Hokkien Chinese
Thursday 9 March 2023
I heard for the first time Hokkien Chinese, as spoken in Taiwan, in a pop #song. I don’t think I heard Hokkien Chinese earlier while being conscious of it. I was surprised how much more close the pronunciation of certain words is to Sino-Japanese. For example, in this phrase:
佇世界安静的時
I seem to hear tei sekai ... shi — all very close to Japanese.
I asked OpenAI to transcribe it:
Tī sè-kài an-tsìng ê sî.
Listening again, yeah 佇 sounds more like /ti/ than /te:/ and 安静 because (I think) early Japanese had no closing /ng/ sound is different. And 的 is different, but that is no surprise at all.
However, sekai and shi are completely different form Mandarin and yet very close to Japanese.
Also a touching song, especially for me with my dad being almost eighty-eight.
Warning: the video shows a somewhat animal unfriendly pig farm (I wonder what Taiwanese think about that, and how consciously it was included in the video).
When I tried to use OpenAI to transcribe more it was unable to do that reliably. I gave a few thumbs down and gave up.
I’ve located two online Hokkien Chinese | Taiwanese dictionaries:
With these I could check that OpenAI failed at transcribing reliably.
Omniglot has page about transcriptions and such:
Looking better at more words made me realize that Taiwanese words sounding like Japanese are much less common than I - for a moment - dared to hope. I’m not surprised. I still like how Taiwanese sounds quite different from Mandarin, but that’s very subjective and even arbitrary of course.
Would you guess /hiaⁿ-tī / is kyoudai/ (兄弟)? I wouldn’t. ;-)