Chinoy Ancestry Question...
hitokiri6993
June 28, 2008, 12:47 PM posted in General DiscussionTo any Chinoys out there： 你們好! I have a question...
I know that almost all Chinese-Filipino have Fujian （福建）；Hokkien ancestry, am I right? And if they are, I want to know if they mostly speak Hokkien in the Amoy dialect or the Taiwanese dialect. Are there any Guangdong-based Chinoy like me? I'm considered like a rarity.:P
BTW, I'm curious, how do you write Cu-Unjieng(福建的一種性） in Chinese?
alanchan
June 28, 2008, 05:13 PMHi Hitokiri,
Also, not a biggie, but I think you meant 姓 instead of 性 in (福建的一種性), right?
hitokiri6993
June 29, 2008, 05:54 AMYes..:) TYPO.:P hehe...thanks.:) Oh I see...thanks for the info.:) Grabe! Loner ako in the Philippines...I'm half Canto.:)
alanchan
June 29, 2008, 08:33 AMThat's ok, I have Chinoy friends that are Cantonese too, and they blend in just fine. In Chinese school they usually start speaking only in Mandarin (therefore only a handful understand what the heck they are saying), but then eventually they start learning and speaking Hokkien. Hokkien is pretty much the language that you should learn if you wanna do business with the Chinese in the Philippines.
One of my Chinoy friends who's Cantonese actually taught me a little Cantonese, so in HK restaurants sometimes I can pass as Cantonese, but always praying at the back of my mind that they don't ask me a question I don't understand.
Since I started listening to Chinesepod, I have switched to using Mandarin whenever I'm in a Chinese restaurant here in the SF Bay Area, as well as when I vacationed in HK and Shanghai 2 months ago.
missgoldfish
July 19, 2008, 04:49 PMOn a tangent, in Canada I'd say most Chinese spoke Mandarin or Cantonese, depending on the city. I already lived here for more than a decade before I found another Chinoy (and only because I moved to Vancouver haha), and hearing him speak hokkien was so surreal having only heard it from my family for so long, hahaha. (Especially since he never spoke it much, so he had an accent...but I wonder if I'm the one with the accent, having grown up only hearing it by my parents...? o_o)
Hokkien is also the main language used for Singapore Chinese, I've heard.
hitokiri6993
July 20, 2008, 11:36 AMMissgoldfish: I wish I knew how to speak in Hokkien.
SG has a Hokkien community, but because of Lee Kuan-Yew, Mandarin has become an official lingua-franca...some SG Chinese though do speak in Hokkien.
missgoldfish
July 20, 2008, 10:24 PMhitokiri6993: Haha, well for me, I felt like my parents made up a language all on their own because I didn't know anyone else that spoke it, and always wanted to know Mandarin/Cantonese instead =\ Can you understand any hokkien at all?
auntie68
July 21, 2008, 12:17 AM
Hi missgoldfish and hitokiri! We do love our Hokkien here in SGP, although most of it consists of swear words! And not only SGP Chinese: SGP Tamils and Malays are pretty fluent too!
Here is a very realistic example (exaggerated) of how we use Hokkien in Singapore, in this satirical sketch from on a site that does podcasts mocking the Singapore Way:
http://cdn1.libsyn.com/mb/tmbs-080721-do_us_in.mp3?nvb=20080721000901&nva=20080722000901&t=08569c400116d4c617a0d
hitokiri6993
July 21, 2008, 10:47 AMI can speak some. Taiwanese dialect, not the Amoy dialect.:)
missgoldfish
July 29, 2008, 05:02 PMAunti68 - LOL! I laughed a good one at that.
"Who says I don't give you two freedom of speech? You better not say such lies, defame my good character!"
Haha, sounds just like what my dad would say to my siblings and I >=D!
And this one sounds like my mom:
"I tell you, there is a conspiracy to do us in."
Anyway, thanks for the laughs, I appreciate the link! ^^v
alanchan
June 28, 2008, 05:11 PMHi Hitokiri,
Yes you are correct. I would say that at least 80% of Chinese living in Philippines trace their roots to Fujian. Even the new Chinese immigrants are mostly from Fujian.
Almost every Chinoy I know who speak Hokkien speak the Amoy dialect; we can understand the Taiwanese dialect but find some words are pronounced funny. I would say it is probably not unlike British vs American English.
As for Cu-unjieng, I have a friend (also from Philippines) who has this last name!
I heard a story about why people have these long last names. They say that back during the old days (between the 1920s and 1940s), when waves of Chinese immigrants fled poverty-stricken China to search for greener pastures and ended up all over Southeast Asia, they had to go secure their immigration documents. Officials asked them this question, among many others: "What is your last name?", not knowing what to answer, they would answer their whole name, Cu-unjieng or Cojuangco or TanCaktiong, for example, and that became the last name. But really, it was the whole Chinese name of the immigrant. Succeeding generations just decided to carry on using their father/grandfather's name as their last name up to this day.
As for how Cu-unjieng is written in Chinese, my guess is 许恩兴. If you prefer traditional Chinese it would be 許恩興.