Malaysian/Singaporen Hokkien foreign malay words

[niuc]

I c, Ah-bin, so it may be "native" Min.

Amhoanna, your Malay is impressive! But what do you mean by proto-Sinitic there? Is 吻 a "recent" word?

[Ah-bin]

Maybe there was no monosyllabic morpheme. I just looked up 吻 in the 古代漢語詞典 and the meaning was "lips" hence 接吻 meaning "to kiss" Japanese also had no native word, they use 接吻 seppun (suru) or kissu (suru).

[niuc]

Oh, so it's 接吻 and the meaning passed to 吻. i c!

[amhoanna]

Actually, my Malay is pretty limited. That's why I can only write dialog for 15th century Hokkiens and Formosans.

I was mostly going off a hunch regarding 吻. I don't know much about Old/Middle Chinese, but I use the HM(CV) test. What is it in Hoklo? What is it in Mandarin? And what is it in Cantonese and Vietnamese, if it's w/i what I know? Extra weight on Mando and Canto for being "more Sinitic" in general. Kind of a crude tool, but it seems like most Sino-linguists (the professionals) are allergic to inferring anything about ancient or classical forms of "Chinese" based on modern evidence. Besides the phonology.

Back to the topic of 吻, it seems like it only exists in Canto and Mando as part of the daily-use literary layer. It doesn't seem to exist in Hoklo at all. Then again, could it have something to do with búnchiò? (Do you guys use this word, and how?)

[Ah-bin]

I can't find a single morpheme for "kiss" in Vietnamese either, and I tried Ong-Be and it had a word which can be split into "to taste lips" I think.

de Souza's "Manual of the Hailam Colloquial (Bun Chio Dialect)" p. 65 has "sóih" for kiss.
Taiwanese Si-yen 四縣 Hakka has siông-chîm 相唚 (romanised in Kau-fi Lo-ma-su 教會羅馬字), the Hakka version of POJ) but the chîm may be due to Hokkien influence.

Perhaps this word (as a single morpheme) is a lacuna in many East Asian languages? Interesting that Min (and perhaps Hakka) has a single morpheme and others do not. Most of the vocabularies that I have on hand at the moment don't even seem to have it.

[Ah-bin]

Okay...got into the office today

Vietnamese is hôn (the circumflex indicates vowel quality, not tone) written 昏 in Nôm with the same Sino-Vietnamese reading.

In the Tai languages of Kwangsi and Kwangtung, kiss is a monosyllablc morpheme, variously [tsup] or [sup]

Most Yueh dialects have tsüt or some variation like tot (Sze Yap varieties) they seem to write it 啜

BUT
The Hsin-i 信宜 dialect of western Kwangtung has [ts'am tsui] the tone class for [ts'am] is 陰平 so it may be related to the Hokkien one.

[amhoanna]

Ah, right, now I remember those words, hôn and tsyt. Don't know their nuances, though. I think another word for kiss in Cantonese is sek, written as 惜... and that could be its punji. Possibly related to the soih word from Hainam. (Is -h a glottal stop? Any connection to Hoklo 惜 sioh?) Qin1 親 and wen3 吻 are both used as stand-alone verbs in Mandarin now. Remember that song with the line, Wang le wen ni... 忘了問你, 忘了吻你... homophones since Mandarin pop songs are atonal all the way. My sense (and here I'm a native speaker ) is that qin doesn't include lip-to-lip kissing, whereas wen means exactly that. Wen seems to be mostly used in compounds like rewen and qinwen, though, or wenhe. Stand-alone, it gets mixed up with wen 聞 in many applicable contexts b/c of sandhi. Seems likely that wen hasn't always meant "to kiss; kiss (n)". Good chance there was no lip-to-lip kissing in the old days in the Mando-world. There's a lot of info on the web about "Thai kisses" and it's possible that for a long time those were the only kisses in Mando-town too.

[Ah-bin]

I have a sneaking feeling that the lack of a received word (or character) for "kiss" in the classics has something to do with Confucian prudishness, like that quote: "男女受授不親" Lâm lú siù siù put chhin from Mencius, about men and women not having physical touching. So if there was a word (maybe the antecedent of the Hokkien word) it might have been excluded from the classics. Perhaps chim/tsam was this word and it just never picked up a written character.

I should go back and have a look at how they describe things on the seemier side of Classical Chinese literature i.e. all those novels and sex manuals that the authors wouldn't dare put their names to. van Gulik collected a whole bunch of these in his book "Erotic Colour Prints of the Ming Period", next time I'm in my office I'll go to see what some of those books are using for "kiss". The Jiók Phó• Thóan 肉蒲團 (a Ming pornographic novel, translated into English as "The Carnal Prayer Mat").

I might add that these are fascinating books that show a side of traditional Chinese culture that very few Chinese regimes (Harry Lee's included) want to admit to.

[amhoanna]

Quick question springing from a discussion on Bīnpún. How do you guys say "jambu air" in your variants of Hokkien?

[SimL]

I only ever said "jambu" for both forms, and one just had to guess which one was meant. I always found this to be incredibly silly, but there was no common term for each of the two types.