Hi all! I apologize for the low volume on this video. It sounded fine when I played the video on my desktop earlier but after uploading the video, the volume became really low. There isn't an option to raise the volume on an already uploaded video so I would have to trouble you guys to manually increase the volume on your end. It took me a long time to create this video so I really hope this doesn't impact your viewing too much! Sorry for the inconvenience 🙁
No problem with me concerning volume on my desktop, some other videos on RUclips have far lower volumes and the authors do not even mention it. Thanks.
Please please do make more videos like this. It is extremely hard to find such accessible but well-researched and complete information on non-Mandarin non-Cantonese Chinese languages and even if you only ever did Hokkien, your contribution would be extremely valuable.
As an Indonesian speaker, I'm delightfully surprised to find Hokkien words that are adapted to Indonesian, like 虼蚻 (ka tsuah -> kecoak) = cockroach and 馬車 (be tshia -> becak) in 馬車路 which meaning has shifted from 'horse cart' to 'rickshaw'. We also use the word 'sinse' (先生) in Indonesian to call alternative medicine practitioners! Thank you for the insights and I really look forward to your next videos!
As a Thai person who is learning Mandarin, Japanese and Cantonese. I find this video quite interesting and insightful, because I always wonder why Japanese keep using kanji in a weird way, like using 他 (hoka/ta) as the meaning of "other" or 先生 (sensei) as an honorific address to teacher or doctors. By watching this video I found out that some of the sounds in Hokkien that don't exist in other Sinitic languages like sui 美 or kha 跤 have the same meaning in Thai. As kha (ขา) means leg and suai (สวย) means beautiful. I hope in the future you will make videos in Cantonese and Hakka. Looking forward to it!
Exactly. The Japanese ported most of their Chinese vocabulary during the earlier dynasties like Southern Wu, Han and Tang. During that time, the current Mandarin Chinese was not even conceived yet and the norm pronunciations at that time sounded closer to the southern sinitic languages of today. Thus many Japanese onyomi have southern sinitic roots.
It might also be because Teochew (another branch of Southern Min) had heavy influences on the Thai language during some era at least 300 years ago. I think Thailand even had an emperor whose dad was Teochew.
@@JonMawPAUL_ANKA You are right Thailand has a very big Teochew population and there are many influences from Teochew in the language, but in this case 'sui' in Thai is unlikely from Teochew, because in Teochew we actually don't say "sui" for beautiful, we say 雅 (ngia). King Taksin of Thonburi kingdom was indeed of Teochew descent.
I am truly grateful that you are making videos about the Hokkien Language! Well done! I believe that Hokkien is an underrated language in the West since most of Western Media portrays Chinese that speak Mandarin or Cantonese.
Swatow, Sawbei and Teo Chew are so similar to the southern Hokkien language, they can be categorised as variations of the Min language. My father's father says "jiak png" while my mother's mother says "jiak pui" but I understand Teochew too.
the confusion with "chinese dialect" vs "sinitic language" seems to still be strong in Singapore and Malaysia. In the Philippines, people used to have this confusion too but it was not just relegated to those of the Sinitic language family, but also to members of the Philippine language family, where in the provinces, they were also deemed as "dialects" before with only the official languages in the country being thought of as "languages", but this made no sense since they could not understand each other anyways with only some resemblance of similar words and grammar to each other. Upper academia and literati later no longer acknowledged the idea that the other provincial regional languages were merely "dialects", hence it was slowly dispelled as a bad rumor and gossip that the masses still sometimes bring up. Though it looks like, that's still strong in Singapore and Malaysia. I wouldn't be surprised for those in China too since only a few there are good at English and I wouldn't be surprised if those that know English there still think "方言 = dialect = non-official-language".
True, 方言is most likely a modern term created by the linguistic chauvinists up north. In the olden days the term used was 土言/土話. Anyway, Fujianese language is the true Chinese language. Check it out yourself, 王，皇are the same pronunciation if you use the 說文解字 dictionary to reconstruct the pronunciation of the word, Mandarin Chinese and Cantonese Chinese don’t add up and doesn’t sound right. If you read 說文解字，you we be amazed by the accuracy of the word and meaning of Fujianese language, in comparison to the Mandarin Chinese. Well the least educated person in this conversation wouldn’t agree with me and try to cancel me. Sad.
@@ZQQHello1919rty There is no "one true Chinese language." Whether Hokkien, Cantonese, Mandarin, etc., each language diverged in their own way from the common ancestor, and have each become their own thing. Though yes, 土話 is a pretty interesting term for "local variety."
Its not a confusion. I'm Malaysian Chinese and we know the varieties of Han are mutually unintelligible. Some of us speak several Han languages. The reason "we" (not me personally) call them dialects is simply out of habit.
@@ZQQHello1919rty Wow you literally referred to the people from up north as "linguistic chauvinists" and then later in the same comment, actually able to say that the Fujianese language is the "true Chinese language". Some people really have no sense of self awareness. There's no 1 true Chinese language. They are all Chinese languages and are all legitimate. Language is ever changing and ever evolving all the time.
As someone grew up with 4 grandparents with 4 different mother tongues - Japanese(Kyushu dialect) and also Hokkien; Hokkien(Taiwanese); Cantonese/Hakka/Mandarin; Hakka(Sixian dialect), where some of them already multilingual, I can say in first hand that these have very low to none mutual intelligibility. Due to my father travelled a lot, I had been living with my grandparents (on my mother side) as a kid along with some of my cousins, and we are able to speak these languages with various proficiency. But in day to day life, like going to the market/doctor, my grandparents who only spoke one language would either only go to places that speak their mother tongues, or required my parents, or aunts/uncles, to accompany them as translators. And they themselves would only be able to use traveler vocabulary like Mandarin to communicate with each side during holidays when they met. And this language barrier continues to my generation and beyond. My sister-in-law's family who came from Zhejiang, spoke dialects of Wu language (her grandparents also spoke different dialects in those regions), and the nanny of my nephew and niece comes from Indonesia. And I have no idea what they were saying when I joined their family holidays, and I cannot even tell what kind of dialects they were speaking in their languages (the same goes for my sister-in-law, she cannot understand what we are saying). And it is indeed easier to guess and learn traveler level vocabulary if they are still the same language family. But very far from understanding any full sentences.
Please make more Chinese language history videos like this. I love learning this stuff, it's so interesting. Thank you for taking time to make these videos!
As a Hokkien I’ve asked all the questions you’ve answered elegantly. Whenever I ask questions regarding the non-straightforward translatability of mandarin to Hokkien I usually get withering looks of exasperation. People in Singapore considered me silly to even consider the questions!
I am a Singaporean Hokkien. Ya, I would wonder why you ask about the direct translatability because Mandarin and Hokkien are not really directly translatable 😜
honestly i find your 2 part series to encompass everything someone should know about hokkien in a very understandable and fairly comprehensive package. very good stuff yea
These videos are truly well-researched, informative, interesting and easy to understand. Thank you for bringing us close to such a distant yet beautiful language.
Such an awesome video. Can't wait for more. I'm a native English speaker that knows Hmong (苗語）普通話 (Mandarin) and Thai. When you pointed out in Hokkien that 美 uses "sui" which was borrowed from Baiyue it blew my mind cause in Thai we also use sui (suai สวย) for beautiful. There's also a lot of Teochew speakers in Thailand as well but it makes me interested even more in researching this.
I am half Teochew, half Hokkien. Actually I noticed the word for beautiful in Thai and Hokkien are the same, but it is unlikely that it is a loanword from Teochew even though Thailand has a very big Teochew population because in Teochew we actually say 雅 (ngia) instead. It is also interesting to know that there are many Teochew loanwords in Thai, which would be pronounced similarly in Hokkien. For example, chair (kao yi), cupboard (tu), boss (tow kay), abalone (bao hir), chinese broccoli (kan na) etc.
多謝・・恁！汝・過再創啊野好勢！ Love both videos! This could easily be the most well-made linguistic series about Hokkien that I've seen so far. Thank you for addressing the widespread misconceptions about my language (and the Chinese languages in general), and making sure that your information is as accurate as possible. You deserve to be more popular.
Fellow Singaporean here! Really enjoyed your videos. It has helped me learn more about my Hokkien roots. I have always wanted to learn more about the language but my poor mandarin ability has erected a barrier to access the language. Thanks for helping to make this knowledge acessible to me now :)
This is a great video, it has been very informative for me. As someone who speaks south and north Indian languages and grew up in the US, I never was exposed to any Chinese language beyond Cantonese and Mandarin. Thank you for making these vidoes, they're incredibly informative in a way that most people can follow, and I look forward to more!
This is another incredible video! It's super clear and easy to understand, and illustrates several phenomena in historical linguistics quite well, all the while still relating it to people's real lives and social contexts. One realization that this video struck me with is that people unfamiliar with Chinese characters don't have the same sense they likely have with different iterations of, say, the Latin alphabet -- myself included! This channel is off to a phenomenal start, I can't wait to see even more videos even more spectacular than this one!!
Fascinating to see the similarities between Japanese "on-yomi", or readings of Kanji taken from Chinese, and the same character's reading in Hokkien. Japanese "sekai" -- world -- for example. Or, Hokkien "jin" -- person. Even the use of 走 for 'run' is similar to Japanese. I always knew that the Japanese readings were taken from another Sinitic language than Mandarin but it's still fascinating to see those similarities in a video like this.
In ancient times, Japanese gov. s every 1? or several years sent huge delegations to China to learn newest trends in technology, poetry, physical science, cuisine, sports, board games, sports, music song dance, etc.at each dynasty s court in different cities + provinces. BUT, 1 year, not sure why, the delegation went to Xiamen (Amoy) which has never been the national capitol, not even provincial capitol. Thus that delegation learned Hokkien, words, & not that dynasty s capitol s words.
Fantastic work. My only suggestion is to keep an eye on the audio level. This one is a lot quieter than Episode 1. Otherwise, this is very informative content.
Once again, extremely interesting, including the description of Hokkien as a language rather than a dialect. Thank you for your efforts, and I hope you can make more videos about Chinese languages.
Great video! Really loved and enjoyed it as a Singaporean Hokkien Speaker, hope you can do more on words special to the hokkien and Cantonese languages
Actually, de(的) is probably similar to the old pronunciation of zhi(之）which was changed into current pronunciation by Mongols. One evidence is chen(陈) surname sounds similar to tian(田) surname in ancient Chinese, which was recorded evidently in history book. Similarly, hen(很) is probably similar to the old pronunciation of shen(甚）
Great video (and so was part 1)! Would love a whole series of videos like this for a language that I natively speak but have never learned formally in an academic setting.
As someone who grew up speaking hokkien, then Mandarin and later on learnt English, Japanese and dabbled in malay, Indonesia languages, it truly has been fascinating to find similarities in many phrases and words. You've helped me understand so much of what I've been confused by and delighted to know that your channel exists. Subscribed.
Wow, really informative and eye-opening. 👏 As a Singapore Hokkien speaker myself I never realised there is actually so much value and history in this 'dialect' or language. Also, is 先生 read as sian si, and doesn't it also have another the meaning of teacher apart from medical practitioner? Also will you be considering talking about the other 'dialects' as well as dialect groups we have here in Singapore? For instance, Teochew, Hakka, Hainanese, etc.. Gam Sia!
You have compiled such a brilliant discovery of Hokkien language. As an Hokkien, your discovery has initiated a new interest in me to learn Hokkien again. I am proud to be a Hokkien speaker. Thank you for your amazing findings.
18:14. What I have been noticing is that for some reason Hokkien has some words that are similar if not the same as Korean and Japanese, in this instance 'sekai' is also world in Japanese, hence the genre 'isekai' for other world; probably because Korean and Japanese has some roots in old chinese.
Interestingly, "kecoa" today still refers to cockroaches in Indonesian and Javanese, both of which are categorically Austronesian languages. Also, "be chia" sounds like "becak" but the latter refers to another kind of vehicle.
It's fascinating to learn more about the Hokkien language since I am a Hokkien speaker. It is also fascinating why Hokkien vocabulary became adopted by the Korean and Japanese languages. Why was Hokkien so influential from the Sui to Ming period? There are people who commented that Hokkien words exist in Japanese because Japanese people originated from Fujian. I think the "reasoning" is too simplistic and ignorant of history. So I hope you can make a video to clarify the historical spread of Hokkien vocabulary to the Korean and Japanese languages. By the way, I also speak fluent Cantonese and Japanese. Thank you.
Japanese people created many new words (called wasei-kango) during Meiji restoration to translate western concepts that did not exist in Asia (such as history, philosophy, bank, library, telephone). When China and Korea started using these words, they used their own pronunciation of the characters. Similar pronunciation in Hokkien and Japanese is just coincidence.
Trade, and pirates. Japan loved bronze mirrors and had a hard time obtaining the ores required for steel from their land. They had to trade. Hence Japan has "Chinese" readings that sound like hokkien and canto, from the two coastal provinces that dominate in the sea...
Thank you for these videos. They are well organized and I appreciate the information coming from someone who is also a speaker of (some of) the languages being discussed.
Thank you for creating this video on the Hokkien language, helping to clear up some of the misconceptions about the language. May I ask, do you speak Hokkien or Chinese? I am curious because your pronunciation of some words are a bit off. Take the word "Zhangzhou Hokkien" for example. We usually pronounce Zhangzhou as in Pinyin, not as in English. Also, your pronunciation of 餓死 (pronounced POJ: gō sí, Taiji: go33 si4). You pronounced it as POJ gó sì Taiji go1 si3. It would be good if your examples include the proper diacritic mark or tone number, to denote the right tone. The vast expanse of China means there's a multitude of vernacular languages. In an age without social media, Internet, or to be exact, telecommunication, it is impossible to retain the same pronunciation across this large area. There were no pen drives, DVDs. etc. to transport audible speech from one end of China to the other. However, it is possible for text to travel in the form of manuscripts and books. And so, to communicate over this vast area, Classical Chinese text is necessary. And as a result, the peoples of China had to live with diglossia for hundreds of years, until the introduction of Modern Mandarin, where the same writing system and pronunciation is rolled out across China. Of course, it is made possible only in the early 20th century, with the invention of telecommunication, to broadcast speech across China. I look forward to your future video covering other Chinese languages perhaps. All the best!
@kepala kentang toyu (soy sauce) is tauyu, tokua (tofu) is taukua is hard type and the soft type is tauhu , lanca (rickshaw) is langchia, The word you found on google is actually Malay pronunciation not really hokkien pronunciation Some are correct but some are wrong pronunciation Lang is referring to human Lan if you pronounce it wrongly it can be vulgar
@kepala kentang it is difficult to say which words are used by the Malays in Kedah and Penang in their dialects, but generally, they are very likely to loan the words from Penang Hokkien for use if it is not available in their language. The words you mention, written here in Chinese characters, Taiji Romanisation and Church Romanisation (POJ) are soy sauce 豆油 (Taiji: tau33iu2, POJ: tāu-iû), beancurd 豆腐 (Taiji: tau33hu33, POJ: tāu-hū), trishaw 人車 (Taiji: lang3chia1, POJ: lâng-chhia), glass noodles 冬粉 (Taiji: tang3hoon4, POJ: tang-hún) and porridge 糜 (Taiji: moy2, POJ: môi). There are other words that can come to mind, such as stir-fried flat noodles: 炒粿條 (Taiji: char1koay1teow2, POJ: chhá-kóe-tiâu). For more words in Hokkien, refer to the Penang Hokkien Dictionary, www.penang-traveltips.com/dictionary/index.htm
@kepala kentang what's tokua? Is it hard beancurd? I suppose it would have a slight shift in pronunciation. In Penang Hokkien, we say 豆乾 (Taiji: tau33knua1, POJ: tāu-koaⁿ).
Really glad you took the care to stress how Hokkien is a separate language in the Chinese language family in these videos. Probably due in part to not having learnt otherwise, and also partly due to systematic governmental persecution and suppression in the past, many Singaporeans have no concept that Hokkien (along with Teochew, Hakka, Canto etc) is anything other than a "dialect" of the "main Chinese language". But when you really think about it, they are vastly more different than what would be considered "separate languages" in other parts of the world, like Danish/Swedish/Norwegian or Spanish/Galician/Portuguese. As a Singaporean I had to study Mandarin Chinese in school, and also learned Danish on my own (obviously not to as high a standard). But still, I can understand Swedish relatively clearly, yet I cannot understand more than 15-25% of a full Hokkien conversation, even despite being "ethnically 1/2 Hokkien" myself. If that gulf in intelligibility alone doesn't speak to how divergent Mandarin and Hokkien are, then idk what does!
Thank you for creating the two videos on Hokkien. I speak the three dialects you referred to in the video and in addition to learning about hokkien, I also get a comparative note about the other two dialects.
When you mentioned the word for world "世界" in Hokkien, I thought "wow that sounds eerily similar to the word for world in Japanese". Then I googled it and not only does it sound the same but it even uses the same characters. I know Japanese kanji are all just borrowings from the chinese writing system, and I'm sure there's a clear answer for it, but it got me wondering if, when Japanese borrowed the hanzi, it also tended to take more influence from the Hokkien pronunciations for whatever reason as opposed to Mandarin, Cantonese, etc, or if at the time period when the characters were borrowed certain words just sounded different, but Hokkien maybe retained a lot of those older pronunciations, where Mandarin and the others didnt. I don't know enough about chinese languages to even know where to start researching this kind of stuff though.
This vocabulary is called wasei-kango. Many words like this were created in Japan during Meiji restoration to translate western concepts that did not exist in Asia (such as history, philosophy, bank, library, telephone). When China and Korea started using these words, they used their own pronunciation of the characters.
Mainly southern Chinese languages/dialects like Hakka, Min (include Hokkien), Yue (include Cantonese) languages preserved more ancient sounds than Mandarin, thus more similarities to Japanese
@@peytonsawyer562世界 is definitely not a wasei-kango, this word existed well before modern times in classical Chinese. Don't see a Japanese word cognate with Chinese and just think it is wasei-kango.
There's a lot of convenient coincidences between Japanese and Hokkien which have made the sound development of both languages very similar. Both Japanese and Hokkien are not Middle Chinese derived languages, but both were heavily influenced by Middle Chinese. I don't really think Japanese had a lot of influence from Hokkien, it just so happened that both were influenced in similar ways by literary Chinese and their phonology developed similarly with that influence given they both had similar phonology in the first place. For example, Japanese considers the sounds h/f, b/v, and p to be related sounds ふ ぶ ぷ which makes sense when you consider how Old Chinese (and Hokkien) both had b/p/ph while in Middle Chinese those had all developed to f and v sounds as explained in the first video. Back when Japanese borrowed a lot of its vocabulary a lot of its phonology was likely very similar to Min phonology, thus when they borrowed the sounds they both likely mispronounced borrowings in the same way. The sound of the aspirated "p" has a tendency to develop into "f" in a lot of languages, probably because of difficulty in accurate reproduction - if we look at Greek we see the same thing from Ancient Greek to Modern Greek. Both Japanese and Hokkien have also lost / been losing the /ng/ sound. Japanese still uses /ng/ in the middle of words in "newscaster" Japanese which is called 鼻濁音 (bidakuon) but they do not use /ng/ at the start of words. Hokkien (Min Nan) similarly also does not have /ng/ anymore, but if we look at Fuzhounese (Min Dong) we actually do still see this sound which might be an indicator that Hokkien's lack of /ng/ is more recent a development within Min Chinese than the borrowings of words into Japanese. So for example 五 is "gō" in Hokkien, "go" in Japanese, and "ngô" in Fuzhounese. Granted, this is all just speculation by me, I don't have any sources to back it up and I probably got some things wrong in this, but it does seem like a case of convergent evolution. That said, the Min languages are definitely more conservative than many other Chinese languages, but the fact that it's so similar to Japanese (and Korean) in many ways is likely more from coincidence than from intent.
Great video. I often tell people that one cannot just speak "Chinese" they speak a particular dialect and Mandarin is the most common dialect. There's often a hesitation when someone asks, "how do you say xxx in Chinese?" which often leaves me asking, in which dialect? Because although often times the characters would be the same, the pronunciation would be completely different. You might as well mess with them by giving the Japanese, Vietnamese, or Korean pronunciation.
Thank you for saying correct things in a sea of wrong facts, misinformation and drivel. So often do I read shit like "Chinese writing is entirely non phonetic, a character means an idea and is readable in any dialect and Japanese and Korean and any language it's so universal"
Indonesian here 🇮🇩. Ka tsuah sound similar to Malay/Indonesian "Kecoak". I wondered whether this Baiyue had relationship with Austronesian languages. I was surprised that Bah (in Indonesian Hokkien -- Bak) had non-sinitic roots. No wonder they sound different than Cantonese "Juk", Teeochew "Nyuk'. Thank you for the video.
As a Filipino Chinese that uses Hokkien my whole life. Thank you for this! It’s truly a beautiful and dying language so it’s good to learn more about it 🥲
Well done again! Perhaps there could be a proper place to discuss and define what Hokkien language is, as some of the wumao comments went out of hand. I personally believe that when the word ‘Hokkien’ was coined as a language of an ethnic group (which was in Malaya), it started to become a new identity. Should we follow Taiwanese or China’s writing system, each to their own. I also feel that there is a movement of learning a more ‘authentic’ form of Hokkien. I do believe learning pre-Malaya Minnan and modern Taigi is also quite important to enrich our understanding of the language and its history, however the soul of the Hokkien which I speak, at least, lies in its creolised malay nature. Words such as ‘sayang’ and ‘sukak’, when spoken in right tones are so close to my heart. I would not sacrifice them for the sake of purity, authenticity or revivalism. If the creolisation of Hokkien is not allowed to thrive, I rather take it with me to my grave. Not really a complain or anything, but just a comment in response to the many arguments people have. Look forward for more enriching videos.
@@yasminejade not that it will be any better with ‘Hokkian’. Don’t want to be sent to Hailam to do forced labour like my granduncles and grandaunts thank you very much!
@@yasminejade "standard" never means "correct" or the only way people are allowed to speak a language. please never mix those up, a lect is defined by the community that speaks it and not by arbitrary standards, in ANY language. If the Malayan/SG Hokkien has creolized "sukak" then it is as much a fully legitimate part of the language as any "native" Hokkien terms. If not, we would not be using basic words like "professor" or "primary" in "Standard" English as these are "borrowed" from other languages no?
interesting how the kanjis are pretty close to the hokkien,i guess thats where they got those words from, really appreciate these videos about hokkien language,as a hokkien myself I'm unfortunately don't know how to speak it since our school prohibited speaking dialects and my father never taught me about it but tq for letting me learn more about my mother language.
Brilliant videos, congratulations and thank you. I have a simpler explanation for the language/dialect question. When the first Westerners started learning Chinese, classical Chinese was still in use, and so they thought that there was one single Chinese language, with several different local pronunciation standards. They called these 'dialects', because it appeared to be similar to the situation where English or French or any other well-established European language has local standards of pronunciation despite having an established written standard. Where there is a different language spoken (Welsh in the UK, Basque in Spain, Breton in France etc.) it is not a dialect because it cannot be written in the same way as the main language of the country. So the real issue is that the relationship between written and spoken Chinese language is different from the European norm. This makes the dialect/language issue essentially meaningless. Chinese is so variable that once you start trying to count the different versions that have existed through history it is never-ending. How many Chinese languages do you want to enumerate? 10? 30? 50? 100? It is arbitrary. The term 'idiolect' is maybe better for analysis, meaning the way an individual speaks. At least you know where you are.
Well, my teacher one told me "a language is just a dialect with a government and tanks to back it up". It's mostly a matter of sociopolitical recognition. Fascinating video. I would like more comparisons and divergence explanations.
people only say that because a speech form being used by a society with that capability has the tools to isolate itself and become its own language, so there is a sense of fatalism that it will turn out into its own language anyways.
With Chinese, it's a combination of mistranslation and the desire for unity. As explained in the video, the Chinese use the word 方言 which was mistranslated as dialect.
Lovely! You were very diplomatic highlighting that those are actually different languages. My couple cents would be that the Romance languages are still significantly closer among themselves that the Sinitic ones.
Hope you added tone contours or tone letter in the tone sandhi part for better visualization of tone since different dialects in Hokkien have different tone contours but using same tone number system.
Spanish and Portuguese are mutually intelligible to a large extent, but are considered to be different languages. Likewise with the Nordic languages Norwegian, Swedish and Danish, which are to a large extent mutually intelligible.
As a Singaporean who had to study Mandarin Chinese in school, and learned Danish on my own (obviously not to as high a standard), I can still understand Swedish relatively clearly, whereas I cannot understand more than 15-25% of a full Hokkien conversation - even despite being "ethnically 1/2 Hokkien" myself. If that gulf in intelligibility doesn't speak to how divergent Mandarin and Hokkien are (particularly the argument against their being separate languages), then idk what does!
A lot of that is about politics, not linguistics: if they are separate nations, they like to think of their languages as unique languages rather than dialects. The reverse is true of Chinese languages: the PRC government strongly encourages people to think of Chinese languages as simply dialects of one indivisible language (even when they're clearly not mutually intelligible).
@@dingus42 Hokkien (and other Chinese languages) were labeled as dialects because the Chinese Central Government wanted to downgrade them, for reasons of national unity. Dialects are considered to be an inferior version of the dominant language, which in this case, is Mandarin. In so doing, it has taken away any esteem of the language. In Taiwan, the then ruling Kuomintang suppressed the use of Taiwanese (aka Hokkien) for over 30 years, to prevent any possibility of Taiwanese independence. Unfortunately, Singapore (and Malaysia) followed suit with the same policy as the Chinese Central Government. The net result is that Hokkien is dying out.
@@flembertblemfort9571 What you say is undoubtedly true. I would add that Friesian is an official language of the Netherlands, alongside Dutch. But Friesian is very similar to Dutch with only some (relatively) minor differences.
I want to point out some difference between Singaporean Hokkien and Taiwanese Hokkien (Taigi) in this video: We use 的 or 兮 instead of 兮，媠 or 水 instead of 美，and the sixth tone in Singaporean Hokkien is the seventh tone in Taiwanese Hokkien (most dialects in Taigi don't have the sixth tone)
Very interesting, especially the tones. While I know Mandarin, Hokkien tones seem to be quite a step up in terms of complexity. Maybe I will have to learn it some day ^^ Also this distinction between dialects and languages just seems to me somewhat arbitrary, and usually not really motivated by linguistics. Th idea of mutual intelligibility just doesn't really make much sense to me. Not only is it not well defined at what level of intelligibility we draw the line between dialect and language, but it's also highly dependent on what person speaks to whom in what context about what topic. It can also happen one person can understand the other, but not the other way around. It's kinda the same problems as the definition of "being fluent" in some language. It just tries to combine a lot of different dimensions into one neat binary decision, and that just doesn't work.
Great video, thanks! Many learners of tonal languages from a non-tonal language background find tones hard enough in the language they're learning, and quite impossible to distinguish (and certainly reproduce) in a different tonal language. Your tones 1, 4, 6, and 8 sound almost the same to me. Showing the pitch contour while pronouncing something (when contrasting tones) would be way more useful than just showing the number.
hi, tones 1 and 8 are almost the same, if the word ends with a vowel it's considered tone 1, if it ends with p/t/k/ʔ it's considered tone 8 same thing with tones 4 and 6 between the two pairs, 1/8 is higher than 4/6 the difference only shows itself in an actual phrase, when tone sandhi starts to kick in. then each tone will change to something different
Even as a Filipino, I’ve never really been familiar with Hokkien, which is really ironic considering that Hokkien is the language of most of the Chinoy population. I think it’s because I’ve only really been exposed to Mandarin and Cantonese most of my life. Although I’m taking up Cantonese, the Hokkien language has always intrigued me, and I’ve always wondered why we don’t really see it portrayed in the Western media very much. I’m also really fascinated with the similarities to Korean and Japanese, since (in the former case) as a K-Drama fan, I noticed that some Korean words sound almost the same as Hokkien ones. It’s incredible, really. Very insightful video! I guess I have some new words to pick up now.
I had truly enjoyed Part 1, and was looking forward to Part 2. Hence, I was rather disappointed by the poor audio. You have obviously done lots of good research for this video, and since the pronunciation of the characters in Hokkien are of central importance, I would humbly suggest you reload the video with clearer audio.
Politically speaking, Hokkien is a dialect but linguistically speaking, Hokkien is definitely a language. "A language is a dialect with an army and navy" - some guy whose name I forgot.
Other non-Sinitic words in Hokkien would be word for mango (suai-ann) which sounds very similar to Vietnamese xoai and Khmer svay. Also the words for male and female (zha bor and ta po) are most likely non-Chinese in origin.
To those who know some Japanese, you would have realized that there are many similarities in Hokkien. This was due to Japanese scholars having gone over to China in the ancient past to learn.
Japanese gov.s for centuries sent delegations to whatever Chinese court + capitol in each dynasty. 1 time ( why?) they sent delegation to Xiamen ( Amoy).
@@tymanung6382 for a country outside of China to have a similar language to a province in the south from a single visit is completely illogical. More likely Hokkien or at the very least a version of it was the standard "Chinese" language. Whatever "China" was at that time. Definitely moreso than Mandarin.
The equivalent of character 的 in "Classical Chinese" 文言文 has been 之 。的 was not the only character used in early form of 白话文 for possessive purpose，other characters such as 底 has also been used while the language was evolving.
A part 2, how nice! I'll just add on some of my favourite written Hokkien features since I don't think you had much more time to discuss it all. 歹勢 was often rendered 呆世. Nowadays, people will opt for 歹 but 世 is still retained. 兮 for ê is only one of the common written forms. The majority of works used some form of 个, such as 個 and 箇 (not to mention 个 which seems to be the most common). 兮 is actually a later phoneticisation, but it's interesting how it survives in the Hokkien consciousness. 枵 was pretty much never used by any native writer until the latter 20th century when some scholars became interested in 'etymological scholarship'. Writers used the phonetic 夭 or in Taiwan use the locally made character 飫. For súi, native vernacular writings pretty much only contained 水. 美 as a semantic loan is recorded in some dictionaries but ultimately I don't believe those reflect written tradition as native works do not appear to use 美. Ka-choah seems pretty rare, but the NTU KAC library does contain two uses of 加絕 which are phonetic. Oat is not rendered 斡 in the vernacular convention, but rather phonetically as 越, 曰 or挖. Sin-pū / sin-pǔ / sim-pū have also been rendered 媳婦 (a semantic usage) and 心婦, no doubt due to the -m final of some places.
I think you are a Taiwanese, and I don't know why you don't talk about Taiwan Ministry of Education's Taiwanese Hokkien standard. By Taiwan Ministry of Education's Taiwanese Hokkien standard, phái-sē is 歹勢(embrassing), ê is 的('s) or 个(count), iau is 枵(hungry), suí is 媠(beautiful), ka-tsua̍h is 虼蚻(cockroach), uat is 斡(turn), sin-pū is 新婦(daughter in law)
As Zhangzhou Hokkien speaker, we can understand Teochew. Teochew is very close to Zhangzhou Hokkien spoke by people living in ZhaoAn, which neighbours to Chaoshan region. We have stronger identity to people whoever living in Fujian, Chaoshan region, Zhejiang, Hainan, and oversea Chinese who speak southern hokkien.
I speak Fuzhouese, Cantonese, and Mandarin. Although Fuzhouese, an Eastern Min language, is only roughly 10-15% mutually intelligible with Hokkien, a Southern Min language, I find the two share a lot more vocabularies than they do with Cantonese. My guess is that both Min languages are from Old Chinese while Cantonese evolved from Middle Chinese. I do not speak Hokkien, but Your analysis of the languages is fascinating to watch
Hi all! I apologize for the low volume on this video. It sounded fine when I played the video on my desktop earlier but after uploading the video, the volume became really low. There isn't an option to raise the volume on an already uploaded video so I would have to trouble you guys to manually increase the volume on your end. It took me a long time to create this video so I really hope this doesn't impact your viewing too much! Sorry for the inconvenience 🙁
No problem for me with regards the audio. Only slightly lower than Part 1. Still loud enough for me. Thank you so much!
u need to learn how to normalise or use compression for your audio
No problem with me concerning volume on my desktop, some other videos on RUclips have far lower volumes and the authors do not even mention it. Thanks.
No problem at all with the volume. I do not even have to use earphones. Thank you for a very interesting analysis.
it was low for me, but with some careful hearing and quiet surroundings i heard everything perfectly
Please please do make more videos like this. It is extremely hard to find such accessible but well-researched and complete information on non-Mandarin non-Cantonese Chinese languages and even if you only ever did Hokkien, your contribution would be extremely valuable.
As an Indonesian speaker, I'm delightfully surprised to find Hokkien words that are adapted to Indonesian, like 虼蚻 (ka tsuah -> kecoak) = cockroach and 馬車 (be tshia -> becak) in 馬車路 which meaning has shifted from 'horse cart' to 'rickshaw'. We also use the word 'sinse' (先生) in Indonesian to call alternative medicine practitioners! Thank you for the insights and I really look forward to your next videos!
Wow, I didn't know becak came from there
Banyak koq bahasa serapan. Kayak loteng. Baso
Many words for culinary or business/commerce-related
Oh my god in thai we say Kajua for cockroach too (colloquially, there is a thai word for cockroach as well) but ours is probably from teochew.
@@FukChit Both Teochew and Hokkien are part of Minnan languages family.
As a Thai person who is learning Mandarin, Japanese and Cantonese. I find this video quite interesting and insightful, because I always wonder why Japanese keep using kanji in a weird way, like using 他 (hoka/ta) as the meaning of "other" or 先生 (sensei) as an honorific address to teacher or doctors.
By watching this video I found out that some of the sounds in Hokkien that don't exist in other Sinitic languages like sui 美 or kha 跤 have the same meaning in Thai. As kha (ขา) means leg and suai (สวย) means beautiful.
I hope in the future you will make videos in Cantonese and Hakka. Looking forward to it!
Exactly. The Japanese ported most of their Chinese vocabulary during the earlier dynasties like Southern Wu, Han and Tang. During that time, the current Mandarin Chinese was not even conceived yet and the norm pronunciations at that time sounded closer to the southern sinitic languages of today. Thus many Japanese onyomi have southern sinitic roots.
The Tai languages actually originated in what is now southern China (where most Tai languages still exist) so perhaps there really is a connection.
Even in Mandarin, 先生 was used to call teacher in 1920-1930s, even female teacher was called 先生 in Mandarin during Republic of China Era.
It might also be because Teochew (another branch of Southern Min) had heavy influences on the Thai language during some era at least 300 years ago. I think Thailand even had an emperor whose dad was Teochew.
@@JonMawPAUL_ANKA You are right Thailand has a very big Teochew population and there are many influences from Teochew in the language, but in this case 'sui' in Thai is unlikely from Teochew, because in Teochew we actually don't say "sui" for beautiful, we say 雅 (ngia). King Taksin of Thonburi kingdom was indeed of Teochew descent.
I am truly grateful that you are making videos about the Hokkien Language! Well done! I believe that Hokkien is an underrated language in the West since most of Western Media portrays Chinese that speak Mandarin or Cantonese.
This is the first time I heard someone acknowledging 'Shanwei' dialect as Hokkien and not as Teochew. 😯 This man deserves recognition!
Swatow, Sawbei and Teo Chew are so similar to the southern Hokkien language, they can be categorised as variations of the Min language. My father's father says "jiak png" while my mother's mother says "jiak pui" but I understand Teochew too.
the confusion with "chinese dialect" vs "sinitic language" seems to still be strong in Singapore and Malaysia. In the Philippines, people used to have this confusion too but it was not just relegated to those of the Sinitic language family, but also to members of the Philippine language family, where in the provinces, they were also deemed as "dialects" before with only the official languages in the country being thought of as "languages", but this made no sense since they could not understand each other anyways with only some resemblance of similar words and grammar to each other. Upper academia and literati later no longer acknowledged the idea that the other provincial regional languages were merely "dialects", hence it was slowly dispelled as a bad rumor and gossip that the masses still sometimes bring up. Though it looks like, that's still strong in Singapore and Malaysia. I wouldn't be surprised for those in China too since only a few there are good at English and I wouldn't be surprised if those that know English there still think "方言 = dialect = non-official-language".
Can confirm, I'm from the Philippines. The "dialect" misconception is sadly still widespread.
True, 方言is most likely a modern term created by the linguistic chauvinists up north. In the olden days the term used was 土言/土話. Anyway, Fujianese language is the true Chinese language. Check it out yourself, 王，皇are the same pronunciation if you use the 說文解字 dictionary to reconstruct the pronunciation of the word, Mandarin Chinese and Cantonese Chinese don’t add up and doesn’t sound right. If you read 說文解字，you we be amazed by the accuracy of the word and meaning of Fujianese language, in comparison to the Mandarin Chinese. Well the least educated person in this conversation wouldn’t agree with me and try to cancel me. Sad.
@@ZQQHello1919rty There is no "one true Chinese language." Whether Hokkien, Cantonese, Mandarin, etc., each language diverged in their own way from the common ancestor, and have each become their own thing.
Though yes, 土話 is a pretty interesting term for "local variety."
Its not a confusion. I'm Malaysian Chinese and we know the varieties of Han are mutually unintelligible. Some of us speak several Han languages. The reason "we" (not me personally) call them dialects is simply out of habit.
@@ZQQHello1919rty Wow you literally referred to the people from up north as "linguistic chauvinists" and then later in the same comment, actually able to say that the Fujianese language is the "true Chinese language". Some people really have no sense of self awareness. There's no 1 true Chinese language. They are all Chinese languages and are all legitimate. Language is ever changing and ever evolving all the time.
As someone grew up with 4 grandparents with 4 different mother tongues - Japanese(Kyushu dialect) and also Hokkien; Hokkien(Taiwanese); Cantonese/Hakka/Mandarin; Hakka(Sixian dialect), where some of them already multilingual, I can say in first hand that these have very low to none mutual intelligibility.
Due to my father travelled a lot, I had been living with my grandparents (on my mother side) as a kid along with some of my cousins, and we are able to speak these languages with various proficiency. But in day to day life, like going to the market/doctor, my grandparents who only spoke one language would either only go to places that speak their mother tongues, or required my parents, or aunts/uncles, to accompany them as translators. And they themselves would only be able to use traveler vocabulary like Mandarin to communicate with each side during holidays when they met.
And this language barrier continues to my generation and beyond. My sister-in-law's family who came from Zhejiang, spoke dialects of Wu language (her grandparents also spoke different dialects in those regions), and the nanny of my nephew and niece comes from Indonesia. And I have no idea what they were saying when I joined their family holidays, and I cannot even tell what kind of dialects they were speaking in their languages (the same goes for my sister-in-law, she cannot understand what we are saying). And it is indeed easier to guess and learn traveler level vocabulary if they are still the same language family. But very far from understanding any full sentences.
Please make more Chinese language history videos like this. I love learning this stuff, it's so interesting. Thank you for taking time to make these videos!
As a Hokkien I’ve asked all the questions you’ve answered elegantly. Whenever I ask questions regarding the non-straightforward translatability of mandarin to Hokkien I usually get withering looks of exasperation. People in Singapore considered me silly to even consider the questions!
I am a Singaporean Hokkien. Ya, I would wonder why you ask about the direct translatability because Mandarin and Hokkien are not really directly translatable 😜
honestly i find your 2 part series to encompass everything someone should know about hokkien in a very understandable and fairly comprehensive package. very good stuff yea
Keep up the good work brother!
Hello, I am from India.
Love china.
There was a rumor of coup in China from American media.
Is that true?
These videos are truly well-researched, informative, interesting and easy to understand. Thank you for bringing us close to such a distant yet beautiful language.
Such an awesome video. Can't wait for more. I'm a native English speaker that knows Hmong (苗語）普通話 (Mandarin) and Thai. When you pointed out in Hokkien that 美 uses "sui" which was borrowed from Baiyue it blew my mind cause in Thai we also use sui (suai สวย) for beautiful. There's also a lot of Teochew speakers in Thailand as well but it makes me interested even more in researching this.
I am half Teochew, half Hokkien. Actually I noticed the word for beautiful in Thai and Hokkien are the same, but it is unlikely that it is a loanword from Teochew even though Thailand has a very big Teochew population because in Teochew we actually say 雅 (ngia) instead. It is also interesting to know that there are many Teochew loanwords in Thai, which would be pronounced similarly in Hokkien. For example, chair (kao yi), cupboard (tu), boss (tow kay), abalone (bao hir), chinese broccoli (kan na) etc.
It wasn't "borrowed" from Baiyue ...it has it's roots from it .
I'm glad I stayed up to come by this so early. I loved the first episode and am looking forward to seeing where this channel goes.
多謝・・恁！汝・過再創啊野好勢！
Love both videos! This could easily be the most well-made linguistic series about Hokkien that I've seen so far. Thank you for addressing the widespread misconceptions about my language (and the Chinese languages in general), and making sure that your information is as accurate as possible. You deserve to be more popular.
Fellow Singaporean here! Really enjoyed your videos. It has helped me learn more about my Hokkien roots. I have always wanted to learn more about the language but my poor mandarin ability has erected a barrier to access the language. Thanks for helping to make this knowledge acessible to me now :)
This is a great video, it has been very informative for me.
As someone who speaks south and north Indian languages and grew up in the US, I never was exposed to any Chinese language beyond Cantonese and Mandarin.
Thank you for making these vidoes, they're incredibly informative in a way that most people can follow, and I look forward to more!
This is another incredible video! It's super clear and easy to understand, and illustrates several phenomena in historical linguistics quite well, all the while still relating it to people's real lives and social contexts. One realization that this video struck me with is that people unfamiliar with Chinese characters don't have the same sense they likely have with different iterations of, say, the Latin alphabet -- myself included! This channel is off to a phenomenal start, I can't wait to see even more videos even more spectacular than this one!!
Fascinating to see the similarities between Japanese "on-yomi", or readings of Kanji taken from Chinese, and the same character's reading in Hokkien. Japanese "sekai" -- world -- for example. Or, Hokkien "jin" -- person. Even the use of 走 for 'run' is similar to Japanese.
I always knew that the Japanese readings were taken from another Sinitic language than Mandarin but it's still fascinating to see those similarities in a video like this.
In ancient times, Japanese gov. s every 1? or several years sent huge delegations to China to learn newest
trends in technology, poetry, physical
science, cuisine, sports, board games,
sports, music song dance, etc.at each
dynasty s court in different cities +
provinces. BUT, 1 year, not sure why,
the delegation went to Xiamen (Amoy)
which has never been the national capitol, not even provincial capitol.
Thus that delegation learned Hokkien,
words, & not that dynasty s capitol s
words.
Shimbun as well.💖
日本人說的“支那”，其實是閩南語中的“秦人”。
Best Chinese linguistics video ever. Thank you so much!
Excellent video on a topic on which it is hard to find information for foreigners, even foreigners like myself to do speak Mandarin. Appreciated!
Fantastic work. My only suggestion is to keep an eye on the audio level. This one is a lot quieter than Episode 1. Otherwise, this is very informative content.
yeah, could not hear very clearly. had to raise volume.
as an american learning mandarin chinese, your videos are so cool and informative, can't wait to see more :))
Once again, extremely interesting, including the description of Hokkien as a language rather than a dialect. Thank you for your efforts, and I hope you can make more videos about Chinese languages.
Great video! Really loved and enjoyed it as a Singaporean Hokkien Speaker, hope you can do more on words special to the hokkien and Cantonese languages
Actually, de(的) is probably similar to the old pronunciation of zhi(之）which was changed into current pronunciation by Mongols. One evidence is chen(陈) surname sounds similar to tian(田) surname in ancient Chinese, which was recorded evidently in history book. Similarly, hen(很) is probably similar to the old pronunciation of shen(甚）
Bruh, best local youtuber in my opinion 🎉 learn so much about the heritage here and your format is really good
Great video (and so was part 1)! Would love a whole series of videos like this for a language that I natively speak but have never learned formally in an academic setting.
As someone who grew up speaking hokkien, then Mandarin and later on learnt English, Japanese and dabbled in malay, Indonesia languages, it truly has been fascinating to find similarities in many phrases and words. You've helped me understand so much of what I've been confused by and delighted to know that your channel exists. Subscribed.
Wow, really informative and eye-opening. 👏 As a Singapore Hokkien speaker myself I never realised there is actually so much value and history in this 'dialect' or language. Also, is 先生 read as sian si, and doesn't it also have another the meaning of teacher apart from medical practitioner? Also will you be considering talking about the other 'dialects' as well as dialect groups we have here in Singapore? For instance, Teochew, Hakka, Hainanese, etc.. Gam Sia!
This was a wonderful part 2 and I enjoyed it thoroughly. Subscribed and look forward to what you put out in the future!
Thank you -- I learned a lot. These two videos were absolutely amazing and I can tell how much work and research you put into it.
You have compiled such a brilliant discovery of Hokkien language. As an Hokkien, your discovery has initiated a new interest in me to learn Hokkien again. I am proud to be a Hokkien speaker. Thank you for your amazing findings.
Amaze with your insight, i was born speaking hokkien as my mother tongue yet i just found out this history and complexity of the language
Thank You for the video.👍👍👍👍👍👍👏👏👏👏👏👏🙇🙇🙇🙇🙇🙇
18:14. What I have been noticing is that for some reason Hokkien has some words that are similar if not the same as Korean and Japanese, in this instance 'sekai' is also world in Japanese, hence the genre 'isekai' for other world; probably because Korean and Japanese has some roots in old chinese.
Interestingly, "kecoa" today still refers to cockroaches in Indonesian and Javanese, both of which are categorically Austronesian languages. Also, "be chia" sounds like "becak" but the latter refers to another kind of vehicle.
Appreciate your efforts in making such interesting videos. Keep it going!!
It's fascinating to learn more about the Hokkien language since I am a Hokkien speaker. It is also fascinating why Hokkien vocabulary became adopted by the Korean and Japanese languages. Why was Hokkien so influential from the Sui to Ming period? There are people who commented that Hokkien words exist in Japanese because Japanese people originated from Fujian. I think the "reasoning" is too simplistic and ignorant of history. So I hope you can make a video to clarify the historical spread of Hokkien vocabulary to the Korean and Japanese languages. By the way, I also speak fluent Cantonese and Japanese. Thank you.
Japanese people created many new words (called wasei-kango) during Meiji restoration to translate western concepts that did not exist in Asia (such as history, philosophy, bank, library, telephone). When China and Korea started using these words, they used their own pronunciation of the characters. Similar pronunciation in Hokkien and Japanese is just coincidence.
Trade, and pirates. Japan loved bronze mirrors and had a hard time obtaining the ores required for steel from their land. They had to trade.
Hence Japan has "Chinese" readings that sound like hokkien and canto, from the two coastal provinces that dominate in the sea...
Thank you for these videos. They are well organized and I appreciate the information coming from someone who is also a speaker of (some of) the languages being discussed.
Thank you for creating this video on the Hokkien language, helping to clear up some of the misconceptions about the language.
May I ask, do you speak Hokkien or Chinese? I am curious because your pronunciation of some words are a bit off. Take the word "Zhangzhou Hokkien" for example. We usually pronounce Zhangzhou as in Pinyin, not as in English. Also, your pronunciation of 餓死 (pronounced POJ: gō sí, Taiji: go33 si4). You pronounced it as POJ gó sì Taiji go1 si3. It would be good if your examples include the proper diacritic mark or tone number, to denote the right tone.
The vast expanse of China means there's a multitude of vernacular languages. In an age without social media, Internet, or to be exact, telecommunication, it is impossible to retain the same pronunciation across this large area. There were no pen drives, DVDs. etc. to transport audible speech from one end of China to the other. However, it is possible for text to travel in the form of manuscripts and books. And so, to communicate over this vast area, Classical Chinese text is necessary. And as a result, the peoples of China had to live with diglossia for hundreds of years, until the introduction of Modern Mandarin, where the same writing system and pronunciation is rolled out across China. Of course, it is made possible only in the early 20th century, with the invention of telecommunication, to broadcast speech across China.
I look forward to your future video covering other Chinese languages perhaps. All the best!
Nice seeing you here!
@@suomeaboo 😂it's a video on Hokkien, so of course, if I come across it, I will take a look!
@kepala kentang toyu (soy sauce) is tauyu, tokua (tofu) is taukua is hard type and the soft type is tauhu
, lanca (rickshaw) is langchia,
The word you found on google is actually Malay pronunciation not really hokkien pronunciation
Some are correct but some are wrong pronunciation
Lang is referring to human
Lan if you pronounce it wrongly it can be vulgar
@kepala kentang it is difficult to say which words are used by the Malays in Kedah and Penang in their dialects, but generally, they are very likely to loan the words from Penang Hokkien for use if it is not available in their language. The words you mention, written here in Chinese characters, Taiji Romanisation and Church Romanisation (POJ) are soy sauce 豆油 (Taiji: tau33iu2, POJ: tāu-iû), beancurd 豆腐 (Taiji: tau33hu33, POJ: tāu-hū), trishaw 人車 (Taiji: lang3chia1, POJ: lâng-chhia), glass noodles 冬粉 (Taiji: tang3hoon4, POJ: tang-hún) and porridge 糜 (Taiji: moy2, POJ: môi). There are other words that can come to mind, such as stir-fried flat noodles: 炒粿條 (Taiji: char1koay1teow2, POJ: chhá-kóe-tiâu).
For more words in Hokkien, refer to the Penang Hokkien Dictionary, www.penang-traveltips.com/dictionary/index.htm
@kepala kentang what's tokua? Is it hard beancurd? I suppose it would have a slight shift in pronunciation. In Penang Hokkien, we say 豆乾 (Taiji: tau33knua1, POJ: tāu-koaⁿ).
Really glad you took the care to stress how Hokkien is a separate language in the Chinese language family in these videos. Probably due in part to not having learnt otherwise, and also partly due to systematic governmental persecution and suppression in the past, many Singaporeans have no concept that Hokkien (along with Teochew, Hakka, Canto etc) is anything other than a "dialect" of the "main Chinese language". But when you really think about it, they are vastly more different than what would be considered "separate languages" in other parts of the world, like Danish/Swedish/Norwegian or Spanish/Galician/Portuguese.
As a Singaporean I had to study Mandarin Chinese in school, and also learned Danish on my own (obviously not to as high a standard). But still, I can understand Swedish relatively clearly, yet I cannot understand more than 15-25% of a full Hokkien conversation, even despite being "ethnically 1/2 Hokkien" myself. If that gulf in intelligibility alone doesn't speak to how divergent Mandarin and Hokkien are, then idk what does!
Thank you for creating the two videos on Hokkien. I speak the three dialects you referred to in the video and in addition to learning about hokkien, I also get a comparative note about the other two dialects.
Fascinating video, thank you for making the effort of putting this all together!
I am hokien and I find your video fascinating ❤
you are an excellent teacher. very scientific and accurate and clear. i am looking forward to your videos
When you mentioned the word for world "世界" in Hokkien, I thought "wow that sounds eerily similar to the word for world in Japanese". Then I googled it and not only does it sound the same but it even uses the same characters. I know Japanese kanji are all just borrowings from the chinese writing system, and I'm sure there's a clear answer for it, but it got me wondering if, when Japanese borrowed the hanzi, it also tended to take more influence from the Hokkien pronunciations for whatever reason as opposed to Mandarin, Cantonese, etc, or if at the time period when the characters were borrowed certain words just sounded different, but Hokkien maybe retained a lot of those older pronunciations, where Mandarin and the others didnt. I don't know enough about chinese languages to even know where to start researching this kind of stuff though.
This vocabulary is called wasei-kango. Many words like this were created in Japan during Meiji restoration to translate western concepts that did not exist in Asia (such as history, philosophy, bank, library, telephone). When China and Korea started using these words, they used their own pronunciation of the characters.
Mainly southern Chinese languages/dialects like Hakka, Min (include Hokkien), Yue (include Cantonese) languages preserved more ancient sounds than Mandarin, thus more similarities to Japanese
@@peytonsawyer562世界 is definitely not a wasei-kango, this word existed well before modern times in classical Chinese. Don't see a Japanese word cognate with Chinese and just think it is wasei-kango.
There's a lot of convenient coincidences between Japanese and Hokkien which have made the sound development of both languages very similar. Both Japanese and Hokkien are not Middle Chinese derived languages, but both were heavily influenced by Middle Chinese. I don't really think Japanese had a lot of influence from Hokkien, it just so happened that both were influenced in similar ways by literary Chinese and their phonology developed similarly with that influence given they both had similar phonology in the first place.
For example, Japanese considers the sounds h/f, b/v, and p to be related sounds ふ ぶ ぷ which makes sense when you consider how Old Chinese (and Hokkien) both had b/p/ph while in Middle Chinese those had all developed to f and v sounds as explained in the first video. Back when Japanese borrowed a lot of its vocabulary a lot of its phonology was likely very similar to Min phonology, thus when they borrowed the sounds they both likely mispronounced borrowings in the same way. The sound of the aspirated "p" has a tendency to develop into "f" in a lot of languages, probably because of difficulty in accurate reproduction - if we look at Greek we see the same thing from Ancient Greek to Modern Greek.
Both Japanese and Hokkien have also lost / been losing the /ng/ sound. Japanese still uses /ng/ in the middle of words in "newscaster" Japanese which is called 鼻濁音 (bidakuon) but they do not use /ng/ at the start of words. Hokkien (Min Nan) similarly also does not have /ng/ anymore, but if we look at Fuzhounese (Min Dong) we actually do still see this sound which might be an indicator that Hokkien's lack of /ng/ is more recent a development within Min Chinese than the borrowings of words into Japanese. So for example 五 is "gō" in Hokkien, "go" in Japanese, and "ngô" in Fuzhounese.
Granted, this is all just speculation by me, I don't have any sources to back it up and I probably got some things wrong in this, but it does seem like a case of convergent evolution. That said, the Min languages are definitely more conservative than many other Chinese languages, but the fact that it's so similar to Japanese (and Korean) in many ways is likely more from coincidence than from intent.
World in cantonese is : sai kai 世界 and both ‘yes’ in cantonese and japanese are ‘ hai ‘ there are similar
Great video. I often tell people that one cannot just speak "Chinese" they speak a particular dialect and Mandarin is the most common dialect. There's often a hesitation when someone asks, "how do you say xxx in Chinese?" which often leaves me asking, in which dialect? Because although often times the characters would be the same, the pronunciation would be completely different. You might as well mess with them by giving the Japanese, Vietnamese, or Korean pronunciation.
Thank you for saying correct things in a sea of wrong facts, misinformation and drivel. So often do I read shit like "Chinese writing is entirely non phonetic, a character means an idea and is readable in any dialect and Japanese and Korean and any language it's so universal"
Indonesian here 🇮🇩. Ka tsuah sound similar to Malay/Indonesian "Kecoak". I wondered whether this Baiyue had relationship with Austronesian languages.
I was surprised that Bah (in Indonesian Hokkien -- Bak) had non-sinitic roots. No wonder they sound different than Cantonese "Juk", Teeochew "Nyuk'.
Thank you for the video.
As a Filipino Chinese that uses Hokkien my whole life. Thank you for this! It’s truly a beautiful and dying language so it’s good to learn more about it 🥲
Well done again! Perhaps there could be a proper place to discuss and define what Hokkien language is, as some of the wumao comments went out of hand. I personally believe that when the word ‘Hokkien’ was coined as a language of an ethnic group (which was in Malaya), it started to become a new identity. Should we follow Taiwanese or China’s writing system, each to their own. I also feel that there is a movement of learning a more ‘authentic’ form of Hokkien. I do believe learning pre-Malaya Minnan and modern Taigi is also quite important to enrich our understanding of the language and its history, however the soul of the Hokkien which I speak, at least, lies in its creolised malay nature. Words such as ‘sayang’ and ‘sukak’, when spoken in right tones are so close to my heart. I would not sacrifice them for the sake of purity, authenticity or revivalism. If the creolisation of Hokkien is not allowed to thrive, I rather take it with me to my grave. Not really a complain or anything, but just a comment in response to the many arguments people have. Look forward for more enriching videos.
When it comes to langugage, there is no "purity".
Sorry u cannot use sayang and sukak. Bcos taiwan is the standard. No sayang and sukak in taiwan. kah-ì is the standard and correct form.
@@yasminejade not that it will be any better with ‘Hokkian’. Don’t want to be sent to Hailam to do forced labour like my granduncles and grandaunts thank you very much!
@@yasminejade "standard" never means "correct" or the only way people are allowed to speak a language. please never mix those up, a lect is defined by the community that speaks it and not by arbitrary standards, in ANY language. If the Malayan/SG Hokkien has creolized "sukak" then it is as much a fully legitimate part of the language as any "native" Hokkien terms. If not, we would not be using basic words like "professor" or "primary" in "Standard" English as these are "borrowed" from other languages no?
Fantastic compilation!
interesting how the kanjis are pretty close to the hokkien,i guess thats where they got those words from, really appreciate these videos about hokkien language,as a hokkien myself I'm unfortunately don't know how to speak it since our school prohibited speaking dialects and my father never taught me about it but tq for letting me learn more about my mother language.
thanks for such an informative video!
Wonderful video, thank you!
Very impressed by the detailed research and accurate presentation.
Thank you for this video, being a person learning mandarin.I found a great of similarity in many pronunciations of mandarin,Cantonese and hokkien
Very interesting video . Please introduce more . Like very much
Somewhat, "Be" (馬) in Hokkien also cognate with Japanese Go-on sounds "Me" (馬/め) which both means horse
Maybe you can research on Hokkian's prehistory. Would be very interesting.
thanks for the video (I'm slowly learning.)
Brilliant videos, congratulations and thank you. I have a simpler explanation for the language/dialect question. When the first Westerners started learning Chinese, classical Chinese was still in use, and so they thought that there was one single Chinese language, with several different local pronunciation standards. They called these 'dialects', because it appeared to be similar to the situation where English or French or any other well-established European language has local standards of pronunciation despite having an established written standard. Where there is a different language spoken (Welsh in the UK, Basque in Spain, Breton in France etc.) it is not a dialect because it cannot be written in the same way as the main language of the country. So the real issue is that the relationship between written and spoken Chinese language is different from the European norm. This makes the dialect/language issue essentially meaningless. Chinese is so variable that once you start trying to count the different versions that have existed through history it is never-ending. How many Chinese languages do you want to enumerate? 10? 30? 50? 100? It is arbitrary. The term 'idiolect' is maybe better for analysis, meaning the way an individual speaks. At least you know where you are.
Fascinating & very well presented
林北还没看你的视频先给你一个赞👍 真gao 真kiang. (我写不出来啊😯）
Tsin-gâu tsin-khiàng 真𠢕真勥
Well, my teacher one told me "a language is just a dialect with a government and tanks to back it up". It's mostly a matter of sociopolitical recognition.
Fascinating video. I would like more comparisons and divergence explanations.
people only say that because a speech form being used by a society with that capability has the tools to isolate itself and become its own language, so there is a sense of fatalism that it will turn out into its own language anyways.
With Chinese, it's a combination of mistranslation and the desire for unity. As explained in the video, the Chinese use the word 方言 which was mistranslated as dialect.
Stop saying this cliche.
Wow this is so fascinating i learnt a lot today!!
Awesome video! Informative, well-paced and clear, with good examples!
Cool channel! Keep it up.
Great pt.2, hope you can fix the sound issues. Seems to be in mono not stereo
Lovely! You were very diplomatic highlighting that those are actually different languages. My couple cents would be that the Romance languages are still significantly closer among themselves that the Sinitic ones.
These are great videos, I hope you'll make more in the future!
Hope you added tone contours or tone letter in the tone sandhi part for better visualization of tone since different dialects in Hokkien have different tone contours but using same tone number system.
The Europeans use to use Latin to communicate with each other when they all spoke different languages.
Spanish and Portuguese are mutually intelligible to a large extent, but are considered to be different languages. Likewise with the Nordic languages Norwegian, Swedish and Danish, which are to a large extent mutually intelligible.
As a Singaporean who had to study Mandarin Chinese in school, and learned Danish on my own (obviously not to as high a standard), I can still understand Swedish relatively clearly, whereas I cannot understand more than 15-25% of a full Hokkien conversation - even despite being "ethnically 1/2 Hokkien" myself. If that gulf in intelligibility doesn't speak to how divergent Mandarin and Hokkien are (particularly the argument against their being separate languages), then idk what does!
A lot of that is about politics, not linguistics: if they are separate nations, they like to think of their languages as unique languages rather than dialects. The reverse is true of Chinese languages: the PRC government strongly encourages people to think of Chinese languages as simply dialects of one indivisible language (even when they're clearly not mutually intelligible).
@@dingus42 Hokkien (and other Chinese languages) were labeled as dialects because the Chinese Central Government wanted to downgrade them, for reasons of national unity.
Dialects are considered to be an inferior version of the dominant language, which in this case, is Mandarin. In so doing, it has taken away any esteem of the language.
In Taiwan, the then ruling Kuomintang suppressed the use of Taiwanese (aka Hokkien) for over 30 years, to prevent any possibility of Taiwanese independence.
Unfortunately, Singapore (and Malaysia) followed suit with the same policy as the Chinese Central Government.
The net result is that Hokkien is dying out.
@@flembertblemfort9571 What you say is undoubtedly true. I would add that Friesian is an official language of the Netherlands, alongside Dutch. But Friesian is very similar to Dutch with only some (relatively) minor differences.
Very well madd video. Thank you !
Subscribed
I want to point out some difference between Singaporean Hokkien and Taiwanese Hokkien (Taigi) in this video:
We use 的 or 兮 instead of 兮，媠 or 水 instead of 美，and the sixth tone in Singaporean Hokkien is the seventh tone in Taiwanese Hokkien (most dialects in Taigi don't have the sixth tone)
Very interesting, especially the tones. While I know Mandarin, Hokkien tones seem to be quite a step up in terms of complexity. Maybe I will have to learn it some day ^^
Also this distinction between dialects and languages just seems to me somewhat arbitrary, and usually not really motivated by linguistics. Th idea of mutual intelligibility just doesn't really make much sense to me. Not only is it not well defined at what level of intelligibility we draw the line between dialect and language, but it's also highly dependent on what person speaks to whom in what context about what topic. It can also happen one person can understand the other, but not the other way around.
It's kinda the same problems as the definition of "being fluent" in some language. It just tries to combine a lot of different dimensions into one neat binary decision, and that just doesn't work.
Possible Part 3? :)
A language is a dialect with an army behind it.
Great video, thanks! Many learners of tonal languages from a non-tonal language background find tones hard enough in the language they're learning, and quite impossible to distinguish (and certainly reproduce) in a different tonal language. Your tones 1, 4, 6, and 8 sound almost the same to me. Showing the pitch contour while pronouncing something (when contrasting tones) would be way more useful than just showing the number.
hi, tones 1 and 8 are almost the same, if the word ends with a vowel it's considered tone 1, if it ends with p/t/k/ʔ it's considered tone 8
same thing with tones 4 and 6
between the two pairs, 1/8 is higher than 4/6
the difference only shows itself in an actual phrase, when tone sandhi starts to kick in. then each tone will change to something different
Great vid 👍👍👍
Even as a Filipino, I’ve never really been familiar with Hokkien, which is really ironic considering that Hokkien is the language of most of the Chinoy population. I think it’s because I’ve only really been exposed to Mandarin and Cantonese most of my life.
Although I’m taking up Cantonese, the Hokkien language has always intrigued me, and I’ve always wondered why we don’t really see it portrayed in the Western media very much. I’m also really fascinated with the similarities to Korean and Japanese, since (in the former case) as a K-Drama fan, I noticed that some Korean words sound almost the same as Hokkien ones. It’s incredible, really.
Very insightful video! I guess I have some new words to pick up now.
You are an amazing linguist.
Fascinating.
bro, this is super interesting!!! when your next video?😍
世界 has almost the exact same same pronunciation in Japanese. In Hokkien: [ se˥˧kai˨˩ ] In Japanese: [ se̞ka̠i ]
I had truly enjoyed Part 1, and was looking forward to Part 2. Hence, I was rather disappointed by the poor audio. You have obviously done lots of good research for this video, and since the pronunciation of the characters in Hokkien are of central importance, I would humbly suggest you reload the video with clearer audio.
Politically speaking, Hokkien is a dialect but linguistically speaking, Hokkien is definitely a language.
"A language is a dialect with an army and navy" - some guy whose name I forgot.
Other non-Sinitic words in Hokkien would be word for mango (suai-ann) which sounds very similar to Vietnamese xoai and Khmer svay. Also the words for male and female (zha bor and ta po) are most likely non-Chinese in origin.
Love the little 雞同鴨講 joke at 1:13
Please upload or Do video about learning hokkien thank you so much
What we call a language or a dialect is basically a socio political issue. It's hard to pick a line where either begins
To those who know some Japanese, you would have realized that there are many similarities in Hokkien. This was due to Japanese scholars having gone over to China in the ancient past to learn.
esp in Shikoku 四国. I noticed that when I did my 88 Temples Pilgrimage there.
Japanese gov.s for centuries sent delegations to whatever Chinese court
+ capitol in each dynasty. 1 time ( why?)
they sent delegation to Xiamen
( Amoy).
@@tymanung6382 It's not only once to the Min South region
@@tymanung6382 for a country outside of China to have a similar language to a province in the south from a single visit is completely illogical. More likely Hokkien or at the very least a version of it was the standard "Chinese" language. Whatever "China" was at that time. Definitely moreso than Mandarin.
The equivalent of character 的 in "Classical Chinese" 文言文 has been 之 。的 was not the only character used in early form of 白话文 for possessive purpose，other characters such as 底 has also been used while the language was evolving.
A part 2, how nice! I'll just add on some of my favourite written Hokkien features since I don't think you had much more time to discuss it all. 歹勢 was often rendered 呆世. Nowadays, people will opt for 歹 but 世 is still retained. 兮 for ê is only one of the common written forms. The majority of works used some form of 个, such as 個 and 箇 (not to mention 个 which seems to be the most common). 兮 is actually a later phoneticisation, but it's interesting how it survives in the Hokkien consciousness. 枵 was pretty much never used by any native writer until the latter 20th century when some scholars became interested in 'etymological scholarship'. Writers used the phonetic 夭 or in Taiwan use the locally made character 飫. For súi, native vernacular writings pretty much only contained 水. 美 as a semantic loan is recorded in some dictionaries but ultimately I don't believe those reflect written tradition as native works do not appear to use 美. Ka-choah seems pretty rare, but the NTU KAC library does contain two uses of 加絕 which are phonetic. Oat is not rendered 斡 in the vernacular convention, but rather phonetically as 越, 曰 or挖. Sin-pū / sin-pǔ / sim-pū have also been rendered 媳婦 (a semantic usage) and 心婦, no doubt due to the -m final of some places.
I think you are a Taiwanese, and I don't know why you don't talk about Taiwan Ministry of Education's Taiwanese Hokkien standard.
By Taiwan Ministry of Education's Taiwanese Hokkien standard, phái-sē is 歹勢(embrassing), ê is 的('s) or 个(count), iau is 枵(hungry), suí is 媠(beautiful), ka-tsua̍h is 虼蚻(cockroach), uat is 斡(turn), sin-pū is 新婦(daughter in law)
感谢汝传播闽南方言文化☺
愛有自信，阮的話是「語言」毋是「方言」
@@skps2010 既是语言，亦是方言。语言与方言无高低贵贱之分，只是划分方式无同款。
As Zhangzhou Hokkien speaker, we can understand Teochew. Teochew is very close to Zhangzhou Hokkien spoke by people living in ZhaoAn, which neighbours to Chaoshan region. We have stronger identity to people whoever living in Fujian, Chaoshan region, Zhejiang, Hainan, and oversea Chinese who speak southern hokkien.
I speak Fuzhouese, Cantonese, and Mandarin. Although Fuzhouese, an Eastern Min language, is only roughly 10-15% mutually intelligible with Hokkien, a Southern Min language, I find the two share a lot more vocabularies than they do with Cantonese. My guess is that both Min languages are from Old Chinese while Cantonese evolved from Middle Chinese. I do not speak Hokkien, but Your analysis of the languages is fascinating to watch