Disambiguation in Penang Hokkien

Consider this sentence:

"Wah1-eh3 lui1 kau3 liau4."

Does it mean, "My money has arrived", or does it mean, "My money is enough"?

Without context to rely on, we shall never know. That's where the superiority of Chinese characters shine through. If the kau3 liau4 were written like this 够了 or like this 到了, we can tell the difference. But the romanisation robs us of that swift understanding.

I use disambiguation sparingly, because it always creates controversy. But I want to romanise without losing too much of the nature of Chinese characters to distinguish homophones for their meaning. As such, once again, I feel compelled to create another set of heterographs.

The kau3 for "enough" will henceforth be spelled kao3. Therefore "Wah1-eh3 lui1 kao3 liau4" means "My money is enough" while "Wah1-eh3 lui1 kau3 liau4" means "My money has arrived."

I will refine in the dictionary.

Penang Hokkien Grammar

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About this website

Dear visitor, thank you so much for reading this page. My name is Timothy Tye and my hobby is to find out about places, write about them and share the information with you on this website. I have been writing this site since 5 January 2003. Originally (from 2003 until 2009, the site was called AsiaExplorers. I changed the name to Penang Travel Tips in 2009, even though I describe more than just Penang but everywhere I go (I often need to tell people that "Penang Travel Tips" is not just information about Penang, but information written in Penang), especially places in Malaysia and Singapore, and in all the years since 2003, I have described over 20,000 places.

While I try my best to provide you information as accurate as I can get it to be, I do apologize for any errors and for outdated information which I am unaware. Nevertheless, I hope that what I have described here will be useful to you.