Sunday, February 04, 2007

Teochew in Hong Kong Movies

Sometimes when watching Hong Kong movies you can find a number of references to Teochew people and sometimes you can even hear some spoken Teochew in them. Off the top of my head here are some movies:

The God of Cookery: Stephen Chow says "pu nia bho" in it.
Love Undercover 2: After getting demoted Miriam Yeung says something like "ua si diojiu nang, ua bho ketki nia."
Eagle Shooting Heroes: Tony Leung speaks a combination of Cantonese and very bad diojiu. I posted a clip here.
Young and Dangerous III: The priest speaks a short line of diojiu in it.
Stowaway: One of the members speaks diojiu.
The Attractive One: Lau Ching Wan plays a diojiu nang who says that diojiu males are chauvanistic, but responsible.
Enter the Phoenix: Yuen Biao's triad family are diojiu nang that swam from Diojiu to Hong Kong. (Many Diojiu nang actually arrived in Hong Kong that way, so I hear).

Movies I have not seen but heard there are Diojiu references in there:

2Young
Moonchild

I'll try to add more later!

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Spoken Teochew in a Dutch Commercial!

A funny commercial that has alot of spoken Teochew in it! It's even more amazing since this wasn't even a commercial made in China, but rather the Netherlands. See how much you can pick up!

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Cambodian/French Romanization System

While in Cambodia last year, I noticed that alot of businesses there were owned by Teochew people. You could tell because they had their own way of translating their business's name in Chinese characters to english. For the english name, they would commonly just spell out how they would say Chinese words using english.

I later found that this romanization scheme is actually based on the French way of pronouncing Teochew words. Here are some examples, with the pengim used on this site on the left, Chinese character in the middle, and Cambodian romanization on the right:

Modern | Character | Cambodian
Heng 興 Heng
Li 利 Ly
Li 李 Ly
Li 呂 Ly
Bung 文 Bun
Dang 陳 Taing
Chua 蔡 Chhor
Eung 黃 Ung
Dong 忠 Tong
Sio 謝 Chea
Lai 來 Lay
[ ] 辛 Sim

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