Taiwanese and the Roman Alphabet

Lately, my exploration of the Hokkien language of Chinese, in particular as it is spoken in Taiwan, continues. The amount of educational resources for Taiwanese Hokkien is far less than Mandarin since it is more of a “street language” than an official language, but I have been able to find some excellent material thanks to my Taiwanese-speaking friend.

One of the first challenges of learning Taiwanese Hokkien is how to read it. Taiwanese Chinese uses traditional Chinese characters compared to mainland China which uses a simplified character set.¹ So the word for “doctor” in mainland, simplified Chinese is 医生, while in Taiwan it’s 醫生.

But even the Romanized form of Taiwanese, meaning Taiwanese expressed using the Roman alphabet, is complicated and has some history.

The original Romanization system and still popular today is Pe̍h-ōe-jī (白話字, “pay-way-jee”) which is also “church Romanization” because it was developed by Christian missionaries in the 19th century. Having studied Vietnamese in college for two years, another writing system that was originally developed by Western missionaries, Peh-oe-ji and Vietnamese script look pretty similar to me. You can see how the missionaries were thinking at the time, and how their own language influenced their Romanization efforts.

Anyhow, Peh-oe-ji is still widely used, and many text books still use it. However, it also shows its age, and can be hard for modern 21st century English speakers to learn. Plus, has some obvious cultural baggage, so the government of Taiwan has tried to develop a different Romanization system.

The first effort, Taiwanese Language Phonetic Alphabet (TLPA) tried to modernize the system and replace some of the complicated diacritics and spellings to something easier. This made TLPA far easier to type, but it never quite caught on. People were so used to Peh-oe-ji that they stuck with it.

A second effort, called Tâi-lô (臺羅, “dye-luh”) represents a compromise between the two: streamlined like TLPA, but retains some older spellings like Peh-oe-ji.

For example, let’s look at the character 平 meaning “flat”. In Peh-oe-ji, it’s written as pêⁿ while in Tai-lo it’s pênn. The first one, with the tiny “n” superscript, means that it’s a nasal vowel sound. So, it sounds like English word “buh”, but more nasally. In the Tai-lo system, it’s expressed with a double-n.

Another example is 錢 meaning “money”. In Peh-oe-ji, it’s written as chîⁿ while in Tai-lo it’s written as tsînn. The second one feels more “what you see is what you get” to me, even if the nasal ending takes some getting used to.

Plus, there are eight different tones used in Taiwanese Hokkien compared to four in Mandarin (or five in Vietnamese). Thus, you can get different words from just saying “i” differently:

• 醫 i
• 與 í
• 衣 ì
• 台 î
• 易 ī

To help illustrate this more, let’s compare the first 10 numbers in Taiwanese and how they’re romanized in one system or another. If you want to hear how they are pronounced, check out this podcast episode. I also included Mandarin Chinese and Japanese for fun comparison.

Number	Chinese	Peh-oe-ji	Tai-lo	Mandarin	Japanese
1	一	chi̍t	tsi̍t	yī	ichi
2	二	nn̄g	nn̄g	èr	ni
3	三	san	sann	sān	san
4	四	sì	sì	sì	shi
5	五	gō’	gōo	wǔ	go
6	六	la̍k	la̍k	liù	roku
7	七	cchit	tshit	qī	shichi
8	八	peh	peh	bā	hachi
9	九	káu	káu	jiǔ	kyu
10	十	cha̍p	tsa̍p	shí	ju

Interestingly, the podcast I listen to uses Tai-lo, but the textbook I bought uses Peh-oe-ji, so there really is no clear-cut consensus for Romanizing Taiwanese.

What’s really interesting is how native Taiwan people manage all this. Taiwanese people natively use Chinese characters of course, but they juggle the Mandarin reads of those characters with other dialects (Hokkien, Hakka, etc). To help with this, Taiwan developed its own syllabary system called Bopomofo to help young students learn how to pronounce Chinese characters. Additionally, Romanized words are often used alongside this in a system called Hàn-lô (漢羅, lit. “Chinese-Roman”). My textbook explains that it’s not unusual to see a sentence like so:

聽–leh! 我 kā 你 ê 錢 khǹg tī hia.

Listen! I put the money over there.

Page 29, “Taiwense Grammar” by Phillip T. Lin

According to the book this is often used in situations where certain Chinese characters are used by Taiwanese (not Mandarin) and might be a hassle to look up or type.

Anyhow that’s a brief look at Taiwanese and how people have tried to express Taiwanese language using the Roman Alphabet. Thanks for reading!

P.S. featured photo for this post is the skyline of Taipei, capital of Taiwan. Photo by 毛貓大少爺, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

P.P.S. Today will also be a double-post. Hope you enjoy!

¹ Modern Japanese kanji is somewhere in the middle: some characters are simplified, some not. I am unclear why it developed this way.