Use of characters . . .

In my previous post, I have written about what Professor Lim has taught us about our mother tongue Dio’ghe 潮語 [the Teochew language]. In the article, Professor Lim used the word guiⁿ5 and used this character 峞 and we know this guiⁿ5 危 which mean dangerous.  There is another guiⁿ5 character 懸 and this character means to be hung or suspended or to be worried. However, the character 峞 Professor Lim uses in the article means high.

Another character which we use is ngiang3 癮。The original meaning of ngiang3 means to be addicted to something.  

However, we can say “I1 guê3 ngiang3 ziah8 ziu2 zêg8ê6 lo2 bhu6loh8ke3 lag8 zung1 bi5ziu2 伊過癮食酒一下裸騖落去六樽啤酒。”  He really loves drinking alcohol and in a little while, he rapidly consumes six bottles of beer.” I heard a similar sentence made by a child on an mp3 file over 15 years ago when I was learning Dio’ghe 潮語。

Mogher has suggested we use this character 願 for ngiang3. I think Mogher has a point.

While I am discussing characters, I want to point out that zao2 走 in Dio’ghe means to run, just like in Japanese. However, in Mandarin zou3 走 means to walk.

One of the things which I am most frustrated in my journey to master our mother tongue is that our people in homeland is very relaxed about using our characters and often they use the wrong characters.

In this video they have used the wrong character for zi5 as in mochi. The subtitles wrote loh8 teng1 zi5 "落湯錢" and it should be written as 落湯糍。

Would they have used the wrong characters when writing subtitles for a Mandarin drama or video?

 落湯糍