# Taiwanese Hokkien: 文白異讀



## viajero_canjeado

Good day!

I was wanting to ask about the two words 學 and 問, as spoken in the Taiwanese variety of 閩南語。 Sometimes the former is pronounced hak (學生） and other times ou (學台語); sometimes the latter is pronounced mbun (沒問題) and sometimes meng (請問). The idea occurred to me that hak and mbun are more like noun usages, whereas ou and meng are like verbal usages; however my theory doesn't seem to hold up with a word like 學校， which beside 學生 seems also quite noun-ish, yet the pronunciation is different.

Any explanations on the rules of when to use which? Thanks a lot!


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## Ghabi

Viajero學起閩南語來了，佩服！漢語方言的「文白異讀」(literary reading vs colloquial reading)，情況複雜得很，教人頭大！一般來說，在「複合詞」(compound words)中唸「文讀」，單獨用時唸「白讀」，但總有例外！學字作hak是文讀(「學校」、「學生」等都是複合詞)，作oh就是白讀了。問字也是一樣，作bun是文讀，作mng是白讀。複合詞有時候是名詞，有時候是動詞，所以不能說凡是名詞就用文讀。這只是我粗淺的理解，有不對的地方請大家指正！


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## BODYholic

viajero_canjeado said:


> however my theory doesn't seem to hold up with a word like 學校， which beside 學生 seems also quite noun-ish, yet the pronunciation is different.



According to this online dictionary, 學校 is _hak hau_. It sounds formal to me.You'll probably hear it during news broadcasting.


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## Jerry Chan

hi viajero,
The phenomenon is called 文白異讀
hak (學) & mbun (問) are 文讀, they are  more former
ou (學) & meng (問) are 白讀, more colloquial
閩南語 is known to be the most complicated dialect in 文白異讀. But it's very common in 粵語 and 吳語 as well.


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## viajero_canjeado

BODYholic said:


> According to this online dictionary, 學校 is _hak hau_. It sounds formal to me.You'll probably hear it during news broadcasting.



Pardon me, but I gave the wrong word; I should have said 學堂, which apparently is another word for school. You're right that 學校 is pronounced hak hao, identical to 學生的學. Lastly, I should clarify that "ou" is from 金門方言, but in Formosa 學 would be pronounced (using Mandarin pinyin) "e", close to the English "uh".




Jerry Chan said:


> hi viajero,
> The phenomenon is called 文白異讀
> hak (學) & mbun (問) are 文讀, they are  more former
> ou (學) & meng (問) are 白讀, more colloquial
> 閩南語 is known to be the most complicated dialect in 文白異讀. But it's very common in 粵語 and 吳語 as well.



Wow! Does this occur at all in Mandarin? Of course I'm familiar with 破音字, but I don't think I've encountered an instance of changing pronunciation for formality's sake..


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## Jerry Chan

Yes, 學堂 (e deng) is what we usual use in spoken Hokkien for school.
學校 (hak hao) is what's written or used in formal occassions. 

It's really a headache for learners. That's why some say 閩南語 is the most chinese language to master.

I'm not aware if madarin has any instance of 文白異讀, but it's indeed more of a 'what's said is what's written' language.


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## viajero_canjeado

Ghabi said:


> Viajero學起閩南語來了，佩服！漢語方言的「文白異讀」(literary reading vs colloquial reading)，情況複雜得很，教人頭大！一般來說，在「複合詞」(compound words)中唸「文讀」，單獨用時唸「白讀」，但總有例外！學字作hak是文讀(「學校」、「學生」等都是複合詞)，作oh就是白讀了。問字也是一樣，作bun是文讀，作mng是白讀。複合詞有時候是名詞，有時候是動詞，所以不能說凡是名詞就用文讀。這只是我粗淺的理解，有不對的地方請大家指正！



Seems plausible, but why then would the 學 in 學校 and 學堂 have a different pronunciation?



viajero_canjeado said:


> Wow! Does this occur at all in Mandarin? Of course I'm familiar with 破音字, but I don't think I've encountered an instance of changing pronunciation for formality's sake..



It just occurred to me that in church singing hymns (in Mandarin), the 的 is usually pronounced di instead of de. Is that an example of 文白異讀?


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## xiaolijie

> It just occurred to me that in church singing hymns (in Mandarin), the 的 is usually pronounced di instead of de. Is that an example of 文白異讀?


No, di and de are all the same pronunciation, with one being neutralised/ de-emphasized. Think of the pronunciations of "The" in English and you'll see the analogy.



> I don't think I've encountered an instance of changing pronunciation for formality's sake.


 I don't think this is the case. Think of word "hak" (written as 學) as coming from one variety of the language more suitable for formal occasions and the word "e" (also written as 學) as coming from another variety which is more suitable for informal occasions. Then you'll see the necessity to swich to the appropriate register when speaking. To undestand this, you should also need to understand that the writing (such as 學) is artificially imposed on the words "hak" and "e".


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## viajero_canjeado

xiaolijie said:


> No, di and de are all the same pronunciation, with one being neutralised/ de-emphasized. Think of the pronunciations of "The" in English and you'll see the analogy.
> 
> I don't think this is the case. Think of word "hak" (written as 學) as coming from one variety of the language more suitable for formal occasions and the work "e" (also written as 學) as coming from another variety which is more suitable for informal occasions. Then you'll see the necessity to swich to the appropriate register when speaking. To undestand this, you should also need to understand that the writing (such as 學) is artificially imposed on the words "hak" and "e".



I'm not sure it's that way (though you may know more about the etymology of 閩南語 than I do). The way I understand it, historically the same written characters were used over a broad expanse but pronounced differently in different places. So, the Min-nan dialect, at some point in history, was also closely tied to the use of characters. Mandarin became the lingua franca, so now lots of Min-nan speakers consider the Min-nan language merely a spoken one, and when writing or typing use Mandarin, or if they want to use Min-nan they often use characters transliteratively. The result is that sometimes a spoken Min-nan word is hard to connect to a certain character from the Mandarin set of commonly-used words, but for lots of words it's quite easy to see the connection:

am xi (暗時) = 晚上
lei bai (禮拜)
ti ki (天氣)
gim meng (金門)
bua mi (半冥) = 半夜
xiong dei (上帝) 

All that to say, it seems like, from what Jerry and Ghabi were saying, those alternate pronunciations "e" and "hak" are variant pronunciations of the same character, or what was the same character a long time ago. Probably at some point there were rules defining when to use which, but now it's a matter of habit. If you've come across sources that indicate otherwise, I'd be most interested in seeing them, as I'm not at all confident in my assertions. This whole subject confuses me quite thoroughly.

When it comes to di and de (的), all I can say is that it definitely doesn't sound the same to me. Surely you don't mean that the 的 in 目的 is pronounced the same as the 的 in 我的?


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## Ghabi

viajero_canjeado said:


> Seems plausible, but why then would the 學 in 學校 and 學堂 have a different pronunciation?


My take is that 學堂 is a compound word made up "natively", and so the native morpheme _oh_ is used. On the contrary, 學校 was borrowed "wholesale" from the Northern speech, so the "literary" reading _hak_ is used. In the old days, a "school" was known as 學堂, such as the famous 船政學堂 in Fuzhou, which was later renamed as 海軍學校. Compare Cantonese, where the word 堂 in 學堂 (obsolete, but still used in a few contexts) is pronounced _tong2_, not the "literary" _tong4_. I may be completely off base of course, just my two cents!


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## indigoduck

Jerry Chan said:


> hi viajero,
> The phenomenon is called 文白異讀
> hak (學) & mbun (問) are 文讀, they are more former
> ou (學) & meng (問) are 白讀, more colloquial
> 閩南語 is known to be the most complicated dialect in 文白異讀. But it's very common in 粵語 and 吳語 as well.


 
New concept for me!  I sensed this in cantonese but didn't know there was an explanation for it, and didn't know it applied to other dialects as well.

I'm trying to learn 闽东 and i've got a book for it but it's a complete headache reading the explanations.

I've got a question about 闽南.  Does it exhibit the following phenomenon:

The pronounciation for one character changes all over the place depending on what sound was used before and after ("sandhi"), and sometimes change in tone as well.

Would this feature also be called 文白異讀 ?


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## viajero_canjeado

indigoduck said:


> New concept for me!  I sensed this in cantonese but didn't know there was an explanation for it, and didn't know it applied to other dialects as well.
> 
> I'm trying to learn 闽东 and i've got a book for it but it's a complete headache reading the explanations.
> 
> I've got a question about 闽南.  Does it exhibit the following phenomenon:
> 
> The pronounciation for one character changes all over the place depending on what sound was used before and after ("sandhi"), and sometimes change in tone as well.
> 
> Would this feature also be called 文白異讀 ?



Taiwanese displays tone sandhi. Due to the complexity of the tones and interplaying tone sandhi, for the time being I find it easier not to use tone markers whatsoever when typing Min-nan pronunciations 

I don't think this could be designated 文白異讀 because the the words aren't actually different, they just are modified (according to rules, so I hear) when in conjunction with other words - so a word that's a high tone by itself might be low when you put another word after it, just as a blind example. Anyway, since this applies to all words indiscriminately, I don't think it has anything to do with formality.




Ghabi said:


> My take is that 學堂 is a compound word made up "natively", and so the native morpheme _oh_ is used. On the contrary, 學校 was borrowed "wholesale" from the Northern speech, so the "literary" reading _hak_ is used. In the old days, a "school" was known as 學堂, such as the famous 船政學堂 in Fuzhou, which was later renamed as 海軍學校. Compare Cantonese, where the word 堂 in 學堂 (obsolete, but still used in a few contexts) is pronounced _tong2_, not the "literary" _tong4_. I may be completely off base of course, just my two cents!



Very cool idea! Do you have an inkling which "Northern accents" would have contributed these formal readings?


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## Ghabi

I always think that literary readings are based on the rime dictionaries. For example, 學 is glossed 胡覺切 in the rime dictionary 廣韻. Now 胡 is _hoo_ (literary reading) and 覺 is _kak_, and voila we got _hak_ as the literary reading of 學. I may be oversimplifying the problem, though. Anyway, to understand this problem we have to know that in the old days people in different regions of China used to read the classics in their own dialects (we used to read aloud!), hence the 讀書音 or 文讀 or 孔子白!


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## viajero_canjeado

Ghabi said:


> I always think that literary readings are based on the rime dictionaries.



Very interesting. So, does that mean that literary readings corresponding to the rime dictionaries would have been the same across many or all dialects? That is, Cantonese, Hakka, Min-nan (and other) speakers would have all said "hak" in a formal setting because they were familiar with the rime dictionary? Now that you mention it, when dialect speakers of old would read the spelling "胡覺切", how did they know how to pronounce the words in the "literary" way rather than with their own dialectal pronunciation? Was it just a matter of being sufficiently educated?


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## Ghabi

viajero_canjeado said:


> So, does that mean that literary readings corresponding to the rime dictionaries would have been the same across many or all dialects? That is, Cantonese, Hakka, Min-nan (and other) speakers would have all said "hak" in a formal setting because they were familiar with the rime dictionary?


No no, 反切 spelling is only relative; it doesn't give you a "universal" pronunciation. It only tells you how a word is related to other words in terms of pronunciation in the same dialect. When one comes across a word in reading that's not used in his dialect (and thus has no idea how to pronounce it), one can check its 反切 spelling to assign a pronunciation to it; and it seems to me that many words have been given an additional 反切 pronunciation even though they already exist in the dialect with a natural, organic pronunciation, and hence the whole business of the literary vs the colloquial readings. It's my (over)-simplified way to view the problem.

More about rime dictionaries: As their name suggests, they were made to help you rhyme. In the old good days, a guy who wrote good poetry 詩 and rhymed prose 賦 could become an official (it sounds absurd, but it's true!) Problem is, people came from different regions and spoke different dialects, and they rhymed differently. A standard was needed, and rime dictionaries were compiled. All the surviving rime dictonaries were based on one known as 切韻. So which dialect 切韻 was based on? This point is a bit controversial, but it's often assumed that it's not based on a single dialect, but was a kind of compromise of several different dialects. And the phonological system as reflected in 切韻 is nowadays known as 中古音 ...

I'm afraid all this stuff is a drag, and I'm certainly not the right person to explain these things to you! In any case, I hope I haven't misled you too much.


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