Hainanese!
Hainanese!
Anyone wants some resources on Hainanese? I've got'em. If you want'em Send me a private message...
Re: Hainanese!
I'll just qualify the "Hainanese" as I've found out things I didn't previously understand about it, and I've found that what I have relates to two different "Hainaneses"
The usual type of "Hainanese" 海南話 you'll find in PRC materials is the dialect of Hai-khau 海口. There is a dictionary of this the 海口方言詞典 and the 海口方音字典 was a character dictionary published in the 1980's in a Hainanese Pinyin system. The Hainanese POJ Bible also seems to be in this variety.
This is different from the Hainanese of Southeast Asia, which is based on a different variety, that of Bun-chio文昌 on the eastern coast of the island. Just how different they are I am not sure yet. The only difference I have picked up so far is that Hai-khau says "ba" for "I" and Bun-chio uses "gua". Materials for Bun-chio Hainanese are thin on the ground. There is deSouza's manual of the Hailam Colloquial, and a few descriptions of phonology. I'd love to know what native speakers from Southeast Asia think of the Hainanese spoken in Hainan.
The usual type of "Hainanese" 海南話 you'll find in PRC materials is the dialect of Hai-khau 海口. There is a dictionary of this the 海口方言詞典 and the 海口方音字典 was a character dictionary published in the 1980's in a Hainanese Pinyin system. The Hainanese POJ Bible also seems to be in this variety.
This is different from the Hainanese of Southeast Asia, which is based on a different variety, that of Bun-chio文昌 on the eastern coast of the island. Just how different they are I am not sure yet. The only difference I have picked up so far is that Hai-khau says "ba" for "I" and Bun-chio uses "gua". Materials for Bun-chio Hainanese are thin on the ground. There is deSouza's manual of the Hailam Colloquial, and a few descriptions of phonology. I'd love to know what native speakers from Southeast Asia think of the Hainanese spoken in Hainan.
Re: Hainanese!
Alright, time to re-surface. All the materials I've seen out of the PRC have had this hard, gleaming Mandarized sheen. It's just made it so hard for me to get into this tongue. Well, that changed with my first foray into de Souza's Handbook. What a revelation. But U figure maybe what's left of present-day Hainamese is actually all Mandarized, like in the videos on Tudou, so maybe the de Souza book does not deal with the reality of our time. I think the best plan would be to actually leg it to Hainam at some pt and field-test "the de Souza dialect".
Caveat. I have not looked at the 方言辞典 yet. These tend to be decent sources.
My thoughts on the de Souza dialect -- and this has been my first good hard look at this language -- are that U can see a bit more of a Tai-Kadai-type substrate than in Hoklo proper. Some of the syntax and morphology is pretty exotic from a Hokkien POV. There also seems to be a kiss of Cantonese and, with that, a slightly more up-to-date stripe of Mandar-influence than what the Hokkiens and Teochews are used to. The effective 入-ization of T2 (using the POJ scheme) gives the language what I imagine to be a North Vietnamese feel. It would seem to me to be the typhoon's tail of some kind of creaky-voice phenomenon.
U wonder if the migrations to Hainam from Hokkien or Teochew (referring to the places) took a lot of time, poss. sojourning on the coast of the Cantonese province for decades or generations.
The thing I could use a bit of clarification on is the tone system. Apparently the tones vary from region to region. No two writers seem to share a tone system. De Souza himself is unclear about how sandhi applies.
Someone on some forum raises the possibility that maybe de Souza's Hainamese represents a South Seas style of "diaspora Hainamese". I would tend to doubt this, but it's an interesting idea.
One last interesting thing. De Souza says in one of the prefaces that some of the farther-flung dialects of Hainamese are "perfectly" unintelligible to Bunsio Hainamese speakers. That is very interesting.
Caveat. I have not looked at the 方言辞典 yet. These tend to be decent sources.
My thoughts on the de Souza dialect -- and this has been my first good hard look at this language -- are that U can see a bit more of a Tai-Kadai-type substrate than in Hoklo proper. Some of the syntax and morphology is pretty exotic from a Hokkien POV. There also seems to be a kiss of Cantonese and, with that, a slightly more up-to-date stripe of Mandar-influence than what the Hokkiens and Teochews are used to. The effective 入-ization of T2 (using the POJ scheme) gives the language what I imagine to be a North Vietnamese feel. It would seem to me to be the typhoon's tail of some kind of creaky-voice phenomenon.
U wonder if the migrations to Hainam from Hokkien or Teochew (referring to the places) took a lot of time, poss. sojourning on the coast of the Cantonese province for decades or generations.
The thing I could use a bit of clarification on is the tone system. Apparently the tones vary from region to region. No two writers seem to share a tone system. De Souza himself is unclear about how sandhi applies.
Someone on some forum raises the possibility that maybe de Souza's Hainamese represents a South Seas style of "diaspora Hainamese". I would tend to doubt this, but it's an interesting idea.
One last interesting thing. De Souza says in one of the prefaces that some of the farther-flung dialects of Hainamese are "perfectly" unintelligible to Bunsio Hainamese speakers. That is very interesting.
Re: Hainanese!
In Malaysia and Vietnam you can meet people who still speak this. I have found a fairly proficient speaker whose tones seem to be quite close to what de Souza describes, and I'm going to do some recordings next week.
Re: Hainanese!
Ah-bin, any luck with that?
Re: Hainanese!
Sino-Vietnamese language is very close phonetically to Hainanese rather than Hokkien.Ah-bin wrote:In Malaysia and Vietnam you can meet people who still speak this. I have found a fairly proficient speaker whose tones seem to be quite close to what de Souza describes, and I'm going to do some recordings next week.