Sunday 27 May 2012

Hô-ló Sin-gí 1 Fruit


In these two illustrations, you have 27 varieties of fruit set out in four languages.  You'll notice that Taiwanese Hokkien (Hô-ló) very rarely corresponds to the Pinyin (Pheng-im) --and the correspondences are often "foreign fruit" with recently-coined names.


In general, the Cambodian and Lao terms for fruit exist in an interesting web of loan-words that involves Malaysia directly, and, often enough, India and China indirectly.  Many of the English words now used for these fruits are simply anglicized Malay (e.g., mangosteen and rambutan).

Indigenous fruits tend to have significant dialect variations; foreign imports sometimes have a variety of new coinages (e.g., "Shampoo fruit" is the second name given in Lao for syzygium "rose apple", probably just a reference to the color, as shampoo is presumed to be pink in the region).

My Hô-ló transcription differs from the standard (POJ) in just one respect: I'm using the breve (˘) where the standard would have the difficult-to-compute vertical line above the vowel: păt-á vs. paˈt-á.

A few of the names on the list were filled-in by suggestions that I received from members of the Learning-Ho-Lo@Googlegroups --and my thanks go to them.