Stewing fish head with yam

If you were to watch the video and listen to the lady speaking, you might be wondering why did she call yam ou7tao5 芋頭 ? Yam is called ou7 芋 in Teochew Uê.

Yam is known as taro in North America.

The next question you will ask is why did she say the cooking term dung6 燉 for how she cooks the fish head with yam. It is obvious the cooking technique is ngao5 熬 – well, in Teochew Uê dung6 means to cook something in a bain Marie but nowadays due to the import of huge amount of Mandarin words some of our words have double meanings – one taking on the original Teochew meaning and the other the Mandarin meaning.

One other example is pang1 芳 – our Teochew meaning of pang1 means fragrant. However, today, it also takes on the Mandarin meaning of “good to eat” which we would have normally say ho2ziah8 好食。

The other word she used was ziang1 煎 and it was obvious the cooking method here was luah4 烙。

At one point, she even used the Mandarin Teochew word incorrectly, which was za3 炸 and the meaning of za3 is to deep fry and our Teochew word for deep fry is pu5 浮 and I personally think this character 烰 should have been used for pu5 as to deep fry.

However, there are some expressions which she has said correctly.

For an example she said:

uê1 koin3 hiaon1 ki3lai5

鍋蓋掀起來｜锅盖掀起来

lift the lid of the cooking pot

You hear all sorts when you listen to native speakers calling a lid for a pot “gai3 蓋” or “gua3 蓋” and the correct pronunciation is koiⁿ3 蓋 – perhaps this is only true for Swatow Uê!

To cover a pot is called kam3 蓋 and to lift a lid of a pot is said as hiaoⁿ1 掀。 You sometimes hear people say kam3mi2 蓋瞇 which means to close tightly.

The advice I can give to any serious learner of Teochew Uê is not to just do wholescale import of Mandarin words or else you may get your knickers in a twist.