Literary 文讀 and colloquial 白讀 readings in the Min 閩 dialect

[Mark Yong]

Most, if not all, Chinese dialects (including Mandarin) have a characteristic of having literal 文讀 or colloquial 白讀 pronunciations for certain words. However, it is the Min 閩 dialect group that appears to possess the largest proportion of such words.

What is the general rule on determining whether a character/word in Min 閩 should be pronounced in speech using the literal 文讀 or colloquial 白讀 pronunciation?

According to Nicholas Bodman's excellent textbook on Amoy Hokkien, the rule-of-thumb is that single characters are pronounced using the colloquial pronunciation, whereas words (character combinations) are read using the literal pronunciation, e.g. 東 is read as 'tang', but 東方 is read as 'tong hong', especially when one or both of the characters is a bound morpheme.

(There appear to be some exceptions, e.g. Bodman uses 'hui-ki' for 飛機, but in Malaysia, 'pue-ki'/'pe-ki' is used).

Actually, I am asking this question because, on many occasions, I encounter words in texts, whereby I am unable to decide whether to use the literal or colloquial pronunciation for them, when reading them out loud using Hokkien pronunciation. For long-established terms, I guess one would just adopt what has been in common use over the decades or centuries. The tricky part comes when encountering newer terminologies, e.g. technological or commercial, mostly those jargon developed in modern Mandarin over the past century.

[Ah-Bin]

If you are reading anything out in Classical Chinese you should actually read everything according to the literary pronunciation. That was its original role - as the standard used when reading out Classical Chinese texts. In Taiwan you can buy recorded Hokkien versions of the Four Books and of T'ang poetry where they do just that.

As for reading off a text written in Mandarin or something representing a kind of colloquial Chinese it is hard to tell what you should use if you don't already know the word from having heard it. You should definitely read off all 成語 in the literary style as they are usually quotations from classical texts.

That rule that Bodman gives is quite strange, even some words which come from a Classical source like 入門 are pronounced in the colloquial (jip-mng, not jip-bun). I did see a dictionary in Taiwan that was written to answer questions like yours, but I can't remember its name. Carstairs Douglas's dictionary of the Amoy vernacular sometimes explains the differnces between the usage of one pronunciation and another.