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[peemonkey]

I've just joined this community fairly recently, and through it I've learned so much already.. we're so fortunate to have such a great resource at our fingertips

Comments

[languagesblog]

I think it's Cantonese as the Mandarin version is gong xi fa cai. I don't know about the tones for the Cantonese version though.

[peemonkey]

Thanks for your help. :)

[muckefuck]

"Gung hei fat choy" (恭喜發財)is Cantonese. Literally, it's something like "I wish you happiness (喜) and wealth (財)!"

I'm not sure what the "usual pronunciation guides" are. The Yale romanisation is "Gung1 hei2 faat3 choi4". A rough IPA would be [kʊŋ53 hei35 fɑ:t33 tsʰɔ:i21]. (The numbers represent tone levels, "1" being the lowest and "5" the highest. So if "3" is the middle of your range, then "2" is a bit below that and "1" is a bit lower still. If both numbers are the same, the tone is steady, but if they are different, it shifts from one tone level to another during the course of the vowel.)

The Mandarin pronunciation would be very different indeed--"Gong1 xi3 fa1 cai2" in Pinyin romanisation. But I don't really hear Mandarin speakers use this phrase; they seem much more likely to say "Xin1 nian2 kuai4le4!" (新年快樂) which is more literally "May your new (新) year (年) be happy (快樂)!"

[peemonkey]

Wonderful, thank you! This is very helpful. However, I can't see the Chinese characters in your reply, and I checked the user info and the memories for the community and couldn't see how to activate them. Do you happen to know?

[muckefuck]

It all depends what kind of machine you're running with what OS. Microsoft offers a free East Asian language support download on its website; I'm not sure what the details are for MacOS. You may already have the fonts you need but simply don't have the right browser support turned on. When you check the appropriate FAQs, it will help you to know that the encoding I use is Big5 (Traditional Chinese).

If all else fails, I can spell out how to find the characters on this extremely useful site, which displays them as images so they're viewable without any mucking about.

[taschenrechner]

People down here in Shenzhen certainly use this when speaking Mandarin. Even non-Cantonese speakers. It's becoming one of those things from Cantonese that's creeping into Mandarin, I guess.

[languagesblog]

People here in Taiwan have said gong xi fa cai to me as much as xin nian kuai le so I'm guessing it isn't quite out of vogue just yet.

[muckefuck]

Any idea which they would use in Hoklo? Or would they prefer a different phrasing altogether?

[languagesblog]

No idea. I only focus on the Mandarin dialect, to be honest. I wouldn't know Hoklo if it slapped me across the face!

[tisoi]

Look in journal. One of my recent public entries have it in Hokkien.

[nancyy]

My parents' friends sometimes just say "gong xi" (恭喜) in Mandarin for short. Since this term also means "congratulations", I don't like it as much (what am I being congratulated for?), especially when it's the first (and only) thing they've got to say when I pick up the phone at 6 o'clock in the morning.