Hô-ló vs. Xiàmén (More on Contextual Tones)

I received some feedback from a native speaker of Xiàmén providing me with "Pinyin spellings" now used for the same vocabulary on the mainland (I do not know to what extent this is a formal or informal standard: the Communist government of Xiamen has become involved in the creation of official dictionaries and standards for the language very late in the game).

Some of these differences (in comparing the POJ column to the column on the far right of the charts) just reflect different attempts at transcribing the same word; others reflect real differences in dialect.  Problems with consonant sounds are obvious, but problems with both tone marking and the actual tones pronounced (two very different things) are much harder to pin down.

I have some new books arriving from Taiwan in the next few weeks, and should have more to say in due course.  For the time being, however, I'm left with a puzzle that is missing many of its necessary pieces.  The resources produced both by the Taiwanese government and by Taiwanese academics are largely polemical (rather than educational) and tend to assume that you're already fluent in both Hô-ló and standard Chinese, and that you want to join in a debate on the politics of the language.

Note that these illustrations substitute the breve character (jĭt, jŏat) where P.O.J. has a small vertical line or apostrophe above the vowel (ji't, jo'at).

End-notes to the chart:
¹ Textbook: pȱ vs. pō (sic?).
² Textbook: siòng vs. siōng (sic?).
³ Textbook: jĭt vs. jĭk (sic?).
⁴ Textbook: chèng vs. chêng (sic?).
⁵ Textbook: the audio omits this word.

Contextual tones in Hô-ló (Taiwanese Hokkien)

In putting together a chart like this I encounter all the "limits of documentation" of the language: I discover a problem in one source, then I look at another, and I can't confirm if one source is in error, or if the other source is in error, or if they both are wrong, or if they're both right.  The source I'm working from here is a simple word-list in Romanized Hokkien only (it provides no Chinese characters, and no English translation: I've filled in all those blanks myself here, and the results are imperfect).

The writing system (P.O.J.) loosely describes the way Hokkien was spoken in Xiamen (廈門) around 1870.  It applies to 21st century Taiwanese Hokkien very loosely (there are ongoing debates about how many distinct consonants people should use when writing Hô-ló, even amongst those who want to abolish Romanization entirely).  You'll notice several points in the chart in which I question whether or not the textbook I'm using has made an error --but it is an open-ended question.  I will now rely on suggestions form native speaker to let me know if I've figured out the puzzle.

It's very hard for me to say with certainty that ló is an error for lŏh --I can only suggest what seems to make sense to me, and then wait for feedback from native speakers.  Given how approximate the spelling system is, it is entirely possible that both spellings are acceptable (or that ló is now a better transcription of what the old dictionaries list as lŏh).  It is entirely possible that the new generation of dictionaries using Zhuyin (注音, a.k.a. bopomofo) will end up influencing the way that people use the "old" methods of spelling Hokkien in Roman letters.  It is also possible that reverse-transcription from the Taiwanese government's official list of Sinograph-based spellings (available here as a PDF) will end up influencing Romanization through "reverse-transcription".


Displaying information schematically gives the impression that you're presenting more when (in fact) you're presenting less.  The chart that here seems to present the answers to many questions; in fact, it raises more questions than it answers.

History of Amoy Cinema 2011 book review

There's a great deal to be said in praise of Taylor's new book (2011 still counts as "new" in academic non-fiction) but it happens that it doesn't contain what I was looking for.

The book as a whole illustrates a strange world that both arose and disappeared with the changing political geography of the 20th century: the Hokkien speakers of Taiwan and "the south seas" were centrifugally arrayed around Xiamen (廈門) --and, after 1949, they found themselves more-or-less suddenly separated from their cultural homeland.

A cascading sequence of political changes ensue (Malaya becomes Malaysia, etc.) with implications for the commercial and cultural vitality of the Hokkien language (or languages) as a medium for cinema.  The book also includes some useful comments on radio, theatre, music and other media.

The text is loaded with anecdotes of anthropological interest, and one of my first reactions to it was a sense of surprise in discovering the extent to which the style (and jargon) of cultural anthropology is now the prevalent fashion (far outside of the academic discipline itself).  About 30 years ago, I do not think that the discussion of "transnational ethnography" would have been found in a book of this kind, nor even the word "ethnography"; to observe this is not a criticism of the book, but just a remark on the extent to which anthropology has displaced formerly-fashionable tropes in the analysis of popular culture (and this trend is certainly preferable to seeing jargon borrowed from Freud or Hegel).

As one example of such an anecdote (that needs no further introduction):

[In 1955 there were] two films —one Mandarin the other Amoy-dialect— which both centred on the figure of Mazu [媽祖 = Má-chȯ́-pô], the Goddess of the Sea and protector of seafarers.  The Amoy-dialect film, entitled Shengmu Mazu zhuan (the True Story of Mazu), was funded by […] Chiayi-based theatre-owner Lin Zhang.  It was filmed at Wader Studios in Hong Kong (although some outdoor scenes were shot in Taiwan) by the small Amoy-dialect production house Bi Da, and starred the perennial Jiang Fan.  The Mandarin film, Shengnü Mazu zhuan (The Story of Mazu), was funded and produced by the Taipei-based China-Light Movie Company, with the veteran Shanghai actress Zhou Manhua playing the title role.
A legal dispute arose […] over accusations of plagiarism […].  The dispute, however, highlighted the significant differences between the two interpretations of the figure of Mazu.  The Mandarin film tells the life story of a young woman called Lin Moniang from a village in Fujian, pior to her posthumous deification.  The Amoy-dialect version doesthe same, but presents Mazu as a being with superhuman powers who, halfway through the story, leaves the mortal world and is transformed into a benevolent deity able to influence the actions of others.
Certain ways in which Mazu was presented in the [Amoy-language] Nan Yang-funded film caused problems in Taipei.  References to the "goddess descending to earth" (shennü xiafan) in the film's script, for instance, were identified by censors as evidence of "superstitious" elements of the sort that had been outlawed in 1953.  These same superstitious factors were also attacked by sections of the media in Taiwan […].  This may also help to explain why the Mandarin[-language] film was so adamant about its own "non-superstitious" credentials —theatres promoted it as a movie that "commemorated the spirit of Mazu" but did not "advocate superstition".  [Op. cit., p. 60–61]

The book also deserves some praise for going above and beyond the usual (and abysmal) standard of Routledge non-fiction books: significant effort has been made with the cover and also with design, layout and illustration of the text (although I would have preferred to see more Chinese-language within the text, not sequestered to a glossary, and more actual Hokkien written wherever possible).  This is a huge step above what I've now come to expect from Routledge (i.e., the dismal blue cover of "digital on-demand printing", with the poorest possible quality provided at the highest possible price).

What's missing from the book (from my own strange perspective) is simply a concern with the language, and that's fair enough: the author had a long list of substantive concerns of his own (historical, political, cultural and methodological) to be addressed in 126 pages.  However, the history of Hokkien cinema contains the raw material for someone else to write a book that would make use of the same film archives as a window onto the study of the language.  The cinema of this era was produced (and marketed) across dialects (with networks linking studios in Hong Kong to cinemas and investors in Taiwan, Singapore, Manila, Kuala Lumpur, etc. etc.) and some of the specific films discussed in the book involved multiple languages and dialects (delivering none-too-subtle political messages to the audience and, sometimes, pronouncements on the social status of the different languages in relation to one-another) so we might yet hope that some linguist would find a laboratory for examining various forms of spoken Hokkien in the same film-archives --and, perhaps, there are some materials that might yet be useful for students, if they could be extracted and enframed for study.

A bibliography of just one entry: Jeremy E. Taylor, 2011, Rethinking Transnational Chinese Cinemas: The Amoy-Dialect Film Industry in Cold War Asia, Routledge.

Lexical tones in Hô-ló (Taiwanese Hokkien)

What do we mean by "lexical tones"?  They are the tones we now rely on to find a word in the dictionary (a lexicon, in plain English).  There's a lot of frustration with the fact that the marked tones don't mean much more than that --and there's a lot of frustration with the writing (and learning) of Hokkien tones generally.

POJ is the writing system used to make the dictionary, and this is why students need to memorize the "lexical tone" of a word, even if it has no connection whatsoever to the spoken tone.  At a minimum, the lexical tone allows the student to discern some difference between chài and châi (and to find them in the dictionary), but the fact that native speakers of Hokkien have so much trouble guessing the written form of these tone-markings (from the sound of a word) is a hint at how tenuous the link is between the orthography and the "parole" of the language.

For a student of Hô-ló, this is a problem encountered on about three different levels:

 • There's an asymmetry between the lexical tones (ā, â, á, etc.) and the traditional idea of what the tones are supposed to be.  On the charts, for example, the tone described as "flat" in Chinese [平] is not the tone marked as "flat" (ā) in English; I'm left to wonder if POJ might be better off marking the vowels as "im" [陰] and "iông" [陽] instead of using the arbitrary numbers 1 through 8 (or the even more arbitrary lines above the letters, that neither relate systematically to the Chinese categories, nor to the numbers).  You may also notice that the tone called "upper" (上聲) is actually spoken as a falling tone [˥˧] but is marked in POJ as if it were a rising tone: á makes less sense than would à in this case.  Again, I wonder why the English didn't just directly adapt 上 in some way (as with 平 before).

 • There's an asymmetry between the lexical tones as they're written and the tone actually spoken "lexically" (i.e., when the word is said in isolation, or sometimes at the conclusion of a phrase).  Lexical â is supposed to be a "low rising tone" [˩˧] and if that were true, the marking â would be fairly confusing, as the shape of the tone would be á (rising) not â (up and down).  However, the reality is that lexical â (a.k.a. tone 5) first gets lower and then rises (˧˩˧) --or, at least, this is the tone as it now exists in 21st century Taiwan.  In other words, â is supposed to be providing a mnemonic for a tone that would naturally look more like ǎ (and the symbol ǎ doesn't exist in POJ).

 • There's an asymmetry between the traditional categories for the tones [陰 vs. 陽, and 平 vs. 去, etc.] and the tones as they're actually spoken.  Given the geographic (and historical) distribution of Hokkien dialects this isn't surprising, but it is, simply, a problem that the student has to encounter and deal with: memorizing that â = 陽平調 won't help you figure out the lexical tone of a word you've just heard (but have never seen written).

My perspective on these problems is different from that of other foreigners because of the variety of languages I've worked on in the past.  Although languages like Lao and Thai are not described in terms of "lexical tone", the reality for most students is similarly arbitrary: you need to learn a bunch of markings that are added above vowels that have very little predicatable relationship to the tones as they're spoken aloud.  This involves a lot of "brute memorization" (as Victor Mair would say) but it isn't too brutal if you just regard the tone-markings as an arbitrary system separating dictionary entries.  I find that the most embittered students are the ones who actually go around trying to pronounce the words following the de jure system of rules found in the dictionary (and who are then frustrated by now idiosyncratic the reality of tonality can be in the given language).

With Lao and Thai, I certainly met foreigners who had tried to believe the myth of textbook tonality: they were told "just memorize this chart, and you'll know everything" --and they responded by jejunely expecting that the chart really would provide a set of prescriptive rules for the langauge.  At some point, they've got to figure out that the charts are neither descriptive nor prescriptive (and, to keep it in perspective, imagine how difficult it would be to provide a table that was truly prescriptive just for the pronounciation of English vowel sounds: there's a lot of guesswork involved based on the context, the dialect, and there exceptions to every rule, even in a very robust and well-documented spelling system).

Unfortunately, the use of Pinyin (for Modern Standard Mandarin) has promoted the notion that tonality (in all tonal languages) is far more regular and predictable than vowel-sounds in English; the reality is that neither the tones nor vowels sounds are predictable (from the written form) in any actually-spoken-brogue of Chinese.

There's an empirical study of Taiwanese tonality (available as a PDF) by Wi-vun Taiffalo Chiung.  The emphasis of that study is to draw attention to generational change in the tonality of the language.  What I would instead draw your attention to is (simply) that people don't speak the tones the way they're written (not even in the audio recordings that come with the textbook), partly because the writing system itself was never an attempt to accurately describe the sound.  Lexical tones very indirectly and imperfectly relate to any spoken form of the language; and the question of the (still more difficult) "contextual tones" isn't even touched on in Chiung's article (nor in this one!).

Hô-ló Sin-gí 2 Animals from Comenius

I raised this list of words (and sentences) for discussion in my email group for Learning Hô-ló (台語, 臺灣話)* for a peculiar reason: the original exercise (from Comenius in 1658) practices vocabulary of a type that children commonly know but that you often can't find in the dictionary.


For each of the pictures, you're supposed to make a sentence along the lines of "The bear growls, grr grr".  Many people who learn English as adults might not know the verbs growl, bleat, bray, etc. (we have specific verbs for the sounds that animals make in English).


This sounds easy, but you soon see the trouble when you try to translate this exercise using a dictionary.  I'm pretty sure that the Hô-ló sound that a bear makes is hm̄-hm̄-kìo ("to growl").

So, what you can see at a glance with a language exercise of this kind is that different languages both have different nouns and verbs to form these sentences, but also have different assumptions about onomatopoeia (is the sound of a bear growling "hm̄" or "grr?").

* (If you're having trouble finding the group, the name is exactly as stated above, but the e-mail is Learning-Ho-Lo@Googlegroups).

Hô-ló personal pronouns

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.

Spoken Hokkien new textbook review

This is the first truly new textbook for teaching Taiwanese Hokkien (台語) to native speakers of English in a very long time.


Most of the materials available for this language (in English) are either directly or indirectly derivative of the work of Nicholas Cleaveland Bodman (whose career in Asian languages apparently started with deciphering Japanese naval code at Pearl Harbor in 1942).*  If you'd like to see a survey of the informal language resources now produced in Taiwan, there's a Youtube video providing an overview (in the most literal sense of the term), but you'll see that most of these are merely phrase-books (if they're produced for foreigners at all), or else children's books (that presume the child has grown up speaking Hokkien, to some extent, and has a parent reading the text aloud).

There has been remarkably little that's truly new since Bodman ("cold war" textbooks, some linked to the U.S. government, and other linked to Christian missionary groups); and, of course, one reason for this is the strange history of the suppression of the language itself (quoting Victor Mair, "Until the lifting of martial law on July 14, 1987, not only was it considered subversive to write in Taiwanese, one could be punished for compiling Taiwanese dictionaries and instructional materials, or even for speaking Taiwanese in public arenas such as schools, governmental bodies, the media, and so forth.").  So, if you're looking at textbooks to purchase online, you may be surprised to find that some of them are still sold with cassette tape.

So, anyone interested in learning or teaching the language will need a copy of this new book from Fang Meili for several obvious reasons:

 • It was produced specifically for teaching Hokkien to westerners, and presumes no prior knowledge of any other Chinese dialect, nor of Chinese written characters.
  (Don't believe me?  The methodology and rationale for the book are set out plainly enough in this PDF, 台灣語言在英國教學與發展情況.)

 • It uses POJ (Pe̍h-ōe-jī) throughout, and that's means that you'll actually be able to use it with the existing corpus of dictionaries for the language.  Be warned: some of the other textbooks (and phrase-books) available neither follow POJ nor any other systematic transcription standard.  When you're at "level zero" with the language, you will need to be able to find POJ entries in whatever dictionary you have (digital or otherwise).

 • The audio recordings are clear, high-quality, and provided on compact disc (which is what you'd expect for a book first produced in 2010).

What are the limitations of the textbook?
 • You will immediately be wondering "where's volume two"?  The book is only 167 pages long, and you can indeed tell that each chapter was adapted from an in-class lesson (as is explained in the appendix).  As such, it is introductory, but not compendious.  It is well-suited to classroom use, but it is not a reference book.  The total range of vocabulary covered is limited.

 • Within the limit of so many pages, it is understandable that the book does not include Chinese characters, but teaches the language exclusively in phonetics (POJ, aforementioned).  This is, however, a limitation (wait for volume two?).

To use an example (taken directly from Wikipedia) wherein a simple Min-nan phrase would not have a single character in common with "standard" Chinese expression:
     i cháu bē kín (伊走未緊)
     tā pǎo bù kuài (他跑不快)
It is true that the characters used in Taiwanese also exist in a Chinese dictionary (i.e., 伊 exists in both languages) but the more important fact here (from the student's perspective) is that the two phrases both sound completely different, and also look completely different.

This sort of asymmetry is worth knowing about relatively early in the student's education, partly because so many native Chinese speakers will insists that the opposite is true.  People will tell you every day that the difference between the languages is "merely phonetic"; just a few days ago a Chinese librarian insisted to me that the two languages are written identically in Chinese characters.  The simple sentence above shows that this isn't true, or that it is true only in some abstract sense (cf. anything written on pinyin.info about language-ideology, e.g. Victor Mair's comments, "The myth about a nation of Chinese speaking a single language made up of countless 'dialects' with only negligible differences of 'accent' continues to root itself ever more deeply in the global consciousness, plaguing common sense and scientific observation all the while.").  Perhaps this could be compared to someone saying that German and English are written identically, and merely spoken differently: every word in [the German phrase] wie geht es dir corresponds directly to an English word (and yet this correspondence is still completely incomprehensible if you don't already have a solid understanding of both English and German).
 • The book is published in Europe --and that really is a limitation!  One of the reasons why I'm posting this brief review to the internet is that the textbook seems to be nearly unknown at present (and I assume that it is very hard to find a copy in Taiwan).  Whatever prestige SOAS may have as a publisher, they're really lousy as a book-maker: they put zero effort into transforming the author's manuscript into a book worth buying.

It has a plain, white cover, and plain MS-Word page-layout throughout the interior (with a plain white audio CD, too).  I put a flower next to the book in that photograph to provide some color (thus, you can tell that the photo isn't in black and white).  The book contains zero illustrations (cf. Comenius, the "inventor" of the illustrated vocabulary).  In terms of the quality of the paper and binding, let's face it: books published in Europe are now of much lower quality than books produced in Taiwan.  This is, perhaps, especially true of textbooks and non-fiction.

I was also very disappointed with SOAS's own online bookstore, in addition to the disappointing printing/production of the book.  Although it is more expensive to order the same book from Amazon, I can only say that you take your chances with a badly-managed and poorly-working system if you purchase directly from SOAS.  If you try reporting your problems to the SOAS bookstore, guess what?  The e-mail address doesn't work, and there's no other way to get in touch with them.

If you're expecting the book to arrive with a postage stamp from England, you'll be disappointed: it comes from some anonymous digital print shop in Germany.  The reality is that SOAS outsourced the production and shipping of this book to Germany (at the lowest possible quality), and they really have no executive control over the process.  It really seems that the publisher takes no pride or care in producing the book at all, and the results are sloppy (please note that I am not blaming the author for this at all).  Authors of language textbooks should seriously consider publishing with anyone else instead of SOAS (this is not the first disappointment I've had with their language materials); like many publishers in Europe's 21st century, they now compare very poorly to the Asian alternatives (including even alternatives printed in India).

In sum:
 • Everyone needs to get a copy of the book, because it's the first truly new thing of its kind in a very long time.
 • I'm looking forward to the sequel (volume 2?) as soon as possible.
 • I'm hoping that both this book and the sequel can be re-published in Taiwan, where they would probably be able to produce the same book at a much higher quality for the same price, and where they would probably be better at international distribution as well.