327 replies to this topic

[xng]

I see that nowadays when people see "台" they think of Tái, but I guess that's after

Most characters with phonetic 台 has the sound Tai or T'ai, so the majority number undisputably shows that this is the original sound

怠, 胎, 抬, 鮐, 颱, 炱, 苔, 迨, 紿, 軩, 駘 etc...

The only thing that can be disputed is the meaning although 'cut fish to cook' is acceptable. But 治人 is too far fetched because you don't cook a human.

What is the Tai kadai word for 'kill' and 'die' ?

Edited by xng, 10 September 2010 - 09:06 PM.

[qrasy]

Most characters with phonetic 台 has the sound Tai or T'ai, so the majority number undisputably shows that this is the original sound

This argument is also analogous to arguing that 各 should originally sound "lak/lok" because there are 落駱洛烙絡珞硌雒 and anything like "kak/kok" is "exception".
Or like arguing that 柬 should sound "lan" as we have 蘭練爛瀾. In the same way, people can claim 監 to be "lam" etc.
The thing is, those are based on modern pronunciations, and they don't directly "determine" what these characters sound like in Old Chinese.

What I think is, some sounds are just used more frequently than the others, so when certain syllable types distorted, most of the words in the same Xiesheng (諧聲) category gets distorted at the same time.
Imagine if *ə: is used much more often than *ə and we have *ə-*ə: 諧聲, then when *ə: distorts to -ai, most of the 諧聲字 will have -ai (and whatever *ə evolve to, if any different, will become a minority).

Anyway you can see that things like "Dai1" (Middle Chinese /t/) does not occur in the list of 台.
Starostin does have a reason for not endorsing "tai" for 台.
If you see enough Xiesheng, you will find that:
Anything that includes Middle Chinese /t/ does not have /j/ in Xiesheng, but can have /d/ and /tʰ/ (e.g. 單尚)
Anything that includes Middle Chinese /j/ does not have /t/ in Xiesheng, but can have /d/ and /tʰ/ (e.g. 也台易昜) [note that the /j/ is usually reconstructed as Old Chinese *l, and it can be seen from foreign loans]
This strangeness suggests that the first and second /d/ were different. Same argument for /tʰ/.

The only thing that can be disputed is the meaning although 'cut fish to cook' is acceptable. But 治人 is too far fetched because you don't cook a human.

It's used for killing a human in modern times?
For humans, the "manage" or "take care of" him, for example, the meaning should be more of cure (or maybe punish) him, not cook.
When the issue is about a troublesome man, "manage this issue" implies "get rid of this troublesome man".

And I do notice that, sometimes in the movie, "宰" is used for humans [which appears to be a generalization by some later generations; Google search of "我宰了" actually gives more human result than animal result. Among the resulst I can even see a further shift from "real kill" to 'another sense of English "kill"'].
I can see that some "unfathomable" shift of meaning could occur when there are many, many generations.

What is the Tai kadai word for 'kill' and 'die' ?

Things like "ta:i" occur in many Tai languages for 'die'.
I don't know how widespread is the word for 'kill', but Starostin could list a Proto-Tai-Kadai: *xa.C. Corresponding to this, Thai has khaa [high consonant, tone mark 1], khaat [high consonant] in Thai, sounds unrelated.

Edited by qrasy, 11 September 2010 - 01:52 AM.

[xng]

It seems that there are no expert to throw light on the original character for T'ai (kill).

[mrclub]

http://en.wikipedia....Minyue_language

[General_Zhaoyun]

It seems that there are no expert to throw light on the original character for T'ai (kill).

Taiwanese Hokkien uses the word 刣 (thâi) for kill.

[mrclub]

Taiwanese Hokkien uses the word 刣 (thâi) for kill.

Well do you think the word Chinese character for 'for kill' is 刣 for Minnan, Mindong etc. ?

Fuzhou Dialect states 刣
http://en.wikipedia....Minyue_language

當代泉州音字彙 states 刣 -- tai2 閩南語用字。猶「殺、宰」。 ⦋例⦌ 刣雞教猴〈猶殺雞儆猴〉

Teochew Mogher states 刣 -- tai5 屠杀动物

Found this link -- http://fujian.qq.top...tid-369871.html

[General_Zhaoyun]

Well do you think the word Chinese character for 'for kill' is 刣 for Minnan, Mindong etc. ?

Fuzhou Dialect states 刣
http://en.wikipedia....Minyue_language

當代泉州音字彙 states 刣 -- tai2 閩南語用字。猶「殺、宰」。 ⦋例⦌ 刣雞教猴〈猶殺雞儆猴〉

Teochew Mogher states 刣 -- tai5 屠杀动物

Found this link -- http://fujian.qq.top...tid-369871.html

They are used in Hockchew, Hokkien and Teochew.

刣 thai (meaning "kill") - formed by a combination loaning of sound for the radical "台 tai" (形聲） and the radical of "刂dao" (meaning "knife") (會意）. It fits well with 六書， 6 principles of constructing Chinese character.

[xng]

當代泉州音字彙 states 刣 -- tai2 閩南語用字。猶「殺、宰」。 ⦋例⦌ 刣雞教猴〈猶殺雞儆猴〉

I have some doubt regarding this because the literary sound (ziong) and colloquail sound (t'ai) are so different from each other.

Usually both sounds should be similar, the colloquail sound should be 'tiong' or 'teng' if the literary sound is indeed 'ziong'.

But then there is a small possibility that the literary sound has gone too far wayward from the norm.

Edited by xng, 13 September 2010 - 11:07 AM.

[qrasy]

It seems that there are no expert to throw light on the original character

I do notice that; I can't see "active + expert" member on this area in CHF.
And among the experts we have quoted so far, it seems that their primary responsibility is to find words that matches the sound and meaning, not explaining how far the semantics evolved.

http://en.wikipedia....Minyue_language

I think once in a while they will make a mistake, because the principle in collecting these characters are usually "anything that the investigator can't identify as Archaic Chinese".
I saw one article about Wenzhou Wu, and it even mis-identified 亦~又(modern 也) as non-Chinese.

Taiwanese Hokkien uses the word 刣 (thâi) for kill.

GZ, the discussion was not about the present practise, but rather about whether there's an ancient word that can be associated with it.
There's already discussion about why it should not be correlated to ancient character:
《篇海》音鍾。刮削物也。
The meaning doesn't match and neither does the sound.

刣 thai (meaning "kill") - formed by a combination loaning of sound for the radical "台 tai" (形聲） and the radical of "刂dao" (meaning "knife") (會意）. It fits well with 六書， 6 principles of constructing Chinese character.

That doesn't mean it's a recent inventon. In fact, it's easy to make such type of charaters: e.g. Cantonese 界刂

Usually both sounds should be similar, the colloquail sound should be 'tiong' or 'teng' if the literary sound is indeed 'ziong'.

I think the colloquial sound should also have [ts] not [t].
It's because Sino-Vietnamese 鍾 start with ch-, not tr- [even though both Cantonese and Mandarin mix up ch and tr].
( Sino-Vietnamese tr- correspond to Minnan [t], ch- to [ts]. The difference can be demonstrated by 張/章:
Sino-Vietnamese: Trương/Chương
Minnan "Literary": Tiong1/Tsiong1
Minnan "Colloquial": Tiu~1/Tsiu~1
[ignoring one specialized meaning of Tng1 "羅取鳥獸曰張" ]
).

But then there is a small possibility that the literary sound has gone too far wayward from the norm.

The meaning could go quite far too, if there's many generations.
And one critical step is having a generation that forgets some previous meanings, as it allows further generalization.

Imagine this scenario for a hypothetical word:
Generation 0: Meaning A
Generation 10: Meaning A and B
(after some more generation, meaning A is forgotten)
Generation 20: Meaning B
Generation 30: Meaning B and C (even though the meaning of C is quite far from A)
(after some more generation, meaning B is forgotten)
Generation 40: Meaning C
Generation 50: Meaning C and D.

Once people forget all the previous meanings, words for "to kill (an animal)" can easily generalize to humans. As modern "宰" doesn't have the meaning of "cook", "我宰了" often have a human target. (and as people can see on the web)

[edit:
http://zdic.net/zd/z...dicAEZdicB0.htm
As I search for the 'more antique meaning' of "宰", I find this:
《玉篇》治也。《增韻》主也
I see that the original meaning is also "治也" in the context of management.
And we can also see the 'more antique' meaning from "宰相" (which means "prime minister", not 'someone responsible to cut animals' (butcher) ) and also "主宰".

In fact it's easy to see that the "宰" also follows the same meaning change as described above for "Minnan colloquail 治", i.e. from "to manage" to "to butcher (animals)".
And after the contextual meaning of "宰=to manage(as a monosyllabic word)" is largely forgotten, the word finally generalizes to "to kill (including human)".

[edit: it once also included the meaning of "cook", as seen from "又屠也，烹也"]

Edited by qrasy, 14 September 2010 - 08:02 AM.

[xng]

GZ, the discussion was not about the present practise, but rather about whether there's an ancient word that can be associated with it.

I think GZ is still confused as a lot of Taiwanese songs nowadays use the wrong characters borrowed by their homophones.

The problem with this approach is that a lot of youngster (and also those not so young) nowadays don't know the correct character or doesn't bother with finding the original character. Chinese characters place emphasis on meaning first and then the phonetics (because phonetics can differ in different chinese dialects) and is totally different from English words which are based on pure phonetics. So we can't treat chinese characters like English.

This is happening in Mandarin too where 后 can be substituted for 後 when the meaning of the two are completely different. Nowadays, we see people write 吃面 ie. Eat the face.

Recently, I saw this subtitle in Cable TV for hokkien song.

攏細你啦 !

This is mixing mandarin with hokkien because the 細 in mandarin has the same homophone as 是 in hokkien.

Edited by xng, 14 September 2010 - 01:57 PM.

[qrasy]

The problem with this approach is that a lot of youngster (and also those not so young) nowadays don't know the correct character or doesn't bother with finding the original character.

In the ancient times where there were only much less characters available, 假借 was quite acceptable.
As time goes by it became less acceptable, though, as many forms became "fixed by convention".
We no longer see people interchanging 間 with 閒 or writing "morning" with 蚤 instead of 早.

(And then it's well-known that modern Chinese languages have much more homophones than in ancient times, which means there are more possibilities of "unaccepted character" to choose from.)

Chinese characters place emphasis on meaning first and then the phonetics (because phonetics can differ in different chinese dialects) and is totally different from English words which are based on pure phonetics. So we can't treat chinese characters like English.

In English we can have some 'terrible' homophone replacement, too, one more commonly seen example "their" vs "there" or "your" vs "you're". Even though these cases are still easily understood, they can slow down reading by causing temporary confusion.

If "roe" is replaced by "row" I think it would be quite confusing.
Writing "good morning" as "good mourning" would also be a bad English practice even though they sound the same.
If a voice "sounds hoarse", it does not mean it "sounds horse" either.

This is happening in Mandarin too where 后 can be substituted for 後 when the meaning of the two are completely different.

One is noun and one is adjective, it's unlikely to cause confusion.
Even in Mandarin, 厚 vs 後 have very few confusable context.

Nowadays, we see people write 吃面 ie. Eat the face.

If you want a "more ancient" meaning for 吃, it's to stammer/to stutter. So, to me it also looks like "stuttering face".
[口吃 Mandarin kou3 ji1/Cantonese hau2 gat1 exactly means "to stutter", though some people apparently forgot the 'older' reading/meaning of 吃.
Japanese entry for 吃 also have domoru, i.e. "to stutter"/"to stammer", but no usage of "to consume"=喫]

I wondered why people started to use "吃" (should end with -t as 乞 is) for 喫 (should end with -k).
I think one important factor was the confusion between -k and -t ending.
Probably it was first read like "khi[入]" (no retroflex), and people colloquially created 口+乞 without really noticing that "吃" is already used for another meaning. (it's analogous to how people created 台+刂 for "cut" without knowing that "刣" already had another meaning read like "鍾". Similarly some simplified Chinese also "collided" with some rarely used characters, e.g. 极种)
鄂州 and 孝感 dialects do pronounce 喫 as qi[入] (no retroflex). (as far as I see from http://www.baidutx.com/Html/?280.html and http://www.parasitus.../?tid-2697.html . It's interesting to see a Mandarin dialect that doesn't have -i- for 下 and 咬)

"又與喫同" appears early enough to be recorded in 康熙字典, though for the case of "喝" meaning "to drink", it's not even recorded in 康熙字典. [the meaning related to "shout", e.g. 喝 as in 喝彩, is recorded, though. Japanese also recorded the meaning of "shikaru", meaning "to scold"]
The "本字" for Mandarin "drink" is "欱" (the usage of "喝" for this meaning shows a confusion between -p and -t endings), though it's difficult to introduce 欱 for Mandarin speakers as "喝=drink" has become too well-established.

Both usages (吃=eat and 喝=drink) also successfully "infiltrated" Cantonese educations, and Hong Kong people misread 口吃 and their "書面語 read out loud" will easily confuse "to drink" with "thirsty".

Recently, I saw this subtitle in Cable TV for hokkien song.

攏細你啦 !

This is mixing mandarin with hokkien because the 細 in mandarin has the same homophone as 是 in hokkien.

Or does it mean "死" instead?

And, I once observed that 係 is used instead of 是 in intentionally distorted Mandarin.

Edited by qrasy, 14 September 2010 - 05:56 PM.

[General_Zhaoyun]

I think GZ is still confused as a lot of Taiwanese songs nowadays use the wrong characters borrowed by their homophones.

The problem with this approach is that a lot of youngster (and also those not so young) nowadays don't know the correct character or doesn't bother with finding the original character. Chinese characters place emphasis on meaning first and then the phonetics (because phonetics can differ in different chinese dialects) and is totally different from English words which are based on pure phonetics. So we can't treat chinese characters like English.

I'm not following the characters used by Taiwanese songs, but the Hokkien characters according to Taiwan's Ministry of Education Dictionary at http://twblg.dict.edu.tw/tw/index.htm

This is now standardized in Taiwan and used in Taiwan's education.

[xng]

I'm not following the characters used by Taiwanese songs, but the Hokkien characters according to Taiwan's Ministry of Education Dictionary at http://twblg.dict.edu.tw/tw/index.htm

This is now standardized in Taiwan and used in Taiwan's education.

That list is only 98% correct.

There are some characters that are wrongly selected, a good example is 故. There are classical chinese text example of the usage of 故 to mean 'still/again', see link here.

http://solution.cs.u.../dzl/lookup.php

The ucla website is more accurate.

Furthermore, the proof also exist in a modern chinese proverb, 明知故問.

Some characters are chosen not because they are the original character but due to their homophone ie. 閣.

[General_Zhaoyun]

That list is only 98% correct.

There are some characters that are wrongly selected, a good example is 故. There are classical chinese text example of the usage of 故 to mean 'still/again', see link here.

http://solution.cs.u.../dzl/lookup.php

The ucla website is more accurate.

Furthermore, the proof also exist in a modern chinese proverb, 明知故問.

Some characters are chosen not because they are the original character but due to their homophone ie. 閣.

I do understand your explanation of 故 and I quite agree with it. But 故 doesn't really have the same meaning as 又. It does not have the meaning of "again", but rather means "therefore, purposely". I guess Taiwan's ministry of education chose 閣 probably because it is easier to read and write.

I check my Hokkien dictionary from China 閩南方言大詞典 by Professor 周長揖

It uses the character 佫 for "koh", which again is based on same sound (形聲）

My Hokkien dictionary:


Professor 周長揖 is one of the most influential Hokkien expert from Xiamen University in China. He has appeared many Hokkien TV in channel. He speaks Amoy Hokkien.

Check out his video:

[Yeleixingfeng]

What is 'le' equivalant to 個?