Penang Hokkien lessons

[amhoanna]

Nonetheless learners should decide on his own, based on his own evaluation, that if learning from me will greatly impact his knowledge of Penang Hokkien in a negative way, then he should not learn from me.

How can a learner evaluate what they're trying to learn? Exactly -- they haven't learned it yet! Hopefully they'll be savvy enough to Google you and find this forum in order to see how others evaluate the Timothy Tye System for writing Penang Hokkien.

[timothytye]

Dear Mark,
Thank you for the welcome! I am totally bogged down at the moment, so I haven't read anything. Will return when I am more time on my fingers.
Tim

[Ah-bin]

A Hokkien speaker with local knowledge will be able to de-code the garbling; a learner will not. The power of the street language is then lost, except maybe for a scholar who specializes in decoding garbled code.

Enter me!

Actually, as I've mentioned before, I am quite interested to see some of the spellings and what changes are happening in the pronunciation of some speakers. When there is no consistency it is hard to ascertain exactly what is going on, but a few things seem evident to me from the spellings of some words. Those in the first case have been confirmed by my own listening, and those in the second by that of non-native speakers.

1) the disintegration of the -h/-k distinction.

This has not resulted in a complete shift from -h (glottal stop) to (unreleased final) -k, as some of the final glottal stops have been dropped altogether or speakers have become unconscious of the slight difference in vowel length that indicates a dropped glottal stop. I have kept the stop in my spelling of 較 as khah, because I think i still hear a difference in length between this word and kha for foot/leg, but for most speakers the stop is no longer there.

2) the sporadic disappearance of nasalisation

I notice that some of the spellings in the TT wordlist are missing their nasalisation ("sia" for voice, etc.), and have been informed that in fact some people do drop this. This is not entirely unknown for related languages like Hainanese and Lui-chiu, but it doesn't seem to have become universal in Penang Hokkien as yet.

In my opinion these are features of pronunciation that need to be noted as occasionally occurring peculiarities, but I don't see the need for them to be recorded in the script, as the changes are not yet universal throughout Penang Hokkien. I've taken my cue for this from the various dictionaries I've looked through of non-standardised languages like Scots and Northumbrian.

[AndrewAndrew]

This has not resulted in a complete shift from -h (glottal stop) to (unreleased final) -k, as some of the final glottal stops have been dropped altogether or speakers have become unconscious of the slight difference in vowel length that indicates a dropped glottal stop. I have kept the stop in my spelling of 較 as khah, because I think i still hear a difference in length between this word and kha for foot/leg, but for most speakers the stop is no longer there.

Dropping the -h is a normal consequence of standard Minnan tone sandhi, isn't it?

I remember being corrected that lau-pEh was actually lau-pE, and that a-cheh was actually a-chek, so the distinctions are very much still alive.

A.

[Ah-bin]

Dropping the -h is a normal consequence of standard Minnan tone sandhi, isn't it?

Not in any of the cases I'm talking about (all final syllables), I've already mentioned lau-joa elsewhere, and if people are hearing boeh as boey on a regular basis some people must be doing it with that word too.

But speaking of these endings, one of the changes I've noticed in the speech of many PGHK speakers is that the sandhi for im-jip 陰入 with final glottal stop is mostly the same as the sandhi for -k,-t,-p endings, i.e. it sandhis to a iang-jip 陽入, rather than a siang 上 as it does in other varieties of Hokkien.

So 肉粽 is realised as "bah44chang21" rather than "ba41-chang21"

and 客話 is realised as "khEh44-oa21" rather than "khE41-oa21"

I have once heard "ba44-chang21" with a lengthened vowel and no glottal stop.

Some of this may be due to the realisation of the siang tone as a rising, dipping or high tone in Penang.

I remember being corrected that lau-pEh was actually lau-pE, and that a-cheh was actually a-chek, so the distinctions are very much still alive.

Yes, and as a consequence, i have felt the need to keep it distinct in POJ, with a note that not all people seem to make this distinction any more.

Just edited to add that "Lau-pEh" is the product of a different process, in which a glottal stop is added to a syllable where it used not to belong. In this case it may be the influence of the pronunciation of 伯.

I'm not saying that everyone does one thing or another either, it's just an observation on the habits of some speakers.

[Ah-bin]

Someone wrote on the fb page:

I think when we wish to say the phrase " I want to.,,", we say "Wa boey......". But if we want to say "yes, I want", we say "Wa boeik". That is, if no other words follow after "boey", then it ends with an abrupt "boeik"

.

If this reflects general usage then it seems you are right, Andrew. I had no idea that boeh sandhied at all. However, I never hear a sharp falling tone like in Taiwanese when the glottal stop is elided.

[amhoanna]

one of the changes I've noticed in the speech of many PGHK speakers is that the sandhi for im-jip 陰入 with final glottal stop is mostly the same as the sandhi for -k,-t,-p endings, i.e. it sandhis to a iang-jip 陽入, rather than a siang 上 as it does in other varieties of Hokkien.

I think this is in line with (modern) Coanciu dialects and all overseas dialects except for Taiwan and maybe some speakers in S M'sia. AFAIK the only dialects where T4 "sandhis" to high falling are Taiwanese, Amoy, and Ciangciu close to Amoy. I don't know about the rest of Ciangciu.

[AndrewAndrew]

Someone wrote on the fb page:

I think when we wish to say the phrase " I want to.,,", we say "Wa boey......". But if we want to say "yes, I want", we say "Wa boeik". That is, if no other words follow after "boey", then it ends with an abrupt "boeik"

.

If this reflects general usage then it seems you are right, Andrew. I had no idea that boeh sandhied at all. However, I never hear a sharp falling tone like in Taiwanese when the glottal stop is elided.

Boeh in its sandhi form is boe44. But you are right that most -h Jip tones in Penang Hokkien seem to sandhi like -p/-t/-k. I have noted that before. But the glotal stop is often not very distinct.

[Pier]

Interesting short video of learning Penang Hokkien'ua by a hawker aunty.

Learning Penang Hokkien at Mama's Wan Ton Mee shop

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEA1Fghv480

[timothytye]

Dear Mark,

I finally have some time on my hands to provide an update. I have more or less completed the first phase of refinement to my system for Penang Hokkien. I continue to search and weed out and improve on the spelling of words that require refinement. At this point in time, the system is still undergoing refinement and testing, but every chapter will continue to be improved over time. Similarly, some of the videos will be updated when I have the time to do it.

DICTIONARY
Penang Hokkien-English: http://www.penang-traveltips.com/penang ... nglish.htm
English-Penang Hokkien: http://www.penang-traveltips.com/englis ... okkien.htm

Words continue to be added to the dictionary almost daily, and some are re-spelled to get their spelling closer to the pronunciation.

GRAMMAR
International Phonetic Alphabet: http://www.penang-traveltips.com/hokkie ... phabet.htm
Spelling: http://www.penang-traveltips.com/hokkien/spelling.htm
Intonation: http://www.penang-traveltips.com/hokkien/intonation.htm
Tone Sandhi: http://www.penang-traveltips.com/hokkie ... sandhi.htm
Sentence Structure: http://www.penang-traveltips.com/hokkie ... ucture.htm
Nouns: http://www.penang-traveltips.com/hokkie ... ucture.htm
Pronouns: http://www.penang-traveltips.com/hokkien/pronouns.htm
Possessives: http://www.penang-traveltips.com/hokkie ... ssives.htm
Particles: http://www.penang-traveltips.com/hokkien/particles.htm
Prepositions: http://www.penang-traveltips.com/hokkie ... itions.htm
Conjunctions: http://www.penang-traveltips.com/hokkie ... ctions.htm
Demonstratives: http://www.penang-traveltips.com/hokkie ... atives.htm
Adjectives: http://www.penang-traveltips.com/hokkien/adjectives.htm
Adverbs: http://www.penang-traveltips.com/hokkien/adverbs.htm
Reduplication: http://www.penang-traveltips.com/hokkie ... cation.htm
Degrees of Comparison: http://www.penang-traveltips.com/hokkie ... arison.htm
Verbs: http://www.penang-traveltips.com/hokkien/verbs.htm
Auxiliary Verbs: http://www.penang-traveltips.com/hokkie ... -verbs.htm
Passive Voice: http://www.penang-traveltips.com/hokkie ... -voice.htm

All the lessons will be integrated to the travel information of Penang in Penang Travel Tips, so people wanting to know about Penang has in their finger tips information on over two thousand sights and hundreds of streets:

Sights: http://www.penang-traveltips.com/sight-index.htm
Streets: http://www.penang-traveltips.com/streets.htm

Knowing that visitors to Penang will want to know about its food, an extensive section deals with this.

http://www.penang-traveltips.com/food.htm

So far, there's still a lot of ground to cover, including the creating of more reading material in Penang Hokkien using the TJ system, so that people learning it have things to read in it.

I won't be able to visit this forum regularly, but I'll provide an update from time to time.