Comparisons

[amhoanna]

My "impression" has been that "siangka" is siang21 ka21, but I've never had a clear shot at it.

[SimL]

And let me get it straight. When you say " X siang5 ka3 Y" in PgHK, are the tone contours on siang-ka actually:

siang21 ka33
(low falling and mid level)

And yeah, according to my calculations, that would make it T3.

Yes... I forgot to answer this... it depends on whether you count it as sandhied or not! I didn't notice that it became 33... but I get all kinds of things like that wrong!

Amhoanna and Ah-bin,

I've never been really confident of my own judgement of the 1-5 scale for indicating tone contours. The best I can do is confirm that when I say "siang ka i", the "ka" sounds like the syllable meaning "to cut with scissors", i.e. tone-1. Indeed, it's a level tone, which is on the highish side, but not 55.

[Ah-bin]

Thanks Sim, that's good to know. I think I can call that a TV (transitive verb) now, rather than a verb+preposition, and then it follows the rules of other transtive verbs where it sanhdis before the direct object, but not before a description of the object i.e. siang-ka33-wa but siang-ka21 wa peng-iu e. Or does it?

[AndrewAndrew]

Thanks Sim, that's good to know. I think I can call that a TV (transitive verb) now, rather than a verb+preposition, and then it follows the rules of other transtive verbs where it sanhdis before the direct object, but not before a description of the object i.e. siang-ka33-wa but siang-ka21 wa peng-iu e. Or does it?

I would pronounce both as ka44.

[AndrewAndrew]

What you're used to, and attuned to, you can and do use. If you've never known it, then you never miss it. I don't think there are many Chinese girls lying awake at night, fretting over the fact that it's not that easy to say: "My boyfriend likes tennis more than your boyfriend likes soccer" .

I suspect they would say it, "Lu e boyfriend gian football ha, wa e boyfriend ka tennis koh ka gian" or something similar.

[SimL]

Thanks Sim, that's good to know. I think I can call that a TV (transitive verb) now, rather than a verb+preposition, and then it follows the rules of other transtive verbs where it sanhdis before the direct object, but not before a description of the object i.e. siang-ka33-wa but siang-ka21 wa peng-iu e. Or does it?

I would pronounce both as ka44.

I agree with Andrew on this one too Ah-bin. I say the two "ka" identically (as far as I can tell). But because I'm no good at the 1-5 scale, I find it difficult to know if I say 33 or 44. All I can say is (as I mentioned before) that I would pronounce both identically to "ka1" meaning "cut with scissors".

[niuc]

Thank you so much, Abun & Amhoanna for discussing about "pheng". It just dawned to me that my variant uses "pīng" more than "pí". I didn't realize that it's "pīng" but subconsciously thought that it's just an elided form of "pí". Not sure how many things in my variants that i am still unaware of!

[AndrewAndrew]

I guess Penang Hokkien doesn't use hiah-nih and ciah-nih in comparisons primarily not because they are similar to an-nee, but because the expressions AFAIK don't exist in Pg Hokkien!

[amhoanna]

Yes, true! That's what I meant, that the c-/h- expressions have dropped out of PgHk for this usage, most likely on site, during language contact.

Niuc, thx -- I've never heard pēng, must make a note of it.

[mariejozmz]

Hi everyone
Thanks for posting about this song. Quite beautiful song. I found that Teochew and Taiwanese are the closest together. The language of the song seems to be easy to learn and its easier than other languages songs i listen to.
I was going through my Mandarin textbook looking for vocab I should look up and learn in Hokkien, I stumbled upon a grammar question which, although pretty basic, I found I didn't know the solutions for my problems. Though I found German like

Code: Select all

http://eng.goodscheine.net/

pretty easier to learn till now. but want to learn Taiwanese.