Talk:Penang Hokkien

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Fabulous article. Thanks to Andrew Yong. -- Kaihsu 20:43, 2004 May 8 (UTC)

Andrew Yong has done a good job. Now I understand better about Penang Hokkien. Some minor errors:

Minbei (or north Min) should be the region in the northern Fujian Province, places like Nanping, Jian-ou, Shaowu, Pucheng, etc.. Fuzhou and areas in its vicinity are regarded as Mindong, or east Min. Each of these regions has its own Min sub-dialect, except Pucheng where the language is said to be classified under the Wu dialect group.

'bulek' is from the English word, brake, (not break), meaning stop.--Casey

I fail to see how mata (which means eye) could mean police in Hokkien.

correction

seem like u r not a penangite. u dun need to know y eye can become a policeman, juz hv to live with it.

by the way kuey teow is not a borrow word from malay. is the other way round. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 60.51.222.118 (talk) 03:11, 7 September 2010 (UTC)

mata + MATA

The word for "police" in Malay is "mata-mata", so I guess the Hokkiens shortened it. Not really proficient in Hokkien, but I guess that's how it went. Added some clarification to the article, in case anyone else got interested. Jafet

Romanisation: Tâi-lô vs Pe̍h-ōe-jī

In light of minor disagreements over the choice of romanisation for this page I would like to begin a discussion on the matter, feel free to add your views.

From the outset I would like to make clear that my preference for this particular page is Tâi-lô (TL) for reasons explained below:

Penang Hokkien has no standard romanisation. Although Pe̍h-ōe-jī (POJ) is more common throughout Wikipedia I do not find any information to support it being preferred for romanising Hokkien over other systems, unlike Pinyin for Mandarin. TL may be found in several Wikipedia articles, usually alongside the more established POJ.

TL has several advantages over POJ:

• Replaces difficult to type and often poorly rendered symbols such as o͘ & -ⁿ with oo & -nn
• Spelling bears greater similarity to IPA e.g. tshua vs chhoa for [tsʰua]
• Most importantly for Penang Hokkien: TL was designed with different Hokkien accents in mind and is more suitable for the representations of dialectal variation/sounds found in Penang Hokkien e.g. ⟨ee⟩ for [ɛ], whereas POJ either doesn't differentiate this sound from ⟨e⟩ or represents it with difficult to type symbols i.e. e͘ or ɛ. POJ is highly unsuitable for a Hokkien 'dialect' as it only represents the sounds found in 'standard' Taiwanese Hokkien
• TL is the official romanisation promoted by Taiwan's Ministry of Education for Hokkien, which at present is the only government regulatory authority for Hokkien and is actively involved in the study/education of the language and the creation of learning resources
• A modified TL system is currently in use by the Hokkien Language Association of Penang (Persatuan Bahasa Hokkien Pulau Pinang) and is actively promoted as a standard Hokkien romanisation as part of their 'Speak Hokkien Campaign', as well as by various other groups in their attempts to promote and revitalize the language
• Usage in other recent online media, eg. Penang Hokkien Podcast 庇能福建, and in the first film entirely in Penang Hokkien: You Mean the World to Me (海墘新路) which was promoted with its official romanised title in TL (Hái-Kînn Sin-Lōo).

I understand that by preferring and advocating for the use of TL instead of POJ in this article, I am 'going against the trend' of the many other articles which use the 'more established' POJ, however, I do not find this simple reason as a strong enough argument for the continued use of POJ, particularly in light of the advantages of TL I have raised above. No doubt a similar situation would have been encountered in the past before Hanyu Pinyin overtook Wade-Giles as the standard for romanising Mandarin.

My position is to use Tâi-lô for romanising Penang Hokkien and this is reflected in my efforts to improve this page.

Please feel free to add to this discussion. --Jordanopia (talk) 12:14, 25 October 2018 (UTC)

I would welcome efforts to improve this article, and thank you for starting this work! I don't have a strong preference on romanisation, as long as it's consistent, but I wanted to respond to the points you raised above:

• I agree that o͘ & -ⁿ are difficult to type on most keyboards, but so are tone marks. Both POJ and TL require a certain keyboard or input method. I think the second part is a more compelling reason -- o͘ is poorly rendered with Wikipedia's current font (which makes the dot tiny). There are fonts that can handle it well (e.g. Linux Libertine G), but there would be extra effort needed to render it nicely on Wikipedia.
• Resemblance to IPA is a dubious reason to choose an orthography, since most people will not be familiar with it -- and in any case, *use* of IPA requires a particular analysis of the language. For example, [tsʰua] might also be written [t͡sʰwa]. Even supposing we want to be close to IPA, this wouldn't necessarily support using TL. The use of a repeated letter to indicate a different phoneme (ee, oo, nn) is very un-IPA-like. Indeed, using ɛ instead of ee would be closer to IPA.
• Penang Hokkien only has one extra phoneme, which can be written ee, ɛ, or e͘. This are all equally adequate. POJ extended with any of these is suitable for Penang Hokkien.
• It's true that TL is promoted by Taiwan's Ministry of Education, but TL is still not well established in Taiwan, and the Taiwan MoE certainly doesn't have jurisdiction in Penang. The Taiwan MoE is perhaps something to bear in mind, but far from a deciding factor.
• The last two points are perhaps the most compelling: if there are groups in Penang using a particular romanisation system, it would make sense to match them. However, I would also like to point out use of POJ in Penang. I only know of two Penang Hokkien dictionaries, both of which use POJ. The first one, by Luc de Gijzel, uses POJ with e͘ and o͘, but replaces the 8th tone a̍k with ák. The second, much larger dictionary, by Tan Siew Imm, uses a more heavily modified POJ, replacing e͘ and o͘ with ɛ and ɵ, and replacing semi-vowel o with u (e.g. chhua). This last change takes the orthography somewhere between POJ and TL.

So, I'm not objecting to using TL in this article, but it would be a good idea to discuss orthographic variation in more detail, without arguing in favour of one system -- which is not something that should be done in a Wikipedia article. In particular, I object to the claim in the article that TL is "better equipped to express Hokkien dialectal variation", which is simply not true once you include extensions to POJ, such as using ɛ or e͘. At their heart, POJ and TL are almost the same system -- certainly if you compare them to an alternative like Bbánlám pìngyīm, where m- is replaced by bbn- (which can be justified by viewing POJ/TL m- and b- as allophones preceding nasal and oral vowels, respectively, but which would be unintuitive for most Penang Hokkien speakers). Freelance Intellectual (talk) 09:57, 26 October 2018 (UTC)

I appreciate your input on the matter, you make some very good points. I have removed the claim that TL is "better equipped to express Hokkien dialectal variation" than POJ and will attempt to provide a less biased view of orthographic variation in future edits. I have already begun adding information on the more interesting points of the ad hoc romanisation in common usage throughout Penang and I will include information on POJ (and potentially any other relevant systems in use) as alternatives in future edits.

For now I shall continue to use TL when contributing to this page. Thank you for your input and feedback. --Jordanopia (talk) 12:39, 26 October 2018 (UTC)

Thanks for the recent edits -- the article already reads better! Char Kway Teow and Tau Sar Pneah are nice examples of established ad hoc spellings. Freelance Intellectual (talk) 13:43, 27 October 2018 (UTC)

Hokkien words that borrowed to Malay

There are also many Hokkien words which have been borrowed into Malay, sometimes with slightly different meanings... This does not sound like should be at Penang Hokkien page, but at Malaysian Malay page instead. It is because it did not talk about Penang Hokkien, and it also just talk about "Hokkien" in general. Should it be removed?

Caferatte89 (talk) 10:30, 26 December 2018 (UTC)

I think it would make sense to mention it on this page (but some details might be moved to the Malaysian Malay page, as you suggest). The fact that Hokkien words have entered other languages tells the reader something about the social and cultural status of Penang Hokkien. There is also precedent for this on other articles, e.g. English_language#English_loanwords_and_calques_in_other_languages. Regarding the issue of whether these loanwords come from Penang Hokkien or Southern Peninsular Malaysian Hokkien, I would guess that some loans might be clear based on pronunciation (e.g. Ji̍t-pún vs. Li̍t-pún) or cultural importance (e.g. kongsi). Freelance Intellectual (talk) 11:17, 2 January 2019 (UTC)

Phonology

I recently started tidying up the section on phonology, and @Caferatte89 began a discussion on my talk page to ask about these changes: User_talk:Freelance_Intellectual#Any_source_about_w_->_u_and_y_->_i_in_the_Penang_Hokkien_section?. I thought it would be a good idea to start a discussion here in case others have comments. Freelance Intellectual (talk) 11:11, 3 January 2019 (UTC)

Guessing you are right. Both are actually identical in Penang Hokkien. Caferatte89 (talk) 14:00, 4 January 2019 (UTC)