Sunday 8 May 2022

Have you heard of this before?

Mo7si6 - In this video, you will hear the phrase mo'si said. I remember hearing it before but I am unable to find this phrase in my Teochew dictionaries. Have you heard of it before?

Hia2 le2 do6 lai6 mo7si6 lao6 dai6

 

 

汝在內麼是老大|

汝在内么是老大

In this case, you are the oldest at home.

那麼您在家是老大咯

那么您在家是老大咯

You will not find hia2 in Teochew dictionaries and I use the boot character with a mouth on the side to show I am only using the character for its sound. 

na2moh4 那麼那么

or a1nê1 or hia2

like that, in this way, in this case

na4me5 那麼|那么

I think you can guess that na2moh4 is just a Mandarin Teochew expression. 

I remember when I first started learning Teochew more than 16 years ago, more than half of the Teochew words and expressions did not have encoded characters. As new Teochew dictionaries are written, the experts are able to assign characters to our words. These experts have to look at very old documents from as long ago as the Han, Tang, Song dynasties to find our characters. 

I heard a Teochew language expert said, that if we could make a sound, then there would be a character. 

This encourages me to keep waiting for the experts to identify these characters. 

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