June 3, 2026
Today I added two translations for to sneeze. One of them is hak8 chiu3, which is just the sound of a sneeze using Teochew sounds. I couldn't really find any appropriate Chinese characters for this, and when this happens I just store it as question marks in the database.
Previously, I was displaying these unknown characters as [?], but I found that kind of messy looking so I replaced them with a full-width question mark: ๏ผ. Chinese is displayed using only full-width characters so I'm trying to follow that standard on my sit as well. But something interesting that I learned is that the ๏ผ symbol is displayed differently in Traditional vs Simplified chinese! In traditional, it's centered, and in simplified, it's left aligned. At least, that's how Noto Sans did it.
And this made me realize that I never completely finished implementing the traditional and simplified site settings. In order for me to do that, I need to use two different fonts, and I need to go through all the characters I have in my database to see which ones have differing traditional and simplified representation with the same unicode point. And I'd need to inspect like 1000 rows in my database ๐ฑ
Not a project for today. But hopefully soon!
June 2, 2026
I find compound words in Chinese so interesting! Like the word for waffle is lou(7) teng1 gue2, which character-for-character translates to "stove window cake".
Recently, I learned that the word for sunny side up eggs is neung(7) gu1. It was pretty obvious to me that neung6 means eggs, but what is gu1? Apparently it means turtle. "Egg turtle". Because...a sunny side egg kind of looks like a turtle? I can see it.
Also, the character for turtle ้พ is kind of crazy looking to me! I think it's actually supposed to look like a sideways turtle, with its legs pointing to the left!
June 1, 2026
Here are the words I've added most recently:
- to cough
- stuffy nose
- to blow your nose
- earwax
- to steal
- to take off (clothes)
Yeah, some of this is from me asking my aunt about the words "nose" and "snot" some time last year, and that's a whole topic that maybe I'll talk more about in the future.
But with all that, I've officially added over 1,000 translations! ๐
May 30, 2026
In my May 5, 2026 update, I mentioned that I had added ka1 huang5, and that it was a WHOLE PROCESS. Well, here it is, as much as I can remember of it.
So I've got an old recording of a phone call I had with my aunt a few months ago, and I've been meaning to listen to it all to see what Teochew words it has in it. Most of the words are already in my database, but we were talking about different pieces of jewelry and a word came up that I didn't recognize
ka1 huang5...the bracelet that you put on the ankle
Well, ka1 is obviously "foot". But what is huang5?
huang5 means "round"
Hmmm, I'm aware of the word in5 for "round", but I wasn't familiar with huang5. I did a few searches in WhatTCSay. I searched "anklet", but nothing came up. I search "round" and, yup, I just see in5. I searched "huang" and there are SO many results that it's hard to search through them all.
I also searched "anklet" in the Gaginang discord and nothing came up there. But I knew that if I tried my other search terms that I would find too many results.
I decided to check mogher next, to look at all of the characters under "huang5" in their Teochew Pinyin Index. And there were...26 of them ๐ฑ But mogher has some English definitions under almost every entry so I click into every single one of them to see if any seem like a potential match. And none of them seem right.
So next I try the approach of using Google translate. When I translate "anklet" into Traditional Chinese, I get ่ ณ้. Looking that up on Wiktionary, it says it's a variant of ่ ณ้. And looking at that page, I think I'm looking at the wrong type of anklet because I also see the terms "leg iron" and "shackles". I want an ankle bracelet. So I go back to Google Translate and look at other options.
One of the other translations is ่ ณ้ฒ, and Wiktionary's page for that word has the definition "anklet; ankle bangle" which sounds more correct! One of the cool things about Wiktionary is that it shows synonyms in other dialects. The page for this word is pretty bare, and there is no mention of Teochew, but I do see a synonym in Hokkien: ่ทค็ฐ. I recognize that first character as ka1 ("foot"), so I go to the page for ็ฐ, and what do you know! It's pronounced huang5 in Teochew and the definitions are all about rings and round things. I found it!! ๐
Uh, so I realized I could have found this faster:
- I went back to mogher, and I search the character ็ฐ, and I realize that huang5 is listed as the pronunciation for the Gekion dialect (as well as others), but it's not the pronunciation in the "Teochew" dialect, which is the default in mogher. I gotta remember to search other dialects!
- I also went back to WhatTCSay, and I searched the same character, and I realized that there's an entry for "bracelet": ๆ็ฐ. This is just like anklet, but the first character is the word for "hand". If I had just searched "bracelet" initially, I would have found the character I was looking for immediately! Or I even could have looked through all 10 pages of results for "huang5"
Or! I could have asked someone, and I'm sure someone could have told me the answer. But I always like to do my own digging first.
May 29, 2026
So I keep notes of all the Teochew words I hear about in both a text document on my laptop, a note in my phone, and various handwritten notebooks. And each day I've been trying to add at least one of these words into this site!
Today I added choh4, which is not a word I really ever hear my family use, but I see it enough on the Gaginang discord and in Facebook. It generally means "some", and is used in front of other words. Like choh(8) nang5 is "some people", but it can also be used to say "those people", "these people", and even "everybody"? I still don't feel comfortable enough to use it myself, but I seem to get the idea when I hear others use it.
I'm more used to hearing lang(7) lo2. There was a recent discussion in the discord where people were comparing the two words, and it sounds like people use them differently, but I still don't really understand the nuances.
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