Penang Hokkien Grammatical Terminology

In presenting my lessons at Learn Penang Hokkien, I often mention specific grammatical terms. Many of these are borrowed from English grammar. To help learners understand my lessons, I am putting together a list of the terms I use for easy reference.

basic tone: Refer to citation tone.
canonical spelling: The main form of spelling used in writing where alternative forms and their corresponding pronunciation exists.
citation tone: This is the original tone of a morpheme, syllable or word, as listed in the dictionary, before it undergoes any tone changes.
colloquial reading: The pronunciation used in vernacular speech.
emphatic form: The form that a word takes to indicate emphasis or stress. See also regular form.
father tongue: The term used for the native language from the paternal side, when both set of parents do not share a common native language.
inflection: Modification that words undergo to express different grammatical categories (for example, "flies", "flown", "flight"). See also lexeme.
lexeme: The most basic form of a word without any inflection (for example, "fly"). See also inflection.
lingua franca: The language used for communication among people who do not share a mother tongue.
literary reading: The pronunciation used in formal loan words and names. See also colloquial reading.
morpheme: The smallest grammatical component of a language. They can be free morphemes, which can stand on their own (for example, "break", "able"), or bound morphemes (for example, "un-") which must be affixed to a root to form a word (example, "unbreakable")
mother tongue: The language a person learned from birth, particularly from the maternal side. See also father tongue.
orthography: the set of rules or standardized system to which a particular script or spelling observes.
regular form: The original, unstressed formed of a word within a sentence. See also emphatic form.
running tone: Refer to sandhi tone.
sandhi tone: Also called running tone and modified tone, this is the form taken by a syllable after it has changed its tone.
standing tone: Refer to citation tone.
tone sandhi: How morphemes, syllables or words change their tone based on their placement within a compound word or sentence
vernacular: The native language or native dialect.
vulgar: The common or vernacular form of a language, as opposed to the classical. The term vulgar in linguistic terms, do not mean tasteless or indecent.
written vernacular Chinese: This is the written form of Chinese based on the vernacular language. It is based in the written form of Mandarin Chinese in used in the Ming and Qing dynasties, and was adopted and refined by intellectuals with the May Fourth Movement.

Historical Details

Classical Chinese: The language of the classic literature that came about from the end of the Spring and Autumn period, through to the end of the Han Dynasty, which is the written form of Old Chinese. Also known as Literary Chinese, it is different from any modern spoken form of Chinese, which is in written vernacular Chinese. Classical Chinese was the written standard used during imperial China until the early 20th century.
Commission on the Unification of Pronunciation: Body established in the Republic of China from 1912 to 1913 to select ancillary phonetic symbols for Mandarin, and to se the standard Guoyu pronunciation of basic Chinese characters.
May Fourth Movement: An anti-imperialist political movement that began as student demonstrations in Beijing on 4 May, 1919. It ushers in the New Culture Movement period (1915-1921)
New Culture Movement: A movement taking place from mid-1910s to the 1920s, due to disillusionment with traditional Chinese culture, resulting in a revolt against Confuciansim, and the call for a new Chinese culture based on global and western standards. Scholars of this period studied the Chinese language and dialects using western linguistic tools as the basis for creating a national language.
Putonghua: The common spoken language of the modern Han group, and the lingua franca of all ethnic groups in the country, with the standard pronunciation based on the Beijing dialect.

References

Classical Chinese: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_Chinese
Inflection: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflection
Literary and colloquial readings: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literary_and_colloquial_readings_of_Chinese_characters
May Fourth Movement: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_Fourth_Movement
New Culture Movement: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Culture_Movement
Putonghua: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Putonghua
Varieties of Chinese: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_spoken_language
Vulgar Latin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulgar_Latin
Written vernacular Chinese: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Written_vernacular_Chinese

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