Penang Hokkien Vocabulary Questions

[amhoanna]

As the resident hoanná, I'd like to put in a word for the non-Sinitic as well as borderline-Sinitic words in "original Hokkien".

Something I've seen in most hanji-Hoklo and Hàn-Lô texts coming out of Taiwan ... is a bias against using (1) non-Sinitic forms; (2) questionably Sinitic forms; as well as (3) Sinitic forms that call for hanji unfamiliar to the Mandarin-educated. This bias is not really there in POJ texts. U figure it's gotta have a lot to do with the hassle of typing out weird kanji or having to switch to romaji. For Mark, it would be the hassle of having to bust out the brackets, then the dissatisfaction of having all these brackets on the page as well as hanji that don't map neatly to the spoken word.

For whatever reason, I never heard a TWese person come out and say, like Mark, that they find the non-Sinitic elements of Hoklo inconvenient. But on some level some of them may've been thinking it.

What would Hoklo be w/o its non-Sinitic elements? A lot less interesting, is what I think.

LOL to Ah-bin's comment about the bandit-controlled territory! I'm not gonna find it and copy it -- bānglō͘ is too slow here in Banditland. M̄ koh goá āu lépài beh cē poecûn ùi Ēmn̂g kà Bînlílah, hiônghiông cáusiám Cha̍tlákok!

[Yeleixingfeng]

Lol, why "Banditland"?

[SimL]

Well, *some* people have travelled in a certain large portion of the world, and find that it was overrun by bandits in the middle of the last century, bandits who continue to run the place as their own private little country. I'm quite negative about them too, but my opinion is based only on what I read, not on real-life experience.

To temper that, I feel that they have also done a lot of good for the country, lifting it out of famine and corruption (perhaps replacing it with their own brand, but still...).

[SimL]

As the resident hoanná, I'd like to put in a word for the non-Sinitic as well as borderline-Sinitic words in "original Hokkien". [...] What would Hoklo be w/o its non-Sinitic elements? A lot less interesting, is what I think.

Yes, indeed, I support this too. My spiel about "sinitic roots" was more as replacements for the Malay and English borrowings of the 20th Century (though I reserve the right to continue to enjoy speaking and taking pride in my Penang Baba Hokkien variant). "bah4" must of course stay, along with the whole layer of pre-Tang words which have been around for more than a thousand years.

[Ah-bin]

Lol, why "Banditland"?

because it's ruled by
gong4匪!

I put the first syllable in Pinyin so this forum doesn't end up getting banned there, it seems that they don't like being called bandits, but the word has become so popular there today they had to ban it.

lifting it out of famine and corruption (perhaps replacing it with their own brand, but still...).

I have to say here that the major famine of the twentieth century was definitely of their own creation, and the only reason why you can't find out about in there it is because the topic is banned for open discussion. But you can just go there and talk to old people about how their harvests of grain were confiscated by the "new bandits" and they had to eat grass.

I do agree that they did have a few goes at stamping out corruption for the first few years, and again in the late 60's (that one got out of hand though). But sometimes they are credited for making people rise out of poverty, kind of like praising someone for curing someone's breathing problems by giving up stamping on their throat. Chinese are pretty good at lifting themselves out of poverty when you give them the chance (compare Hokkiens/Cantonese in and out of China in the 60's and 70's - same people, different opportunities)

Before anyone accuses me of talking politics, I think since it is over thirty years old the above qualifies as history now, rather than politics.

I used to own a copy of George Orwell's Animal Farm in Hokkien, but I don't know what happened to it. The final sentence (in English) is:

"The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which."

Which I've tried to translate into Penang Hokkien as:

"Gōa-kháu ê khîm-siù khoàⁿ jíp khì, khoàⁿ lâng liáu koh khoàⁿ tu, khoàⁿ tu liáu, koh-chài khoàⁿ lâng, ta-píh í-keng bô hoat-tō• kóng chheng-chó• tó-lóh-chi-lê sī tó-lóh-chi-lê lâi."

...that is political, but since it is political in Hokkien, I think I‘m allowed to get away with it !

[Yeleixingfeng]

bô hoat-tō•

Are you sure this is Penang Hokkien? I have only heard of 'be' for impossible, can't etc.

[Mark Yong]

Ah-bin wrote:
...bô hoat-tō•...

Yeleixingfeng wrote:
Are you sure this is Penang Hokkien? I have only heard of 'be' for impossible, can't etc.

I have heard all the following three (3) forms used in Penang:
1. 無法度 bô hōat tÔ (less common, but still used)
2. 無辦法 bô pân hôat (more common)
3. 無法 bô hôat (this form is the most common in everyday speech)
They carry a slightly different meaning from just saying 【不會】 b'êh, in that they mean, as you said, ‘impossible (under the given circumstances)’. 【不會】 b'êh means ‘unable to’. A person may be unable to do something, but that does not necessarily mean it is impossible (i.e. someone else in the group might be able to do it) – see the difference?

Now, a person may say, “我無法度做 wă bô hōat tÔ cô。” - this syntax is still valid. How so? That means he/she is saying that it is impossible for him/her to perform a certain task (again, under the given circumstances and/or given the person's ability), but it may be possible for someone else to do it. A simple example would be asking a person with two broken arms to lift a 20kg lump of steel, vs. asking a burly and physically-able person to do the same.

This is an example of how, contrary to the perception of some, even colloquial Hokkien vocabulary can actually be quite versatile and specific, if only the speakers are properly-acquainted with the lexicon.

[amhoanna]

Given all this, it's interesting that in a survey of businesspeople a year or two ago, China came out as the third least corrupt country in East Asia, behind Japan and way behind Singapore. Taiwan came in a shade behind China. Vietnam, S. Korea and Malaysia made up the next tier, followed by the Phils, with Thailand and Indonesia at the corrupt end. Not sure if HK was included in China, and how much weighting it was given if so.

The perception is that Singapore is one of the least corrupt human societies on the planet, but if U wanna talk about a country where the leadership ran the country like their own private business...

I'm not defending Tiongkok. Just adding fuel to the fire, I guess. Also, SEA ruling elites with black-and-white "anti-Communist" traditions also killed millions.

[Ah-bin]

Yes, I always feel sorry for the poor people in any Asian country who happened to end up reds in a white country or whites in a red country. When the lines shifted (like in Laos or Cambodia or Vietnam) things only got worse as well.

The corruption index is very good news for the Communist Party and China. Not such good news for the Philippines, though.

I should really have written 無辦法 bô pân hôat, but the bo hoat-tO was the first thing that came to mind, probably because of vestigal Taiwanese that still has not been eradicated.

[SimL]

Reply to Siml,

Yes, khau-peh is very common. We just don't know it is 哭爸. Haha.

Hi Yeleixingfeng,

I think there's been some confusion in morphemes here. According to Douglas (p363), this "pE" has no final glottal stop (and indeed, I think I pronounce it without one too, in the word for "complain"). Again, according to Douglas, this is "pE7", which would explain why - in the Penang Hokkien word for "parents" - "pE(h)-bo" - it doesn't change in tone (i.e. goes to tone3, and hence unnoticable to us Penang Hokkiens). The character Douglas gives is 父.

For "father" I do have a glottal stop at the end: "lau7-pEh". Even in "pE(h)-bo", I'm unsure if I have a glottal stop or not (I know I claimed in an earlier posting that I very often drop them, but now I'm not even sure).

Perhaps this is just confusion between 父 and 伯 in Penang Hokkien, for these compounds? Even in 哭父 I think I occasionally allow a glottal stop, though normally I don't have one. Perhaps the same etymological confusion?

[What I can reason out is that "pE(h)-bo" is definitely not 伯母, as I pronounce the first syllable of this (= sandhied) in exactly the same tone as the citation tone of 伯 - i.e. low-levelish, so 伯 can't be the character in the first syllable of "pE(h)-bo". In any case, it's almost definitely not 爸]

Come to that, is the "ma2" of grandmother really 媽? Douglas and Barclay say it is. If so, then it's almost definitely the Hokkien meaning which has shifted, right? Now that I think about it, it's quite strange!

PS. Thanks to your reply, I've realised that "hau2" (= "to cry") is actually 吼, whereas I've always assumed it was 哭.