Translating Indonesian into Minnanhua

[JT888]

My Indonesian relatives gave me the sounds for some names of people and places in Fujian Province. I'm now trying to translate these sounds back into the original characters. My relatives say they came from the Amoy (Xiamen 厦门) area and speak Hokian dialect, which I believe is Minnan(闽南话）, but, for reasons explained below, I'm wondering if they came from Quanzhou.

The names:

Ing Hoe (person)

Po Duan (person)

Eng Djoen/Djwan (they spell it two different ways) (place-somewhere in Fujian).

I know the Ing is 永 and the Po is 保。 I, unfortunately, have no idea what the Eng Djoen/Djwan could be. I don't even know if my relatives use an internally consistent system of romanization. I have seen them use Djoen to represent 春，and the Eng sounds to me like the Ing， so it could perhaps represent 永。 I understand that 永春 is an area in Fujian province, but to my understanding it's closer to Quanzhou than Xiamen.

My relatives believe the Eng Djoen/Djwan is the name of a village near Xiamen; some claim it is a village where everyone is named 陈 (Chen/Tan)。

Hopefully someone can give me advice about how to translate these sounds, or where I could look to find translations.

Thanks much.

[rose~]

According to the following link, "eng" could also mean pinyin "yang" and "djoen" could also be pinyin "jun", just to give a couple of alternatives:

Link (word file)

There is a romanized Hokkien wiki where the closest I can see is the 永春 which you have found already:

http://zh-min-nan.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hok-ki%C3%A0n

The issues with that are the fact that it's not in Xiamen as you said and also it's quite a large place and not a village.

Baidu has a searchable map which might be useful for searching random village names:

http://map.baidu.com/.

Sorry I'm not more help, I know there are some Hokkien speakers here who will probably be able to assist you

[JT888]

Thanks very much for the thoughts. I have two questions, though.

Is there actually an exact correspondence between Minan "Eng/Ing" and Mandarin "Yang" and the Minnan "Djoen" and the Mandarin "Chun?" Is every character than Mandarin-speakers pronounce "Yang" going to be pronounced "Eng/Ing" by Minnanhua speakers? And every character pronounced "Djoen" by Minnan speakers pronounced "Chun" by Mandarin speakers?

My relatives have also brought up another word to translate: "Tai Hak So/Soe" -- which apparently means "Imperial Instructor" or "Imperial Teacher." Does Tai Hak Soe simply mean 太老师？

To add a third question, is there some sort of on-line lookup tool for minnan pronunciation, so I don't have to keep bothering people with these sorts of questions?

Thanks again.