Juggling with tones

Intro to Hokchew, an Eastern Min language

Daniel Zheng

dtienloi@google.com

Diversity in the south is high

What is Hokchew

• A dialect of Eastern Min language 闽东语 Min-Dong Yu
• “Fuzhou dialect” 福州話 Fuzhou hua
• More natively� 福州話 hǔk ziù uâ / Hokchew�or 平話 bǎng uâ (“common speech”)
• Homeland is the Fuzhou city, also spoken in diaspora communities in Malaysia, Singapore, and US…
• Number of speakers could be in the millions, but quickly dwindling

Fujian Province

Hok-ciu

Fuzhou

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Agenda

• Overview ☑️
• Peculiar features of Fuzhouhua
• Implications for revitalisation
• Language status & thoughts

Disclaimer

• Mostly based on my subjective experience
• I am not a fluent speaker
• My parents and grandparents are fluent speakers
• But I spoke Mandarin growing up
• I was an “passive speaker”, only became active after high school
• Not my sole efforts
• Most are community efforts

Tones

• Chinese languages are mostly tonal
• Tone is used for distinguishing meaning
• Tone is basically changing pitch -- changing the frequency of your vocal tract vibration
• Mechanism similar to intonation in English
• Or singing
• I will use “Musical chart” to visualise tones -- but keep in mind the reality

Sidenote: Typical Chinese Syllable Structure

hua55

花

“flower”

initial final tone

Mandarin has four tones*

妈 麻 马 骂

mother hemp horse to scold

4 tones?

That’s really cute

*plus a neutral, unstressed tone

ma55 ma35 ma214 ma51

How about 6 tones (Cantonese tones)

诗 史 试 时 市 事

poem history to try time market matter

si55 si35 si33 si21 si23 si22

Eastern Min (Fuzhou) has 7+ tones

媽 嬤 罵 癟 貓 賣 麥

mother grandmother to scold deflate cat to sell wheat

ma55 ma33 ma21 mah24 ma53 ma242 mah5

Tones interact with each other!

cai21

菜

“vegetable”

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hua55

花

“flower”

hua53 ai21

花菜

“cauliflower”

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Tone-vowel interaction

Consonantal sandhi

=“change”

goung33

讲

“speak”

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mo53

无

(negation)

mo33 _oung33

无讲

“don’t say it”

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Rules for change of initial

1st Final

2nd Initial

nasal

vowel

Stop 1

Stop 2

unchanged

unchanged

unchanged

Goo Gle => Goole

So here is the formula for combining two words

• Each syllable can be represented as a vector (initial, final, tone) e.g. huah24 (h,uah,24)

�

(声,韵,调)

syllableA = (initialA, finalA, toneA)�syllableB = (initialB, finalB, toneB)�A+B->CD (initialC, finalC, toneC), (intialD, finalD, toneD)

toneD = toneB�finalD = finalB�intialC = initialA�initialD = f(finalA, initialB) --- Consonatal sandhi�toneC = g(toneA, toneB) --- Tone interaction�finalC = h(toneC, finalA) = h(g(toneA, toneB), finalA) -- Vowel change

hua55

花

“flower”

Different Theories of Function g (Tone interaction)

What about 3+ syllables?

Changed tones in red

So that’s how Eastern Min juggles with tones

• Tone <--> Tone
• Tone <--> Vowel
• Vowel <-- > Consonant
• It took many scholars, many years to summarise these rules.
• Remember, that native speakers have these complicated rules wired into their brains

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Theory: this is a optimisation to save you energy while not being ambiguous (like a compilation process)

More sandhi examples

Agenda

• Overview ☑️
• Peculiar features of Hokchew ☑️
• Language status & history
• Revitalisation

My own story

Parent’s attitude

“Two discoveries”

Language typology

• Chinese is not “one language”
• Chinese languages (Sinitic Languages) != Languages in China

These makes an IME tricky to make

• O(N^2) problem
• Hard to teach (basically you can only learn from examples)

Work in Progress

Reasons for language shift

Beliefs about language are a fundamental factor in success in language rescue, for a shift of a languages regularly depends on the values attributed to competing varieties. (Bernard Spolsky)

Old Chinese

Middle Chinese

Yue 粤�(~Cantonese)

Hakka

客家

Gan 赣

Xiang

湘

Wu 吴语�(e.g. Shanghainese)

Northern dialects

(~Mandarin)

Min 闽

(One possible tree, oversimplified)

TIME

Ancestors of Sino-Tibetan Languages

1250BC

200AD

1200AD

TODAY

Diversity in the south is high

The same writing system ^{(but not the only one)}

• Because Chinese writing system is ideographic
• And the writing doesn’t really change with pronunciation
• Which means you can identify the origin of each word easily

Misconception:

All Chinese languages are

the same except for pronunciation

Strange, but understandable

Almost non-sense to native speaker

Fun fact...

• Japanese (Kanji), Korean, Vietnamese (Chữ Nôm) all at some stage or currently use Chinese characters as part of their writing systems. But they are not Sinitic (not descendents of Old Chinese).

Diglossia ~= “two languages”

Classical Chinese�文言文�

Mandarin,

Cantonese,

Min, Wu, Hakka...

Upper language

(literature, government,

education)

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Lower language

(Day-to-day communication)

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Cantonese,

Min, Wu, Hakka...

Mandarin/�Putonghua

Mandarin/�Putonghua

Cantonese,

Min, Wu, Hakka...

~1900 ~1960 Today

Summary

• Chinese is not one language, diverse in the south
• Shared writing system, different colloquial speech
• Diglossia

Hok-ciu-ua Characteristics

• Tones
• Tones that change
• Tones that changes vowels and consonants

Today’s efforts

• Textbooks
• Creators (video & text)
• Social media video in Hokchew
• Wikipedia Eastern Min cdo.wikipedia.org
• IME (Input method) & online dictionary
• Tricky thing is no standardised romanisation -- we have to create one
• Targeting “early adopter” users at the moment.
• Solving the tooling / infrastructure problem

The fact of the matter is that the 'real world' is to a large extent unconsciously built upon the language habits of the group. No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached... We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation. (Sapir 1958 [1929], p. 69)

Why revitalise the language

• Linguistic diversity as a resource
• Cultural & identity
• Anecdotes and folk wisdom (“word of mouth”)
• Knowledge that is not written down in Mandarin

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Work in Progress

Unconfirmed source

Percentage of people who can fluently speak their local tongue, aged 6-20

Northern Mandarin dialects

Southeastern

Mandarin dialects

Wu

Gan

Yue

Min

Links

Learn about varieties (“dialects”) of Chinese in general:

• Langfocus - Chinese - The Sinitic Languages
• How Similar Are Mandarin and Cantonese?
• The Great Dialect Deception 🌟🌟🌟

Learn about Eastern Min / Hokchew:

• Curated resource: awesome-hokchew
• Introduction to the Foochow Dialect by Leo Chen and Jerry Norman
• cdo.wikipedia.org
• IME: zingzeu.org

References

Donohue, C. J. 2013. Fuzhou tonal acoustics and tonology. Munich: Lincom Europa.

馮愛珍. 1998. 福州方言詞典. 南京: 江蘇教育出版社.

梁玉璋, 馮愛珍. 1996. 福州話音檔. 上海: 上海教育出版社

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