Chinese languages

...and I forgot to mention that I think the reason why the -h is dropped is because it is always used in connected speech, never at the end if a sentence. In many types of Hokkien, syllables ending in -h belonging to the 陰入 tone category such as 客 kheh21 and 肉 bah21 lose the h and change tones to be...

Ah, thank you SimL, that clears up the mystery, and it also makes it an awful lot easier for me to make sentences now, because I am quite used to the Mandarin pattern. It may well have been used in the PgHK podcast, I was listening out for it all the time, but since I get usually only 50% of it, it ...

ua khuaN thang/cua pun e gili" (where the "pun" isn't really an "also", just something to help the grammar) I see, that "pun" is probably the specifically Penang replacement for "lóng" (Wá chai i sī Hoán-á jī lâi-ê) Is it then possible to say: Wá chē-chh...

That seems to explain it, thanks. I would say it could have been ki1li2 (Ki-lî) or ki2li2 (kî-lî) but definitely not any of the others. I could see how it became creepy...the prickly, tickly feeling you get when you thiaⁿ-tióh kúi ê kò•-sū.... There must be another word for "scary" then, a...

Now here is another brain twister. In Amoy Hokkien there is a particle "chiah" that corresponds to cai 才 in Mandarin and sin-ji 先至 in Cantonese, but it seems to be absent from Penang Hokkien. In many of the Chinese languages there is something like this that they use to make sentences whic...

Tak-ke ho! About those nasalised syllables.... I remember reading that all syllables that begin with an n or m are nasalised, and that Romanisation systems usually leave this out, writing mE where the pronunciation is actually meN and ni where it is niN. Also, another question about a word I hear a ...

Kam-sia, kam-sia lu-lang!

I have some more, but I'll take these and digest them first.

Ta-ke ho. Here are a few sentences I want to use to find out how express myself better in Penang Hokkien. How do people say these? Some of them I can guess, but I don;t know if they are right or not. This house isn’t as big as that one. Chi-le chhu bo ha-le chhu an-ne toa. How heavy is this thing? (...

Aha! no wonder I couldn't find it in a dictionary. Thanks very much for that. As for chia, I'll try to find another example too. I don't think it was nasalised. I remembered the other word I wanted to know, it was "peh-peh" for "together". Is that really "peh" with a gl...

In the Penang Hokkien podcast forums I have got a lot of help with learning Hokkien by asking how to say certain English phrases and words. Sometimes I hear something I am not sure about, and I can't find it in my dictionaries (Douglas, Campbell, some PRC dictionaries). I can usually tell if things ...