Tone Numbers in Penang Hokkien

Penang Hokkien is a tonal language. That means, the meaning of words is determined by the tone. The good news is that you only need to know 4 different tones, and they can be mapped to the four tones in Mandarin. Every syllable is followed by a number, which can be 1, 2, 3 and 4. You will also come across some syllables marked with tone 33. These are pronounced with the same tone as tone 3, but behaves in a different way from the syllables with single-digit tone numbers (the 1, 2, 3 and 4).

Strictly speaking, every syllable is followed by a tone number. In practice however, loanwords may remain without the tone numbers. Hence you will often see "Penang Hokkien" written this way, rather than the purely numeric Pe3nang1 Hok1kien4.

The tone numbers of this new writing system takes over from the use of diacritic marks (accute, grave, circumflex accents) of older writing systems. I go for numbers rather than diacritic marks because the marks are difficult to write on a standard keyboard. Also, a specific rule has to be remembered as to where to place the mark, is it on an a or e or i, and if the syllable have no vowel, as in "ng", where to mark. To me, these are man-made difficulties that do not contribute anything to help the language. Therefore, diacritic marks do not feature in this writing system.

Another benefit of tone numbers is that you can easily sequence them. When you see a syllable marked with 2, you know that it is the second tone in the system. By running through the sequence of four tones in your head, you can quickly determine the tone of that syllable.

Syllable

A syllable is a single utterance. Words in English are formed by joining together syllables without space in between. The word "syllable" comprises syl-la-ble, three syllables in total. Words in Penang Hokkien are always separated with a tone number. Occasionally you will find hyphens as well, but not always. Thus a word such as ang3kong3na4 is a word of three syllables. No matter how the letters are put together, if it ends with a number, that is one syllable. Thus, a word such as enee2 might to the untrained eye look like two syllables ("e" and "nee"), but because there isn't a tone number separating "e" and "nee", these are a single syllable (look up enee2 in the dictionary to hear how it is pronounced). The dictionary also shows that "enee" is pronounced [ ĩ ] using IPA, but I really don't expect you to have to learn IPA to learn Penang Hokkien.

Morpheme

I use the term morpheme to mean a grammatical unit that carries a meaning. In Penang Hokkien, the basic grammatical unit is usually one syllable. For example, ang1 means "husband" while ang2 means "red". As you can see, change the tone number, and you have changed the meaning.

A morpheme can be a word. It can also be a component of a word. For example, the morpheme ang1 can be the word ang1 meaning "husband". It can also be a component within the word ang3bor4 , meaning "couple".

Here, I need your close attention. Note that the word ang1 (with tone 1) has become ang3 in ang3bor4. When morphemes are put together to form words that comprise two or more morphemes, all the morphemes in the compound change their tone numbers EXCEPT the last one.

The word ang3bor4 comprises the morphemes ang1 (husband) and bor4 (wife). But only ang1 changes its tone number. The morpheme bor4 doesn't change its tone number, because it is the final morpheme in the compound.

On the other hand, we can combine bor4 (wife) and the morpheme knia4 (child) to form the word bor1knia4 (which means "a man's family"). Now it's the morpheme bor4 that changes its tone, while the morpheme knia4 remains unchanged.

When you learn a new word in Penang Hokkien, always, always, always learn it with its tone number. Never learn the word husband as ang. Always learn it as ang1 . Otherwise, you will confuse it with ang2 (red) and ang3 (water barrel). Always get used to writing it with its tone number. Do it correctly from the very beginning, and you'd be thankful for investing the effort.

In the above examples, we see that ang1 becomes ang3 while bor4 becomes bor1 when these morphemes combine with other morphemes. The bad news is that this happens not only to compound nouns, but also to adjectives, verbs, subject nouns, and even whole sentences. People who speak Penang Hokkien tend to take the tone changes for granted but will immediately detect a learner using the wrong tone. The very good news is that there is a very easy rule to remember how the changes are effected. And we'll be learning that, of course.

The rule for changing the tone numbers is called Tone Sandhi. We will look into that in a future lesson.

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