Hokkien: How Do You Say "Have You Eaten?"

Hello everyone, welcome to "How do you say?" on LearnDialect.sg. My name is Eugene and in less than 5 minutes, you'll learn how to greet people in Hawking in 3 different ways. Let's start. Listen to these phrases. Jjapaaboi. Jjapaaboi. Jjapaaboi. Jjapaaboi. Jjapaaboi. Jjapaaboi. Jjapaaboi. Jjapaaboi. Jjapaaboi. Do they sound similar to you? Jjapaaboi means have you eaten your fill yet. Jjapaaboi means have you eaten yet. The third phrase is jjahorwei and it has a dual meaning. It means have you eaten yet, which is similar to jjapaaboi, or you can use it to ask if someone is done with their meal. So for example, at a hawker centre if you are eyeing the seat of someone who looks as though he has finished eating, you can hit up to him and ask jjahorwei. You may now be wondering why greetings among Hawking or Chinese people revolve around food. Well, one story is that in the olden days, there is a lack of food and people did not always have enough to eat. As such, asking about whether somebody has had a meal yet is actually quite a good way to show that you care about their well-being. Now there is actually a growing culture of taboo where in current days, the second and third phrase, namely jjahorwei and jjahorwei are preferred over the first phrase, jjapaaboi. Now this is because the first phrase, jjapaaboi, seems to imply that the subject of your greeting is not effluent enough to eat his or her fill and we don't really want that, do we? Alright, let's do the recap now. The three phrases are jjapaaboi, jjapaaboi and jjahorwei. I hope all our listeners today learned something and in our next post, you will learn two more common greeting phrases to greet your family, friends and co-workers. Thank you for listening in to HowDoYouSay on LearnDialect.sg.