Heruler's Blog

有一 kang 我 tī 德國法蘭克福 ê 北區叫做 Kalbach ê 所在 teh 等巴士, 我看 tióh 車街路對面一 ê 看板, 有一 ê 廣告 kap 一般 ê 無 sio 像, 呣是 teh 廣告甚麼電影, 音樂會, 嘉年華, 馬戲團, 或是甚麼大賣會。 無 kah 甚麼相片, kan-ta 粉紅 á 色 ê 背景寫一寡字 na-tiānn。用嚴肅 ê 德語口氣按呢講：

One day as I was waiting for bus at a bus stop in Kalbach, a northern district of Frankfurt, Germany, a billboard across the street caught my eye.  It was not the usual advertisements for movies, concerts, festivals, circus shows, or special sales.  No glossy pictures.  Just plain words against a stark pink background.  It intoned gravely:

解釋古代北歐字 (ON) kap 對應 ê 台語字 (Tw):

我 chit-má 愛提出一 ê 古代北歐語 kap 台語 ê 語音對應型式 (pattern of sound correspondence, PSC), 來說明字尾複子音 ê 簡化。 Tī 此 ê PSC 內底, 古代北歐字 ê 字尾是 -ngr, 對應 ê 台語字 ê 字尾卻是 -n nā-tiānn。
 

Tī 下面所舉 ê 例中間, 若是台語字無漢字 ê 對應, 就歸類做 “Group-1 words” (G1W)。  若是台語字有漢字對應, 漢字就 kā 寫出來。

I would like to honor two American friends, Lucy (left) and her sister Maria, who joined a rally supporting Taiwan’s application for membership in the United Nations.  On September 14, they joined about 100 Taiwanese-Americans to take a long and arduous ride in two chartered buses from Chicago to New York, arriving in Hammarskjöld Square the next morning.  Despite the tiring ride, they were as high spirited as any of us, chanting, shouting and waving. They also walked among the ranks of demonstrators across Manhattan for a protest in front of the Chinese consulate office.  After a few hours of rest, they returned with us to Chicago in yet another long and arduous ride.  They did it out of their willingness to help the Taiwanese.  To them it was for a good cause.  They wanted to show support for the Taiwanese who have been shut out of the world organization simply because of Communist China.  While world politicians for their self interest are kowtowing to the little emperor in Beijing, the ordinary American citizens like Lucy and Maria are showing them what is right and what is wrong.

Now I would like to present a pattern of sound correspondence (PSC) between Old Norse (ON) and Taiwanese (Tw) to illustrate the simplification of word-final consonant cluster. The ON words in this PSC have a word-final -ngr whereas their Tw corresponding words with the same meaning are simplified to just an ending of -n.

In the following examples, the Tw words that lack a Chinese cognate are designated as Group-1 words (G1W).  Those that have Chinese cognates are given their Chinese characters.

 

Latin words

Gloss (as defined in dictionaries)

1st syllable

      Near the end of September my church held a retreat at Williams Bay, Wisconsin.  As the organizer wanted to lighten us up a bit, he played a DVD movie entitled André Rieu: Live in New York.  This was a pop music concert at the Radio City concert hall conducted by André Rieu, a Dutch maestro.  The performance was entrancing and we all enjoyed the music.  Among many songs presented in the show, three Italian orchestra members sang the famous song Libiamo from Verdi’s La Traviata, known in English as the Drinking Song.

   Tī 九月尾, 阮教會有開一 ê 退修會 tī Wisconsin 州 ê Williams Bay.  主持者為 tióh beh hō· 大家放 khah 輕鬆一下, 伊 poann 一出 DVD ê 音樂電影, 叫做  André Rieu: Live in New York.  這是今年一位荷蘭人音樂指揮 André Rieu 先生 tī 紐約市 ê Radio City 開 ê 一場音樂會. 音樂演奏真 súi, 阮大家真欣賞. 內面有唱 Verdi ê La Traviata (茶花女) ê 一條真出名 ê 歌叫做 Libiamo (英語歌名: Drinking Song, 中文歌名: 飲酒歌).

The Latin word for ‘coin’ is nūmmus.  Its corresponding word in Taiwanese is hun 分, the smallest monetary unit.  In the past it was represented by the smallest coin.  In today’s monetary system of Taiwan it is a hundredth of a yuan, similar to a cent.

In Matthew 10:29 of the Bible, Jesus says, “Are not two sparrows sold for a penny?”  The “penny” is rendered in the Taiwanese translation of the Bible as chít hun gûn (一分銀) in which chit 一 means ‘one’, hun 分 ‘the smallest unit of money’, and gûn 銀 ‘money’.  The hun 分, like the “penny” in the English translation, captures the sense of the original Greek assárion (ασσάριον), which is the diminutive form of the Latin word as ‘a paltry coin’, the smallest unit of the Roman monetary system.  The sense of the original Greek version is that, even though a sparrow is worth so little, yet none of them will fall to the ground without God’s will.  So, Jesus continues, “Fear not, therefore, you are of more value than many sparrows.”

hun-bûn put chhú 分文不取 – means “never touch a cent”.  For example, the official is a man of such integrity that he “hun-bûn put chhú” from the public coffer.

In Romance languages and Taiwanese (as well as Chinese), a new word can be formed from two synonyms. This process is called “pleonastic combination” (Ref. 1).  Let’s start with the example of the formation of the French word dès ‘since’ from Latin.

 

Latin de means ‘from’.  So does Latin ex.  In Vulgar Latin (the precursor of Romance languages), the two synonyms appeared together to mean ‘since’.  An example is from Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum XIV, 5210 (from Ref. 1):

At the risk of giving you an impression that I am a chatty old man who never seem to know when to bring a conversation to an end, I would like to discuss a little bit more about PSC-1 before leaving the topic.  This is because there is an important issue regarding how PSC-1 (i.e., loss of the word-final -s) came about.

 

The reason the issue came up is because the kind of lexical comparisons we have been making is diachronic, that is, comparison across time.  (Not only that, we also compare words from two language families known to be unrelated, Indo-European vs Sinitic.)  In essence, we compare words from the modern Taiwanese vocabulary with those of ancient Germanic, Latin and Greek lexicons.  It would be more “comparable” if we could use the ancient form of Taiwanese (or Holó) words for comparison.  Unfortunately, we lack such sources.

咱已經有看到不止á chōe 有關台語kap 歐洲語言ê 語音對應 ê 第一型式 PSC-1。Chit-má 咱需要kā 所收集ê 資料做一ê 整理。Tī 下面ê 綜合表內面，歐洲語言ê 簡稱是按呢： OHG = 古代高地德語，ON = 古代北歐語，OE = 古英語，L = 拉丁語，Gk = 希臘語。

表一：語音對應型式 PSC-1：字尾ê -s 失落