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What does “哩勒公蝦毀” mean? A Taiwanese guy said that to me after I had, accidently, mistyped two words in an idiom I used on him.
He also used an expression of surprise (I presume) which went like “蛤？！” (after I said he seemed like a guy whom a conversation would get easily boring with) What does that mean too?
哩勒公蝦毀
This sentence refers to the pronunciation of "What did you say?" in Min-Nan
蛤？！
This word equals to "Huh? Could you speak up?". Taiwanese use this word commonly on the Internet because it's the first word choice in Bopomofo input method of "ㄏㄚˊ"
This is a Taiwanese (Min-nan) utterance.
pronunciation: “哩(li) 勒(le) 公(gong) 蝦毀(siann-hue)?”
translation word by word: You are saying what-thing?
There is a hot Disney movie song FROZEN - Let It Go. Recently, we have a Taiwanese version of it
at time slot during 1:18~1:21
There is a similar sentence (only the subject is different. you --> they)
subtile:
"他們 (Yin) 到底 (dau-de) 在(le) 講(gong) 啥貨(siann-hue)?"
translation in English word by word:
"They on earth are saying what-thing?"
I cut that short segment here for easy reference
By the way, I have to point out that because of lack of standardization of written form for Taiwanese, there will be different ways for writing the same utterance. e.g.
哩(li) 勒(le) 公(gong) 蝦毀(siann-hue)?
v.s.
你(li) 在(le) 講(gong) 啥貨(siann-hue)?
The latter is better because those Chinese characters have real meaning to represent those sound.
The former one just use the homonyms, those characters are meaningless in this case, even Chinese native speakers cannot understand the former sentence.
So, frankly speaking, the topic sentence in this question is actually not a correct sentence or not a good sentence to represent a commonly used Taiwanese daily sentence!!
The meaning of "哩勒公蝦毀" (li lei gong xia hui) is "What are you talking about?". And "蛤？！" means "What?".
In one orthography of Taiwanese, the phrase "哩勒公蝦毀" could be written as "汝咧講啥貨" (ru lie jiang sha huo), which literally means "What things are you talking about?" Its Roman transcription would be "lí leh kóng siáⁿ-hòe" (in POJ style).
Since most Taiwanese people didn't learn the proper writing standards of Taiwanese at school, they just started using these characters arbitrarily, according to Mandarin homophones.
"蛤" is also just selected by the Taiwanese, based on Mandarin homophones. The pronunciation of this character is "hã" (or "hâⁿ" in POJ), of which "ã" means a nasal vowel. Moreover, there is no consensus on the character usage of this term.
The phrase means "What did you say?"
It means "What the hell are you talking about?"
Sometimes will use"哩勒公蝦小" It will more impolite. Because 蝦小 can means WTF
