Hokkien in Singapore
Language Log 2016-09-18
[This is the second in a series of four planned posts on Hokkien and related Southern Min / Minnan language issues. The first was this: "Eurasian eureka" (9/12/16).]
Ryan of Singapore writes:
Here is some information about the scope and aims of the program itself: "New Hokkien drama aimed at seniors to be launched on Sep 9" (Channel NewsAsia, 9/1/16).
Apart from its content, you may find the language of the episode quite interesting.
I have watched the first part of the episode, and found it rather curious. The register of the characters is fairly different from what I am used to hearing. It sounds unusually formal and contrived. I have a suspicion that the script was written in Mandarin, and the words pronounced in Hokkien. Either that, or the actors chose to use the literary (instead of the vernacular) readings of the words. In any case I would gladly hear the observations of others on this drama.
I went over the song and episode 1 of 吃饱没？ videos. I completely understand everything. The only difference is that there is a Singapore accent present.
The subtitles of episode 1 match Mandarin quite well. The actors speak vernacular Hokkien but the subtitles are transcribed into Mandarin script. However, this is also very common in Taiwanese dramas that my mother watches everyday (Spring Flower– up to 130 episodes so far).
In the song of 吃饱没, the character subtitles used are more vernacular. Here are some examples:
Geok Hoon (Janet) Williams (a Chinese teacher from Singapore and Malaysia):
1) Great to see my familiar actor / actresses speaking Hokkien. They are very enjoyable to watch.The older generation speaks so naturally, and you can hear their Hokkien is smooth. The Hokkien by the younger generation (children) sounds a bit less natural – lack of fluency, but not bad. Most young people (my nieces and nephews) all speak like that – rather 'chunky', fragmented.
2) Two parts are difficult to bear and are laughable. The first 10 minutes about healthy eating, and the government's medical policy for the elderly (MediShield Life; 19:28). The propaganda is so obvious.
3) Humour and tongue in cheek in some parts, mixing English with Hokkien (rhyming) (eg, Medisave to save your life) – actually are quite well done.
4) Language points:
a. English is used: sack (spoken by the boss) OT
b. Lots of Malay is used throughout: suka (喜欢 "like") diam diam （"quiet quiet") ruit (from Malay duit, "money") baru ("new; just now") walao – this must be the most common expression in Spore – walao, walao wei…It's difficult to translate, a bit like "Gosh, OMG, good grief".
c. From English: Nurse is called Mi-Si (I bet it comes from Miss.)
Jean Debernardi, an American researcher who has done extensive fieldwork in Singapore and Malaysia:
The song at the beginning struck me as being Taiwanese Hokkien. In SIngapore and Penang "I" is "wa" not "gua." And I think 'simmih' ("what") is 'hammit' in Penang, not sure about Singapore. The program itself sounded more like what I'm used to hearing in Singapore and Penang, and I easily understood it.
Chia-hui Lu, native speaker of Taiwanese:
I can understand 99% of what they say (I did not watch the screen, just listened). There are only some accent differences from Taiwanese. I intuitively feel that it's similar to Quanzhou accented Taiwanese (popular in northern Taiwan).
Just before posting, I received another message from Janet which included 19 screen shots from part 2 of the Hokkien short film we've been discussing. The subtitles are in Mandarin and English. As Janet says, "Once again, the clip contains many common Malay words. I found this rather endearing, but Taiwanese may find it rather confusing, or 'incorrect'." I won't record each instance of non-Sinitic vocabulary, and I certainly won't point out all of the differences between the spoken Hokkien and the written Mandarin, but just give some illustrative examples:
03:07 "Did you take the wrong medicine?" Malay "salah" is used for "wrong". Also at 14:33, 15:54, and 17:40.
4:00 An Indian man says "tapi". "Tapi / Tetapi" means "but" in Malay.
6:16 A man tries to say "take care of yourself" in Cantonese.
7:18-8:00 The female nurse speaks in Teochew 潮州, not Hokkien. She speaks Teochew throughout with this man.
9.44 – 9.48 The doctor (Doctor Tay) and the man pronounce the word "fly" 飛 differently. She says "b/pe", the man says "b/puey".
10.28 The Teochew nurse says "rui" (from "duit" from Malay) for "money".
11.18 Another "baru / baharu" ("just now") from Malay.
13:53 "Patut" ("correct, fair") from Malay, also again at 14:00 and 14:04.
14:04 "Mana" ("where") from Malay. Also at 18:09.
15:24 "Guli gang". The meaning is "wages". I suspect that the "guli" part comes from English "coolie":
name given by Europeans to hired laborers in India and China, c. 1600, from Hindi quli "hired servant," probably from kuli, name of an aboriginal tribe or caste in Gujarat. The name was picked up by the Portuguese, who used it in southern India (where by coincidence kuli in Tamil meant "hire") and in China.
From Online Etymological Dictionary.
But I don't know where the "gang" comes from. Perhaps Taiwanese or other Minnan speakers can help us out on this. The expression "guli gang" is used many times in this clip.
17:29 "Gaduh" ("argue") from Malay.
18:43 The word "ngiao" 猫 ("cat") is used for "stingy". It would be interesting to find out if Taiwan Hokkien has the same usage.
19:24 An Indian lady says "you can tell me" in Hokkien.
19:37 Here "gang rui" is used for "wages", but compare "guli gang" discussed above (15:24).
I'd like to close with a personal anecdote that relates to a Hokkien expression used in this film, namely, chhit-tho 七桃 ("play"). The writing is curious, since the characters literally mean "seven peaches". But I could tell from the context that what they were saying is the Hokkien word that is usually written [辶+日]迌.
About ten-fifteen years ago, I went to a famous bookstore for scholars in Taipei, Lexis. I spotted a book with [辶+日]迌 on the cover and was immediately intrigued by it because I had never come across those characters before in my life. I started leafing through the book and could tell that it was a work of fiction by an apparently Hokkien author from Southeast Asia. Because of those two strange characters on the cover alone, I decided that I had to have this book. So I took it up to the checkout area, and the clerks groaned. I asked them why they groaned when I wanted to buy one of their books. They said that it was because their computer system didn't have either of those characters in the software. In the end they had to write out the transaction for this book by hand, because the computer just couldn't handle it.
When I returned to America, I did some research on these two recherché characters, [辶+日]迌, and I found that they were rare characters dug up from some obscure Song Dynasty lexicon to serve as the supposed běnzì 本字 ("original characters") to match the morphemes of the Taiwanese word chhit-tho ("play"). Well, there's nothing "original" about them at all. [辶+日]迌 were simply arbitrarily chosen to transcribe the sounds of this common Taiwanese word.
This experience had a profound effect upon me, because chhit-tho ("play") was one of the first Taiwanese words that I learned when I was teaching in Taichung during 1970-72, and here we had to go through all these graphic gymnastics to write this high frequency word in characters!
On the concept of "original character", search for běnzì 本字 in this paper:
Victor H. Mair, "How to Forget Your Mother Tongue and Remember Your National Language".
For a monumentally important article on the inadequacy of the Chinese script for writing Taiwanese, see:
Cheng, Robert L. (Zheng Liangwei) 1978. "Taiwanese Morphemes in Search of Chinese Characters" Journal of Chinese Linguistics, 6.2 (June): 306-314.
Anyway, it looks like there's a Hokkien revival of sorts in Singapore, but the new Hokkien is not quite the same as the old Hokkien.
[Thanks to Yilise]