Chinese languages

All things considered, I still prefer a completely phonetic representation of Hokkien, where one symbol (or set of symbols in the case of digraphs and trigraphs) always corresponds to one sound. It's just a lot easier to read, remember and learn that way. I don't even mind the digraph ae for [ԑ] as ...

I have been carefully collecting all the vocabulary and information on the Penang variety from Penang Hokkien forums. Although I can't work out what some of the words are or how they should be pronounced, most of them I think I'll be able to find in my collection of reference books, though. I hope s...

I have just been thinking about the flurry of activity on various Facebook groups in the last month or so. I've been finding I get many answers very quickly to my questions, and a lot of people respond in detail about things that their parents used to say. Unfortunately, there is a downside. It is n...

Finally got hold of a copy of the Minutes of the Board Meetings of the Chinese Council of Batavia (Chineesche Raad) 公安簿 to peruse, the first volume deals with the years 1787 to 1791 and is mostly written in a type of documentary Chinese, what is interesting however, are the number of Hokkien words t...

Somewhere I heard that chāi 在 is used in Penang with a particular meaning. I think I have it in my dictionary notes at home, but I can't find it at the moment. Does it mean lethargic, or steady, or both? Could anyone please provide me with an example sentence?

By T6 you mean 陽上?

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 "bo...

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...

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...

Sorry can't we just go and look at Wikipedia if we want to find all this stuff out? Also, if you looked into things more, instead of just copying and pasting willy-nilly from Wikipedia, you might not be so keen to put Goh Chok Tong on the list of prominent Minnan people since he did the following to...

Another thing to consider is that most systems for writing Hokkien phonetically are either based very closely on POJ, or close to POJ, because POJ itself is close to the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), this is true at least as far as the representation of vowels and initials is concerned. Ton...