Written Hokkien
Encyclopedia
Hokkien
, a Min Nan
variety of Chinese
spoken in Southeastern China, Taiwan and Southeast Asia, does not have a standardized writing system, in comparison with the well-developed written forms of Cantonese
and Mandarin
. Since there is no official standardizing body for Hokkien, there are a wide variety of different methods of writing in Vernacular Hokkien. Nevertheless, vernacular works written in the Hokkien dialect are still commonly seen in literature, film, performing arts and music.
, which has grammar and vocabulary based on Old Chinese
used in ancient times. Whilst the written form of Chinese remained static, the spoken varieties of Chinese diverged further away. In the early 20th century, reformers in China saw the need for language reform and championed the development of a writing system that allowed Chinese people to write the language the same way they speak, and eventually the vernacular language movement took hold, leading to the development of the standardized written language known as Vernacular Chinese
. Because Mandarin Chinese had the largest number of speakers amongst all varieties of Chinese, it was chosen as the basis for the vernacular standard.
However, there are various differences between the spoken Chinese varieties, such as Mandarin, Cantonese and Hokkien, such as variations in vocabulary and grammatical particles, meaning that Vernacular Chinese is less suited for writing texts spoken in Hokkien. Various expressions in Hokkien, as with other Chinese varieties, do not have associated Chinese character
s in Vernacular Chinese, meaning that some words originally could not be written. In the case of Cantonese, a vernacular system specifically for writing Cantonese was developed in Hong Kong
, then a British colony. On the other hand, since Hokkien was never standardized, different people began to use various separate methods to solve the issue of Hokkien-specific words, where such words would eventually be written using either a Latin
-based script, phonetically using bopomofo
, or through the use of a Chinese character chosen phonetically with no relation to the original word via meaning.
Varieties of Hokkien are spoken in Fujian Province in mainland China
, Taiwan
, Chinese communities in Malaysia, Singapore
, and other Chinese expatriate communities. Initially there was no effort by the government of the Republic of China
on Taiwan
, nor other governments, to create a standardized Hokkien vernacular. During the initial stages of Kuomintang
rule in Taiwan, the official Kuomintang language policy was to promote the use of Mandarin Chinese in everyday speech, and to discourage the use of other dialects such as Hokkien and Hakka; this was done in an attempt to promote national linguistic unity, and to promulgate a Chinese identity over that of a Taiwanese one for political reasons. Following the Taiwan localization movement, education and everyday usage of spoken and written Hokkien by local Taiwanese became more widely used. Nevertheless, there is still ongoing debate over which writing system should be used to write Taiwanese Hokkien, and there is no definite standard between the various rival systems currently used to write Hokkien. Today usage of languages remains a politicized issue in Taiwan. In Singapore, in an effort to promote Mandarin as a lingua franca
amongst ethnic Chinese through the Speak Mandarin Campaign
, usage of other varieties such as Hokkien is discouraged.
Today, whilst Taiwanese Hokkien speakers speak in their variety of Hokkien, they would officially write in Vernacular Chinese for formal documents, and only use vernacular Hokkien writings during informal occasions. In Taiwan, vernacular Chinese is used for academic writings, newspaper articles and television news report headlines, whilst Hokkien writings are used in novels, songs lyrics, film subtitles, theatrical and opera scripts, and in informal communication.
, meaning that phrases specific to Hokkien can be written without having to deal with the issue of non-existent Chinese characters. Currently usage of Pe̍h-ōe-jī is restricted to some Taiwanese Christians, non-native learners of Hokkien, and native-speaker enthusiasts in Taiwan. POJ remains the Taiwanese orthography with "with the richest inventory of written work, including dictionaries, textbooks, literature [...] and other publications in many areas".
Pe̍h-ōe-jī can also be used along with Chinese characters in a mixed orthography called Hàn-lô, where words specific to Hokkien are written in Pe̍h-ōe-jī, and words with associated characters written in Han Characters.
s, along with Chinese characters, and can also be used to gloss
Chinese characters with their Hokkien readings.
, a Kana
-based system was introduced to gloss Hokkien writing in Chinese characters, as well writing as other languages of Taiwan.
In many cases, when writing Hokkien using Chinese characters phonetically, the use of characters is entirely unrelated to the original meaning of the phrase. While most Hokkien morphemes have standard designated character, they are not always etymological or phono-semantic. Similar-sounding, similar-meaning or rare characters are commonly borrowed or substituted to represent a particular morpheme. In addition, there may be many different ways to write a specific Hokkien phrase using Chinese characters. Wanhua District in Taipei
is commonly written as 萬華 in Chinese (literally "ten thousand flowers"), however the original meaning of the location name, pronounced bɑ́ng-kah in Taiwanese Hokkien (old character form 艋舺), is a rendering of a non-Chinese indigenous
name for "boat". Along with location names, common words also have orthography problems due to non-standardization; chhit-thô or thit-thô (lit. "play (around)") is commonly written as , however both characters do not have anything to do with the act of "playing" (the characters mean "near" and "cunning, deceitful"). Within Robert Cheng's publication of a Han character edition of the Taiwanese Hokkien novella Kho-ai e siu-jin (lit. "Beloved Enemy") by Lai Jinsheng, the word lo˙-moa, meaning "gangster" and cognate with Vernacular Chinese liúmáng (流氓), is transcribed as 鱸鰻; these two phonetically-used characters literally translate to "perch
-eel
".
Additional examples include the word for "beautiful" (美 bí is the literary form), which has the vernacular morpheme suí represented by characters such as 媠 (an obsolete character), 婎 (a vernacular reading of this character) and even 水 (transliteration of the sound suí), and "tall" (高 ko is the literary form), whose morpheme kuân is 懸. Common grammatical particles are not exempt; the negation particle m̄ (not) is variously represented by 毋, 呣 or 唔, among others. In other cases, characters are invented to represent a particular morpheme (a common example is the non-standard character 亻因 i, which represents the personal pronoun "you"). In addition, some characters have multiple and unrelated pronunciations, adapted to represent Hokkien words, such as 肉 for bah ("meat"), although it also has distinct colloquial and literary readings as well (hi̍k and jio̍k, lio̍k respectively). In other cases, a character is borrowed to represent a morpheme with the same meaning, but a different pronunciation; the morpheme kē ("low", as in kē-thn̂g 低糖 'low sugar') has been assigned the character 低, whose phonetic reading is te, by the Republic of China's Ministry of Education. Another case is the word 'to eat,' chia̍h, which is often transcribed in Taiwanese newspapers and media as 呷 (a Mandarin transliteration, xiā, to approximate the Hokkien term), even though its recommended character in dictionaries is 食.
Victor H. Mair
makes an estimate that if "pure, unadultuerated spoken vernacular Taiwanese" were written exclusively in Chinese characters, with minimal use of Mandarin phrases, over 25% of morphemes would have no character, about 25% would have arbitrarily selected (yet more or less conventionally accepted) characters that are homophones or near-homophones, 10% would be written using characters exclusive to Hokkien, and 40% would be written with characters that have the correct sound and meaning. However, in more colloquial styles of Taiwanese Hokkien, the proportion of morphemes written with conventionally accepted characters would drop even lower than 40%.
Moreover, unlike Cantonese, Hokkien does not have a universally accepted standardized character set. Thus, there is some variation in the characters used to express certain words and characters are can be ambiguous in meaning. In 2007, the Ministry of Education
of the Republic of China
formulated and released a standard character set to overcome these difficulties. These standard Chinese characters for writing Taiwanese Hokkien are now taught in schools in Taiwan.
When writing Hokkien in Chinese characters, some writers create 'new' characters when they consider it impossible to use existing ones; this corresponds to similar practices in character usage in Cantonese
, Vietnamese chữ nôm, Korean hanja
and Japanese kanji
. These are usually not encoded in Unicode
(or the corresponding ISO/IEC 10646: Universal Character Set
), thus creating problems in computer processing.
based on Mandarin, and Taiwanese Hokkien written in Chinese characters:
In addition, Hokkien literature can consist of phrases that are vernacular to Hokkien, as well as literary terms originating from Classical Chinese
.
Hokkien
Hokkien is a Hokkien word corresponding to Standard Chinese "Fujian". It may refer to:* Hokkien dialect, a dialect of Min Nan Chinese spoken in Southern Fujian , Taiwan, South-east Asia, and elsewhere....
, a Min Nan
Min Nan
The Southern Min languages, or Min Nan , are a family of Chinese languages spoken in southern Fujian, eastern Guangdong, Hainan, Taiwan, and southern Zhejiang provinces of China, and by descendants of emigrants from these areas in diaspora....
variety of Chinese
Varieties of Chinese
Chinese comprises many regional language varieties sometimes grouped together as the Chinese dialects, the primary ones being Mandarin, Wu, Cantonese, and Min. These are not mutually intelligible, and even many of the regional varieties are themselves composed of a number of...
spoken in Southeastern China, Taiwan and Southeast Asia, does not have a standardized writing system, in comparison with the well-developed written forms of Cantonese
Written Cantonese
Cantonese has the most well-developed written form of all Chinese varieties apart from the standard varieties of Mandarin and Classical Chinese. Standard written Chinese is based on Mandarin, but when spoken word for word as Cantonese, it sounds unnatural because its expressions are ungrammatical...
and Mandarin
Vernacular Chinese
Written Vernacular Chinese refers to forms of written Chinese based on the vernacular language, in contrast to Classical Chinese, the written standard used from the Spring and Autumn Period to the early twentieth century...
. Since there is no official standardizing body for Hokkien, there are a wide variety of different methods of writing in Vernacular Hokkien. Nevertheless, vernacular works written in the Hokkien dialect are still commonly seen in literature, film, performing arts and music.
History
Prior to the modern era, the main written language of China was Classical ChineseClassical Chinese
Classical Chinese or Literary Chinese is a traditional style of written Chinese based on the grammar and vocabulary of ancient Chinese, making it different from any modern spoken form of Chinese...
, which has grammar and vocabulary based on Old Chinese
Old Chinese
The earliest known written records of the Chinese language were found at a site near modern Anyang identified as Yin, the last capital of the Shang dynasty, and date from about 1200 BC....
used in ancient times. Whilst the written form of Chinese remained static, the spoken varieties of Chinese diverged further away. In the early 20th century, reformers in China saw the need for language reform and championed the development of a writing system that allowed Chinese people to write the language the same way they speak, and eventually the vernacular language movement took hold, leading to the development of the standardized written language known as Vernacular Chinese
Vernacular Chinese
Written Vernacular Chinese refers to forms of written Chinese based on the vernacular language, in contrast to Classical Chinese, the written standard used from the Spring and Autumn Period to the early twentieth century...
. Because Mandarin Chinese had the largest number of speakers amongst all varieties of Chinese, it was chosen as the basis for the vernacular standard.
However, there are various differences between the spoken Chinese varieties, such as Mandarin, Cantonese and Hokkien, such as variations in vocabulary and grammatical particles, meaning that Vernacular Chinese is less suited for writing texts spoken in Hokkien. Various expressions in Hokkien, as with other Chinese varieties, do not have associated Chinese character
Chinese character
Chinese characters are logograms used in the writing of Chinese and Japanese , less frequently Korean , formerly Vietnamese , or other languages...
s in Vernacular Chinese, meaning that some words originally could not be written. In the case of Cantonese, a vernacular system specifically for writing Cantonese was developed in Hong Kong
Hong Kong
Hong Kong is one of two Special Administrative Regions of the People's Republic of China , the other being Macau. A city-state situated on China's south coast and enclosed by the Pearl River Delta and South China Sea, it is renowned for its expansive skyline and deep natural harbour...
, then a British colony. On the other hand, since Hokkien was never standardized, different people began to use various separate methods to solve the issue of Hokkien-specific words, where such words would eventually be written using either a Latin
Latin alphabet
The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most recognized alphabet used in the world today. It evolved from a western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumaean alphabet, which was adopted and modified by the Etruscans who ruled early Rome...
-based script, phonetically using bopomofo
Bopomofo
Zhuyin fuhao , often abbreviated as zhuyin and colloquially called bopomofo, was introduced in the 1910s as the first official phonetic system for transcribing Chinese, especially Mandarin....
, or through the use of a Chinese character chosen phonetically with no relation to the original word via meaning.
Varieties of Hokkien are spoken in Fujian Province in mainland China
Mainland China
Mainland China, the Chinese mainland or simply the mainland, is a geopolitical term that refers to the area under the jurisdiction of the People's Republic of China . According to the Taipei-based Mainland Affairs Council, the term excludes the PRC Special Administrative Regions of Hong Kong and...
, Taiwan
Taiwan
Taiwan , also known, especially in the past, as Formosa , is the largest island of the same-named island group of East Asia in the western Pacific Ocean and located off the southeastern coast of mainland China. The island forms over 99% of the current territory of the Republic of China following...
, Chinese communities in Malaysia, Singapore
Singapore
Singapore , officially the Republic of Singapore, is a Southeast Asian city-state off the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, north of the equator. An island country made up of 63 islands, it is separated from Malaysia by the Straits of Johor to its north and from Indonesia's Riau Islands by the...
, and other Chinese expatriate communities. Initially there was no effort by the government of the Republic of China
Republic of China
The Republic of China , commonly known as Taiwan , is a unitary sovereign state located in East Asia. Originally based in mainland China, the Republic of China currently governs the island of Taiwan , which forms over 99% of its current territory, as well as Penghu, Kinmen, Matsu and other minor...
on Taiwan
Taiwan
Taiwan , also known, especially in the past, as Formosa , is the largest island of the same-named island group of East Asia in the western Pacific Ocean and located off the southeastern coast of mainland China. The island forms over 99% of the current territory of the Republic of China following...
, nor other governments, to create a standardized Hokkien vernacular. During the initial stages of Kuomintang
Kuomintang
The Kuomintang of China , sometimes romanized as Guomindang via the Pinyin transcription system or GMD for short, and translated as the Chinese Nationalist Party is a founding and ruling political party of the Republic of China . Its guiding ideology is the Three Principles of the People, espoused...
rule in Taiwan, the official Kuomintang language policy was to promote the use of Mandarin Chinese in everyday speech, and to discourage the use of other dialects such as Hokkien and Hakka; this was done in an attempt to promote national linguistic unity, and to promulgate a Chinese identity over that of a Taiwanese one for political reasons. Following the Taiwan localization movement, education and everyday usage of spoken and written Hokkien by local Taiwanese became more widely used. Nevertheless, there is still ongoing debate over which writing system should be used to write Taiwanese Hokkien, and there is no definite standard between the various rival systems currently used to write Hokkien. Today usage of languages remains a politicized issue in Taiwan. In Singapore, in an effort to promote Mandarin as a lingua franca
Lingua franca
A lingua franca is a language systematically used to make communication possible between people not sharing a mother tongue, in particular when it is a third language, distinct from both mother tongues.-Characteristics:"Lingua franca" is a functionally defined term, independent of the linguistic...
amongst ethnic Chinese through the Speak Mandarin Campaign
Speak Mandarin Campaign
The Speak Mandarin Campaign is an initiative by the government of Singapore to encourage the Singaporean Chinese population to speak Mandarin, one of the four official languages of Singapore...
, usage of other varieties such as Hokkien is discouraged.
Today, whilst Taiwanese Hokkien speakers speak in their variety of Hokkien, they would officially write in Vernacular Chinese for formal documents, and only use vernacular Hokkien writings during informal occasions. In Taiwan, vernacular Chinese is used for academic writings, newspaper articles and television news report headlines, whilst Hokkien writings are used in novels, songs lyrics, film subtitles, theatrical and opera scripts, and in informal communication.
Pe̍h-ōe-jī
Pe̍h-ōe-jī is a romanized orthography developed by Western missionaries working in Southeast Asia in the 19th century to write Hokkien. Pe̍h-ōe-jī allows Hokkien to be written phonetically using the Latin alphabetLatin alphabet
The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most recognized alphabet used in the world today. It evolved from a western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumaean alphabet, which was adopted and modified by the Etruscans who ruled early Rome...
, meaning that phrases specific to Hokkien can be written without having to deal with the issue of non-existent Chinese characters. Currently usage of Pe̍h-ōe-jī is restricted to some Taiwanese Christians, non-native learners of Hokkien, and native-speaker enthusiasts in Taiwan. POJ remains the Taiwanese orthography with "with the richest inventory of written work, including dictionaries, textbooks, literature [...] and other publications in many areas".
Pe̍h-ōe-jī can also be used along with Chinese characters in a mixed orthography called Hàn-lô, where words specific to Hokkien are written in Pe̍h-ōe-jī, and words with associated characters written in Han Characters.
- Sample mixed orthography text: 翻 tńg 工，我 koh hap i tī Hotel ê 餐廳食西式 ê chái 起，我講 beh tò 去稅厝 ê 所在，i beh 送我去，我 kā 拒絕，mā 無 beh hō͘ i 知我 ê 地址、電話番，講若有緣就會 koh 再相會。I 講人海茫茫，我若無 tī hit 間跳舞、唱歌，i beh 去 toh 位 chhōe--我？「就是 án-ni m̄-chiah 講是緣」，我嘴是 án-ni 應，心肝內知影 kap i 自細漢到這時 ê 牽連、綿纏無 hiah 簡單就煞。
Bopomofo
Bopomofo is another orthography used in Taiwanese Hokkien writings. Bopomofo is commonly used in Taiwanese literature to represent Hokkien-specific grammatical particleGrammatical particle
In grammar, a particle is a function word that does not belong to any of the inflected grammatical word classes . It is a catch-all term for a heterogeneous set of words and terms that lack a precise lexical definition...
s, along with Chinese characters, and can also be used to gloss
Ruby character
are small, annotative glosses that can be placed above or to the right of a Chinese character when writing languages with logographic characters such as Chinese or Japanese to show the pronunciation...
Chinese characters with their Hokkien readings.
- Sample text: 我像離水ㄟ魚 (I am like the fish that has left the water)
Taiwanese kana
During the period of Taiwan under Japanese ruleTaiwan under Japanese rule
Between 1895 and 1945, Taiwan was a dependency of the Empire of Japan. The expansion into Taiwan was a part of Imperial Japan's general policy of southward expansion during the late 19th century....
, a Kana
Kana
Kana are the syllabic Japanese scripts, as opposed to the logographic Chinese characters known in Japan as kanji and the Roman alphabet known as rōmaji...
-based system was introduced to gloss Hokkien writing in Chinese characters, as well writing as other languages of Taiwan.
Chinese characters
Writing Hokkien using Chinese characters is a common method of writing in Taiwanese literature. However, there are various problems relating to the use of Chinese characters to write vernacular Hokkien, and in many cases Chinese characters are used alongside other scripts, such as bopomofo or Pe̍h-ōe-jī. The problem with using only Chinese characters to write Min Nan is that there are many morphemes (estimated to be around 15 percent of running text) which are not definitively associated with a particular character. Various strategies have been developed to deal with the issue, including creating new characters, allocating Mandarin characters with similar meanings (but dissimilar etymology) to represent the missing characters, or using romanization for the "missing 15%".In many cases, when writing Hokkien using Chinese characters phonetically, the use of characters is entirely unrelated to the original meaning of the phrase. While most Hokkien morphemes have standard designated character, they are not always etymological or phono-semantic. Similar-sounding, similar-meaning or rare characters are commonly borrowed or substituted to represent a particular morpheme. In addition, there may be many different ways to write a specific Hokkien phrase using Chinese characters. Wanhua District in Taipei
Taipei
Taipei City is the capital of the Republic of China and the central city of the largest metropolitan area of Taiwan. Situated at the northern tip of the island, Taipei is located on the Tamsui River, and is about 25 km southwest of Keelung, its port on the Pacific Ocean...
is commonly written as 萬華 in Chinese (literally "ten thousand flowers"), however the original meaning of the location name, pronounced bɑ́ng-kah in Taiwanese Hokkien (old character form 艋舺), is a rendering of a non-Chinese indigenous
Taiwanese aborigines
Taiwanese aborigines is the term commonly applied in reference to the indigenous peoples of Taiwan. Although Taiwanese indigenous groups hold a variety of creation myths, recent research suggests their ancestors may have been living on the islands for approximately 8,000 years before major Han...
name for "boat". Along with location names, common words also have orthography problems due to non-standardization; chhit-thô or thit-thô (lit. "play (around)") is commonly written as , however both characters do not have anything to do with the act of "playing" (the characters mean "near" and "cunning, deceitful"). Within Robert Cheng's publication of a Han character edition of the Taiwanese Hokkien novella Kho-ai e siu-jin (lit. "Beloved Enemy") by Lai Jinsheng, the word lo˙-moa, meaning "gangster" and cognate with Vernacular Chinese liúmáng (流氓), is transcribed as 鱸鰻; these two phonetically-used characters literally translate to "perch
Perch
Perch is a common name for fish of the genus Perca, freshwater gamefish belonging to the family Percidae. The perch, of which there are three species in different geographical areas, lend their name to a large order of vertebrates: the Perciformes, from the Greek perke meaning spotted, and the...
-eel
Eel
Eels are an order of fish, which consists of four suborders, 20 families, 111 genera and approximately 800 species. Most eels are predators...
".
Additional examples include the word for "beautiful" (美 bí is the literary form), which has the vernacular morpheme suí represented by characters such as 媠 (an obsolete character), 婎 (a vernacular reading of this character) and even 水 (transliteration of the sound suí), and "tall" (高 ko is the literary form), whose morpheme kuân is 懸. Common grammatical particles are not exempt; the negation particle m̄ (not) is variously represented by 毋, 呣 or 唔, among others. In other cases, characters are invented to represent a particular morpheme (a common example is the non-standard character 亻因 i, which represents the personal pronoun "you"). In addition, some characters have multiple and unrelated pronunciations, adapted to represent Hokkien words, such as 肉 for bah ("meat"), although it also has distinct colloquial and literary readings as well (hi̍k and jio̍k, lio̍k respectively). In other cases, a character is borrowed to represent a morpheme with the same meaning, but a different pronunciation; the morpheme kē ("low", as in kē-thn̂g 低糖 'low sugar') has been assigned the character 低, whose phonetic reading is te, by the Republic of China's Ministry of Education. Another case is the word 'to eat,' chia̍h, which is often transcribed in Taiwanese newspapers and media as 呷 (a Mandarin transliteration, xiā, to approximate the Hokkien term), even though its recommended character in dictionaries is 食.
Victor H. Mair
Victor H. Mair
Victor Henry Mair is a Philologist specializing in Sinitic and Indo-European languages, and holds the position of Professor of Chinese Language and Literature in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, United States...
makes an estimate that if "pure, unadultuerated spoken vernacular Taiwanese" were written exclusively in Chinese characters, with minimal use of Mandarin phrases, over 25% of morphemes would have no character, about 25% would have arbitrarily selected (yet more or less conventionally accepted) characters that are homophones or near-homophones, 10% would be written using characters exclusive to Hokkien, and 40% would be written with characters that have the correct sound and meaning. However, in more colloquial styles of Taiwanese Hokkien, the proportion of morphemes written with conventionally accepted characters would drop even lower than 40%.
Moreover, unlike Cantonese, Hokkien does not have a universally accepted standardized character set. Thus, there is some variation in the characters used to express certain words and characters are can be ambiguous in meaning. In 2007, the Ministry of Education
Ministry of Education (Republic of China)
The Ministry of Education of the Republic of China is responsible for incorporating educational policies and managing public schools throughout the Free Area of the Republic of China. The ministry is a cabinet level governmental body of the Executive Yuan...
of the Republic of China
Republic of China
The Republic of China , commonly known as Taiwan , is a unitary sovereign state located in East Asia. Originally based in mainland China, the Republic of China currently governs the island of Taiwan , which forms over 99% of its current territory, as well as Penghu, Kinmen, Matsu and other minor...
formulated and released a standard character set to overcome these difficulties. These standard Chinese characters for writing Taiwanese Hokkien are now taught in schools in Taiwan.
When writing Hokkien in Chinese characters, some writers create 'new' characters when they consider it impossible to use existing ones; this corresponds to similar practices in character usage in Cantonese
Written Cantonese
Cantonese has the most well-developed written form of all Chinese varieties apart from the standard varieties of Mandarin and Classical Chinese. Standard written Chinese is based on Mandarin, but when spoken word for word as Cantonese, it sounds unnatural because its expressions are ungrammatical...
, Vietnamese chữ nôm, Korean hanja
Hanja
Hanja is the Korean name for the Chinese characters hanzi. More specifically, it refers to those Chinese characters borrowed from Chinese and incorporated into the Korean language with Korean pronunciation...
and Japanese kanji
Kanji
Kanji are the adopted logographic Chinese characters hanzi that are used in the modern Japanese writing system along with hiragana , katakana , Indo Arabic numerals, and the occasional use of the Latin alphabet...
. These are usually not encoded in Unicode
Unicode
Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems...
(or the corresponding ISO/IEC 10646: Universal Character Set
Universal Character Set
The Universal Character Set , defined by the International Standard ISO/IEC 10646, Information technology — Universal multiple-octet coded character set , is a standard set of characters upon which many character encodings are based...
), thus creating problems in computer processing.
Vocabulary
The following table lists a few examples displaying differences in vocabulary between Vernacular ChineseVernacular Chinese
Written Vernacular Chinese refers to forms of written Chinese based on the vernacular language, in contrast to Classical Chinese, the written standard used from the Spring and Autumn Period to the early twentieth century...
based on Mandarin, and Taiwanese Hokkien written in Chinese characters:
| English | Vernacular Chinese | Written Hokkien |
|---|---|---|
| Have you eaten enough yet? | 你吃飽了沒有 | 你食飽未 |
| I will leave now. | 我先走了 | 我先來走 |
| Where? | 哪裡 | 叨位 |
| What? | 什麼 | 啥物，啥咪 |
| (I) don't understand | 聽不懂 | 聽無 |
| Thank you | 謝謝 | 多謝 or 感謝 |
| different | 不一樣 | 無同款 |
In addition, Hokkien literature can consist of phrases that are vernacular to Hokkien, as well as literary terms originating from Classical Chinese
Classical Chinese
Classical Chinese or Literary Chinese is a traditional style of written Chinese based on the grammar and vocabulary of ancient Chinese, making it different from any modern spoken form of Chinese...
.
| English | Vernacular phrase | Literary equivalent |
|---|---|---|
| beautiful | 媠 súi | 美 bí |
| wild, crazy | 痟 siáu | 狂 kông |
| stand | 徛 khiā | 豎 sū |
| go against | 齟齬, 搶奪 koāi | 乖 koai |
| window | 窗 thang | 窗 chhong |
| father | 老爸 lāu-pē | 老父 ló˙-hū |
| man | 査哺 tsa-po˙ | 男人 lâm-jîn |
Literary and colloquial character readings
Hokkien separates reading pronunciations (讀音) from spoken pronunciations/explications (語音/解說) of Chinese characters. The following examples in Pe̍h-oē-jī show differences in readings in Taiwanese Hokkien:| Chinese character | Literary reading | Colloquial reading |
|---|---|---|
| 白 | pek as in 明白 (bîng-pek) | pèh as in 白菜 (pe̍h-chhài) |
| 面 | biān as in 面會 (biān-huē) | bīn as in 海面 (hái-bīn) |
| 書 | su | chu |
| 生 | seŋ as in 醫生 (i-sing) | seⁿ / siⁿ as in 先生 (sian-siⁿ) |
| 不 | put | m̄ |
| 要 | iàu | beh / ài |
| 返 | hoán | tńg |
| 學 | ha̍k | o̍h |
| 人 | jîn / lîn | lâng |
| 少 | siáu | chió |
| 轉 | choán | tńg |
See also
- Written CantoneseWritten CantoneseCantonese has the most well-developed written form of all Chinese varieties apart from the standard varieties of Mandarin and Classical Chinese. Standard written Chinese is based on Mandarin, but when spoken word for word as Cantonese, it sounds unnatural because its expressions are ungrammatical...
- Vernacular ChineseVernacular ChineseWritten Vernacular Chinese refers to forms of written Chinese based on the vernacular language, in contrast to Classical Chinese, the written standard used from the Spring and Autumn Period to the early twentieth century...
- Classical ChineseClassical ChineseClassical Chinese or Literary Chinese is a traditional style of written Chinese based on the grammar and vocabulary of ancient Chinese, making it different from any modern spoken form of Chinese...
- Taiwanese literature movementTaiwanese literature movementThe Taiwanese literature movement refers to the effort of authors, poets, dramatists, musicians, and publishers in Taiwan to establish recognition of a distinctly Taiwanese body of literature...
- Comparison of Hokkien writing systemsComparison of Hokkien writing systemsThere are a number of different writing systems for the Hokkien group of languages, including romanizations, adaptations of Bopomofo, of katakana, and of Chinese characters. Some of the most popular are compared here....
- Amoy dialect
- Singaporean HokkienSingaporean HokkienSingaporean Hokkien is a local variant of the Hokkien dialect spoken in Singapore. It is closely related to the Southern Malaysian Hokkien spoken in Southern Malaysia as well as Riau Hokkien spoken in the Indonesian province of Riau...
- Penang HokkienPenang HokkienPenang Hokkien is a local variant of Hokkien spoken in Penang, Malaysia. It is the lingua franca among the majority Chinese population in Penang as well as other northern states of Malaysia surrounding it, and is characterised by the pronunciation of words according to the Zhangzhou dialect,...