Hi Niuc,
Yes, thanks for the feedback. I quite enjoy writing little stories about my youth in Penang, especially if they have a socio-linguistic component to them.
I'm not familiar with your use of "-ir" in the transcription. You use it in 做壞去 "cue3 phai2 khir0", and also in 做壞事 "cue3 phai2 sir7". Does the -r signify that the vowel is slightly different than the usual i? Because our accents are different, I can't quite tell from the context. Oh! A thought just flashed through my mind... it's the vowel as in "fish" and "pig", which in my variant is "hu", "tu", and others "hi", "ti", and which some people transcribe it "hy", "ty". Am I right?
Very perceptive of you, to notice this subtlety about the distinction between "co1 phai*2" and "co1 phai*2 khi3". I have a similar distinction myself. It certainly *includes* your case, i.e. "+ khi3" is when you are, for example, *making* an object. But, in my usage, it also includes the case where you might be opening it up to have a look at it. E.g. you were curious about the way a bulb was fitted into a lamp, so you unscrewed it to have a look, and while you were doing that, it broke! In such a case, I would say "co phai* khi3" rather than "co phai*2". The underlying idea seems to be "while you were busy doing something with it", under which, of course, "the making of it" is included.
To me "su" and "tai-ci" are interchangable in meaning, though perhaps "su" is more homely, and "tai-ci" is more like business/financial matters (although in the phrase "he(-le) si i ka-ki e tai-ci" = "that's his own business", the meaning is not business/financial matters, but emotional/personal matters). I know and use "su" actively, whereas "tai-ci" is only passive for me (i.e. I recognize it when someone else uses it). "co su" was a euphemism for the illegal bookkeeping (betting) based on 4 numbers which was quite prevalent in Penang in my youth. I only know the compound word "tai-ci", I am not familiar with "tai" by itself.
>> Actually in ours, most of the time ‘i1’ in these two
>> sentences is naturally neutralized into ‘i7’.
>> ‘si2’ in the second is neutralized as ‘si0’.
Tones are not my strong point. You may have noticed that I often feel so insecure about my knowledge of tones that I omit tone markings in my examples. So if I don't indicate that I do something similar (whether it's sandhi, or gasp!, neutralization), it's more likely to be because I'm unaware of it, than that I dont' do it.
You made me think more carefully about the difference between 'cang' and 'ki'. I think, for me, the distinction is that:
... 1. 'cang' is still green, and (a bit) flexible, and (more or less still) alive (they could be pulled out of the ground and hence dying on a shelf in the market, but still "flexible", whereas
... 'ki' is stiff, more or less dried out.
Another distinction is that:
... 'cang' is the whole plant (even if it consists of only one long stem), whereas
... 'ki' is part of a plant, specifically, the stalk (even if that stalk is still a bit flexible/green).
Clearly, there is a bit of overlap, or alternatively, these criteria can even contradict one another. So, to give some examples:
1. Three stalks of grass, cut off from the roots, even if they were still green and flexible would be 'ki' (because they are no longer whole plants), whereas
2. Three shallots (spring onions, scallions, whatever you call the long green and white things you chop up and sprinkle the green parts on soup, and fry the white parts), would still be 'cang' because of their "wholeness" (even if they were already half dead and quite stiff).
>> I think we can use ‘cang5’ to count cactus.
Haha. I walked past a cactus shop 3 evenings ago, and stopped to look at the different ones specifically because of this point
.
For the long cactusses, I would say 'cang' without any hesitation. But I saw 3 large ones (about half the diameter of a football), TOTALLY SPHERICAL, and completely covered in thorns. I felt really unsure...
>> It’s interesting that you refer to your family as a Baba family.
>> In your opinion, what are the criteria that qualify a person Baba?
>> Are all Baba mixed blood (Chinese – Malay, or include Thai etc)?
This is quite complex. I tend to say, "anyone who feels they are Baba, are Baba". Rather then answer your question in terms of what criteria I would use to determine if other people are Baba, perhaps I could give the reasons why I think of myself as Baba...
1. My family was matriarchal. That is to say, they practiced the custom of "cin cue". This is a system where all the sisters stayed in the ancestral home, and their husbands came to live with them. Their brothers had to go and join their wives in THEIR matriarchal ancestral home. Apparently, this was a feature of Penang Hokkien Babas (how specific can you get!) - Penang Babas of other dialect groups didn't practice it; Hokkien Babas in Singapore didn't practice it; Babas in Malacca didn't practice it.
2. My women relatives (of my grandmother's and aunts' generation) all wore colourful sarongs (orange, yellow, red, gold were popular).
3. They cooked very hot curries with lots of coconut milk, and ate these dishes on a plate (instead of out of a bowl), and ate the food with their hands (instead of with chopsticks or a fork and spoon (although generally, a lot of even the older menfolk switched to fork and spoon)).
4. They made and ate nonya cakes.
5. They had an incredibly complex cuisine (an elaboration of the two previous points), with dishes which took ages to prepare. [ My favourite story about this is that in my youth, my family would have scorned to eat bean-sprouts where the roots hadn't been pulled off, because the roots of bean-sprouts were considered to be "course" or "tough" (and hence spoil the dish). I still have memories of (during feast days) 3 huge heaped trays of bean-sprouts (I don't know, perhaps 5 kg of bean-sprouts?), where every single root had to be snapped off before they went into the soup! This was called 'liam1 tau7-gE5'. ]
6. The women relatives had a bun in their hair and they covered their faces in a fine white rice powder called "bedak" [ only my grandmother's generation ].
7. They used lots of Malay words in their Hokkien. [ Small incident: I annoyed a Chinese man who didn't speak English while I was on holiday in Singapore. There was a stage set up for Chinese opera, and it was early in the afternoon, and there was no sign of any activity. I wanted to see *some* opera, so I wanted to know if it was worth my coming back that evening. I asked a man hanging around there (in my best Amoy accent!) "ki-mi u pua* wa-yang bo?" (literally: tonight have show/perform wayang, no?". He looked at me, and said "Huh?". I repeated this question a number of times, with the same response, until he got annoyed and walked off. I learnt later that "wayang" (as in "wayang kulit", the Malay / Indonesian shadow puppets) which was the word I have always used for *Chinese* opera, was totally unknown to non-Babas, and that the correct term to have used was "hi7". ]
8. They did all the stereotypical Baba things: collected Baba ceramics, embroidered bead shoes, (some of them!) lived in huge Baba-style mansions, and even those who didn't had that dark (ebony?) furniture, inlaid with mother-of-pearl (we called them "siEn3 ciu0 i2").
If I think of any other characteristics, I'll add them to the thread.
I personally don't think it's "genetic", but more cultural (more what you feel and the customs you pratice), so I don't think that having Malay or Thai blood matters. Having said that, every now and again a member of my family extended family will be born quite dark. The nickname "O <something>" (black <personal-name>) has been given to a couple of people in my family, although for the moment I can only think of "Or Choo" (Malaysian spelling), in the transcription I usually here here: "O cu", i.e. "black pearl", for someone who would normally be called "Ah Choo" (a cu).
Actually, I'm only half Baba. My father's side is Baba, and my mother's side is sin-khek. However, because I spent many formative years in Penang, with my paternal relatives, and only saw my maternal relatives for a week or so on some school holidays, I tend to identify much more strongly with being Baba. What's your "ethnic" background Niuc?
Lastly, if anyone knows the Chinese characters for "siEn3 ciu0 i2", those mother-of-pearl inlaid chairs (and other furniture in general), and for "cin1-cue3", the matriarchal family structure, I would be very grateful.
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