An indispensable Cantonese expression is 你食咗飯未呀？ sik6 zo2 faan6 mei6 aa3? “Have you eaten yet?” It’s a common greeting, with a very similar equivalent in Taishanese. (See the lesson 12 dialogue.)
The corresponding phrase in Taishanese is almost exactly the same, 你食嗲飯未呀 你吃嗲飯未呀？ Ni hiak-e fàn mì a? Some of the tones are (predictably) different. You should also notice that the Cantonese word 咗 zo6 is replaced with the Taishanese word 嗲 e. In my opinion, it sounds very schwa-like (but that’s just my opinion). What’s the meaning of 咗/嗲?—I’m still trying to figure that one out.
Another way to write this particle is with the character 誒, which Deng Jun uses in the Kaiping Dictionary. I’ve never really thought about writing this word before, or if it has the same meaning in Taishanese as the word 咗 in Cantonese.
So, I’m just curious for my occasional blog readers—how do you write this word in Chinese? How would you transcribe it in English? Does it have the same meaning as 咗 in Cantonese?
In Cantonese 咗 implies the past tense. You'd answer the question 食咗 if you had already eaten.
ReplyDeleteWe(台城 area) rarely use 咗. The most common way to indicate completed action is 啊啰, i.e. 吃啊饭未啊? 吃啊啰. Incidentally, we almost exclusively use 吃 instead of 食.
ReplyDeleteThe way I look at it, all these characters 嗲,誒,啊 etc. are to mimic the pronunciation 'eh' or 'ah' which is to indicate a completed action in Taishanese.
ReplyDeleteI’m sorry I haven’t responded sooner—thank you so much for your comments, Stephen! Indeed, I also say 吃 instead of 食, but in this case I was lazy with copy/paste and didn’t check what I’d written.
ReplyDeleteactually 咗 is not really past tense, it's perfective aspect (i.e. completed action, even in the future). E.g. you can say 我食咗先去 which if you translate into English might be "I'll go after I eat (in the future)".
ReplyDeleteThanks, Dominic! I wonder if you can say 我吃嗲先去 in Toisan…
ReplyDelete咗 can also be used as a command sometimes. If you are asking someone to hurry up and finish what's on their plate, you can say 食咗啦 and it will be understand that you are asking them to finish their food. In that sense it is also asking them to complete the action.
ReplyDeleteBut I agree it helps make translations faster if you can generally think of it as a "-ed" suffix.