This post is a translation from my previous post in Japanese.
I sometimes converse with my wife in Hokkien in order to expose our kids to Taiwanese Hokkien. (They only speak Japanese, Mandarin and English, in this order of fluency.)
She asked me to bring something over in Hokkien, so I answered: "Ho."
To this, she responded: "Ho ti lai-soaN lah!"
It took me a while to figure out she was saying: "The tiger is deep in the mountains".
What the heck could this mean?
In no time, I figured out what this word play meant.
Let me explain.
As you may know, Taiwanese Hokkien is a mixture of the Quanzhou and Zhangzhou accents. In Taipei City, the traditional accent is closer to the Amoy accent, which belongs to the Quanzhou side.
In this accent, the pronunciation of "ho (good)" is rounded, as in "hoh".
However, the mainstream accent in Taiwanese media today is closer to the Kaohsiung accent (more toward the Zhangzhou side). In this accent, "ho" is centered, as if to say "her" non-rhotically.
So this word play is used by speakers of the latter accent to ridicule the former's pronunciation of "ho". (FYI, my wife is a speaker of the former. She probably heard someone say this to her parents, who have an even stronger Tong'an accent.)
There are some other jokes that utilize the differences in these two major accents in Taiwan, but some of them are quite vulgar, and not suitable for print.
