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Quite a few words from the variety of Old Chinese spoken in the state of Wu, where the ancestral language of Min and Wu dialect families originated, and later words from Middle Chinese as well, have retained the original meanings in Hokkien, while many of their counterparts in Mandarin Chinese have either fallen out of daily use, have been ...
Hokkien is one of the largest Chinese language groups worldwide. Profanity in Hokkien most commonly involves sexual references and scorn of the object's ancestors, especially their mother. The mentioning of sexual organs is frequently used in Hokkien profanity. [citation needed] Hokkien is the preferred language for swearing in Singapore. [1]
Pe̍h-ōe-jī (白話字) is a Latin alphabet developed by Western missionaries working in Southeast Asia in the 19th century to write Hokkien. Pe̍h-ōe-jī allows Hokkien to be written phonetically in Latin script, meaning that phrases specific to Hokkien can be written without having to deal with the issue of non-existent Chinese characters.
The Hokkien language uses a broad array of honorific suffixes or prefixes for addressing or referring to people. Most are suffixes. Honorifics are often non-gender-neutral; some imply a feminine context (such as sió-chiá) while others imply a masculine one (such as sian-siⁿ), and still others imply both.
The Hokkien word itself when dissected means, 番; hoan; 'foreign', + 仔; á; 'diminutive noun suffix', resulting in Hokkien Chinese: 番仔; Pe̍h-ōe-jī: Hoan-á; lit. 'foreigner', originally from the perspective of ethnic Chinese referring to non-Chinese people, especially historically natives of Taiwan and Southeast Asia.
Hokkien Words Definition Singaporean Hokkien Taiwanese Hokkien Notes 咖啡: Coffee ko-pi: ka-pi " ko-pi" is a loan word from the Malay word "kopi" which in turn is taken from the English word "coffee" The Mandarin word "kāfēi" and the Taiwanese Hokkien word "ka-pi" are derived from the French word "café". As Hokkien does not have an f-sound ...
Taiwanese Hokkien (/ ... Words of tone 6 have merged into either tone 2 or tone 7 in most Taiwanese variants, and thus tone 6 is duplicated in the count.
Pe̍h-ōe-jī (Taiwanese Hokkien: [pe˩ˀ o̯e̞˩ d͡ʑi˧] ⓘ, English approximation: / p eɪ w eɪ ˈ dʒ iː / pay-way-JEE; abbr. POJ; lit. ' vernacular writing '), sometimes known as Church Romanization, is an orthography used to write variants of Hokkien Southern Min, [2] particularly Taiwanese and Amoy Hokkien, and it is widely employed as one of the writing systems for Southern Min.