Hi Bangulzai,
Here are the last few questions (I
think/hope!). If there are any more, they will just be very minor
ones, but the vast majority of problems relating to this one
lecture (52 minutes long) have now been solved.
I never like to impose on other
people’s time to do things which I could do myself, so I apologize
for asking about how to write the characters for some of the words
below (and also in the past), when I could look them up in
dictionaries. The reason is that I have only two dictionaries at
the moment: 1) Douglas and Barclay, and 2) 林宝卿’s 闽南方言与古汉语同源词典, so if I can’t find them
there, I can’t look any further. I’m just about to buy some more
Hokkien dictionaries, but they will still take some time to arrive.
Once they arrive, if I start work on another Buddhist lecture,
hopefully I won’t need to ask so often about how to write some
characters.
Thanks in
advance.
#) How does one write “kha” (= the
comparative particle) in characters? As in
“kha tua” (= “bigger”), “kha se” (= “smaller”).
#) PgHk has “lang2” (= “we/us”) as
the 1st person plural pronoun. I don’t think there is a distinction
between “inclusive we” and “exclusive we” in PgHk. Do you think
PgHk “lang2” should be written with 咱
or 阮 (or
neither)?
#) PgHk has “ha(h)4-ku2”
X?久 “formerly, in the
old days”, which Douglas says is pronounced “hiah4-ku2”
X?久 in most varieties.
How does one write “h(i)ah4” in characters?
#) “e-hiau cun” and “bo5 siong5”
= 無祥?
“thiN e
lang5 lai thiaN-tioh, i-lang ka e e-hiau cun
a. in-ui i thiaN-tioh hut kong ka-liau bo
siong.”
= “[When the] heavenly beings came
and heard [that they would eventually die], they started to
shiver. Because they heard the Buddha say [that]
everything <would turn out
badly>.”
This is a passage where the
speaker explains that heavenly beings can live for several million
years, and that their bodies look very young, even when they are
millions of years old. For this reason (the speaker says), these
heavenly beings didn’t realise that they would ever die. Then they
heard what the Buddha said, and they were afraid.
1) “e-hiau cun”. This is
literally “knew how to shiver/tremble”, but that doesn’t
work in English. Is “started to shiver/tremble” ok?
Is 戰 the correct
character for “cun3”?
2) “bo-siong”. In Barclay, I can
only find (p10 and p204) “cin1 put4-siong5” = “very unlucky, very
ill-omened”. My guess is that “put4-siong5” is 不祥, and that the speaker’s “bo-siong” is
just a colloquial variant 無祥. Is that correct? If so, then there is
the problem of rendering that into English. My reasoning is that if
something is “unlucky or ill-omened”, then it will “turn out badly”
(i.e. that they would all die), so that is why I’ve translated it
that way. What is your opinion?
#)
“ien5-tau5”: 緣<X>? = “handsome, good-looking”
(for men)
What is the character for
“tau5”.
