Michael Churchman is back to share his research and knowledge about the various tones in Hokkien.
You will find both his pieces about how to write Hokkien with roman alphabets (Pe·h-oa-ji 白话字) and his latest addition — Hokkien Tones, on the top right corner of Penang Hokkien Podcast website.
I hope you will find this as interesting and worthwhile as I do.
(Also, please send a thank-you note/comment to Michael for taking the time to generously share his knowledge with us)
Thanks Ah-John, I hope the
I’ll be around in Penang from Thursday morning next week until early Monday morning if anyone wants a live tutorial – free of course….or in exchange for tips on where to eat the best stuff 🙂 – on how to write POJ and the difficulties of tone sandhi, and using Hokkien dictionaries etc…
I hope the……..what was I going to say? I hope it’s useful and that I’ll manage to get the last section done soon!
Ah-bin:
Actually we have more than 6 (or I prefer to say 7) tones in Penang Hokkien.
Traditionally, people think we have no tone 6, but there’s a word we use everyday in Penang, the ending of a question “mee / meh” influenced by Cantonese, is in a higher tone than tone 2. I classify it as 6, so far the only one.
Also, we have 3 entering tones. Not just 4 (low) and 8 (high) but we have a higher one, you try to read Kok4-Ka1, country, and see. Most people play around with Kok8-Ka1 and Kok9-Ka1 depending on the context.
Penang Hokkien is a colourful mixture of Hokkien and Teochew, we have more than the traditional 7 tones. 🙂
If you want, let’s Skype. I am more than happy to share this with you. That’s the reason why people think Penang people speak Hokkien with a musical tone. We have 9 tones. 😛
I know about the six/seven but I simplified it down to this system to make it easier for when I explain about the tone sandhi in the last lesson.
The end result will (hopefully) be that people can use two ways to describe tones, the POJ system, and another system based on these four tones that can still produce accurate PGHK sounds without the headache of learning full POJ. In the last installment I’ll put them all together….and I hope you’ll forgive me for saying “four basic tones” then!!
That high entering one (9) I just class as “H” in this system, but if you use traditional tone categories there are definitely six.
I’ll send you the “full version” – not yet edited for wordpress – for you to have a look at.
Ah John has given a good education in the beginning of the show 🙂