Final Pseudo-Fricative h in Penang Hokkien

Due to its long interaction with surrounding languages, particularly Malay and English, Penang Hokkien picked up specific traits that it exhibits today. One of these is the final pseudo-fricative consonant h, in words such as lah4, sam3pah4, sa3lah3 and so on.

The nature of the final h in Penang Hokkien is that of a pseudo fricative, that is, it may have no fricative articulation, and the neighbouring vowel influences the articulation of the syllable. This is the case with English, in words such as "oh" and "ah", where it is the vowels that are articulated.

Just as Pinyin was devised in the absence of initial voiced consonants, so too the Church romanisation system, or Peh-oe-ji, for Hokkien was devised in the absence of the final fricative. As such, Peh-oe-ji uses the h to represent the glottal stop /ʔ/, differentiating it from the velar stop /k/.

In my first phase of developing a system of romanisation for Penang Hokkien, I adopted the use of the final h for /ʔ/ and k for /k/, based on Peh-oe-ji. That means, I spell words like eight as peh3 and hundred as pah3. However I observed that that system of romanisation collides with local spelling convention. Locals instinctively spell words ending with the /ʔ/ sound using k rather than h. They spell eight as peik3 and hundred as pak3. Locals usually spell meat as bak3, which disagrees with the Peh-oe-ji system, bah3. This is because the final h has long been used locally to represent the final fricative. The Malay word, "bah" (meaning "overflow"), has a fricative ending rather than a plosive one.

Both the glottal stop and velar stop of Hokkien can be grouped as plosive consonants. These are produced by blocking the vocal tract so that airflow ceases. Fricative consonants, in comparison, allow air to continue flowing through. In other words, they are as different as "stop" is to "go".

Having observed local spelling convention, I undertook a step to refine my spelling system to be more aligned to local convention. For that, I drop the use of the final h for the glottal stop, replacing it with k. To accommodate that, some words with a velar stop ending have to be spelled with rk, such as bark1 (ink) and park1 (to tie). This frees the h for use as a final consonant.

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