialect of Spanish", and that the Apostle Paul had written a letter to them.

[SimL]

[Up to 10 minutes ago all I knew (or thought I knew) about Galician/the Galicians was that "it was a Portuguese-like dialect of Spanish", and that the Apostle Paul had written a letter to them.

Yes, I think it's rather funny too. Never too old to learn! According to the Wikipedia article, it's not even certain nowadays who the Galatians were...