Written Hokkien
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Written Hokkien |
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Mixed script (Hàn-lô) |
Hokkien, a variety of Chinese that forms part of the Southern Min family and is spoken in Southeastern China, Taiwan and Southeast Asia, does not have a unitary standardized writing system, in comparison with the well-developed written forms of Cantonese and Standard Chinese (Mandarin). In Taiwan, a standard for Written Hokkien has been developed by the Ministry of Education including its Dictionary of Frequently-Used Taiwan Minnan, but there are a wide variety of different methods of writing in Vernacular Hokkien. Nevertheless, vernacular works written in Hokkien are still commonly seen in literature, film, performing arts and music.
History
[edit]Prior to the modern era, the main written language of China was Classical Chinese, which has grammar and vocabulary based on Old Chinese used in ancient times. Whilst the written form of Chinese mostly remained static, the spoken varieties of Chinese diverged from Old Chinese. 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 in a form more closely reflecting speech called written vernacular Chinese.
However, there are various differences between the spoken Chinese varieties, such as Hokkien, Mandarin, Cantonese, including in vocabulary, 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 characters 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 phonetically, using either a Latin-based alphabet, bopomofo, or through the use of Chinese characters as loangraphs for their phonetically with no relation to the original word via meaning.[1]
Varieties of Hokkien are spoken in the Southern Fujian 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.[1] Following the Taiwan localization movement, education and everyday usage of spoken and written Hokkien by local Taiwanese became more widely used. A Chinese character online dictionary for Hokkien was released in 2008 by the ROC Ministry of Education.[2] Nevertheless, within literature circles there is still ongoing debate over which writing system should be used to write Taiwanese Hokkien, and controversy exists 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, if at all. 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.
Phonetic writing systems
[edit]Pe̍h-ōe-jī
[edit]![](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/33/POJ_text_sample.svg/240px-POJ_text_sample.svg.png)
Pe̍h-ōe-jī (
Pe̍h-ōe-jī can also be used along with Chinese characters in a mixed script 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:[4]
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
[edit]Bopomofo is another script used in Taiwanese Hokkien writings. It is commonly used in Taiwanese literature to represent Hokkien-specific grammatical particles, along with Chinese characters, and can also be used to gloss Chinese characters with their Hokkien readings.
- Sample text:
我 像 離水 ㄟ魚 ('I am like the fish that has left the water', with ㄟ [ei] being used as a replacement for ㆤ ê [e].)
Taiwanese kana
[edit]During the period of Taiwan under Japanese rule, a kana-based system was introduced to gloss Hokkien writing in Chinese characters, as well writing as other languages of Taiwan.
Chinese characters
[edit]![](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/16/Han-ji.svg/220px-Han-ji.svg.png)
Writing Hokkien using Chinese characters
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 characters, they are not always etymologically correct 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
Additional examples include the word for 'beautiful' (
Victor H. Mair makes an estimate that if "pure, unadulterated 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%.[1] Likewise, Carstairs Douglas, who has compiled a historical comprehensive 1873 Dictionary on Hokkien as well that later formed the basis of many other dictionaries for Hokkien in the subsequent decades, regarding Chinese characters would argue as well that:[9]
There are a very large number of the words for which we have not been able to find the corresponding character at all, perhaps a quarter or a third of the whole; [...] many of them rare, and many difficult to recognize from the great variations that take place between the written and spoken forms of the language.
— Chinese–English Dictionary of the Vernacular or Spoken Language of Amoy, Preface (p. viii)[10]
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 and they can be ambiguous in meaning. In 2007, Taiwan's Ministry of Education formulated and released a standard character set known as the Taiwanese Southern Min Recommended Characters to overcome these difficulties.[11] These standard Chinese characters for writing Taiwanese Hokkien are now taught in schools in Taiwan.
![](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c3/%E4%BA%BB%E5%9B%A0_%28in%29.png/100px-%E4%BA%BB%E5%9B%A0_%28in%29.png)
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.
The earliest Hokkien vernacular literature written in hàn-jī is Tân Saⁿ and Gō͘-niû in the Ming dynasty, and koa-á-chheh is also an important kind of hàn-jī vernacular literature in the history of the Hokkien language.
Vocabulary
[edit]The following table lists a few examples displaying differences in vocabulary between Vernacular Chinese based on Mandarin, and Taiwanese Hokkien written in Chinese characters:
English | Vernacular Chinese | Written Hokkien |
---|---|---|
Have you eaten enough yet? | 你吃飽了 |
你食飽未 |
I will leave now. | ||
Where? | 哪裡 | 佗位,叨位 |
What? | 啥物,啥咪 | |
(I) don't understand | 聽不懂 | 聽無 |
Thank you | ||
different |
In addition, Hokkien literature can consist of phrases that are vernacular to Hokkien, as well as literary terms originating from Classical Chinese. The following list of Taiwanese Hokkien words is adapted from a list by scholar Ong Iok-tek, contrasting vernacular terms with relevant literary terms;[12] the English translations have been added by Mair.[1]
English | Vernacular phrase | Literary equivalent |
---|---|---|
beautiful | súi 媠 | |
wild, crazy | siáu 痟 | |
stand | khiā 徛 | 豎 sū |
go against | koāi | 乖 koai |
window | thang |
|
man | cha-po͘ 查埔 |
Literary and colloquial character readings
[edit]Hokkien separates reading pronunciations (讀音) from spoken pronunciations (
Chinese character | Reading pronunciations | Spoken pronunciations / †explications | English |
---|---|---|---|
pe̍k | pe̍h | white | |
biān | bīn | face | |
su | chu | book | |
seng | seⁿ / siⁿ | student | |
put | m̄† | not | |
hóan | tńg† | return | |
ha̍k | o̍h | to study | |
jîn / lîn | lâng† | person | |
siàu | chió | few | |
chóan | tńg | to turn |
See also
[edit]- Taiwanese literature movement
- Comparison of Hokkien writing systems
- Amoy dialect
- Singaporean Hokkien
- Penang Hokkien
References
[edit]- ^ a b c d e f Mair, V. H. (2003). "How to Forget Your Mother Tongue and Remember Your National Language".
- ^ a b
臺灣 閩南語 常用 詞 辭典 [Dictionary of Frequently-Used Taiwan Minnan]. Ministry of Education, R.O.C. 2011. - ^ Chiung, Wi-vun Taiffalo (2005). Language, Identity and Decolonization. Tainan: National Cheng Kung University. ISBN 957-8845-85-5. p. 272.
- ^ Sidaia, Babuja A. (1998) (in Hàn-lô Taiwanese). A-Chhûn. Taipei: Taili. ISBN 957-98861-6-4. pp. 264.
- ^ a b Lin, Alvin (1999). "Writing Taiwanese: The Development of Modern Written Taiwanese" (PDF). Sino-Platonic Papers (89). OCLC 41879041. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2011-07-19. Retrieved 2011-07-04.
- ^
臺灣 閩南語 常用 詞 辭典 [Dictionary of Frequently-Used Taiwan Minnan] (in Chinese). Ministry of Education, R.O.C. 2013. #2607. - ^ Klöter, Henning (2005). Written Taiwanese. Otto Harrassowitz Verlag. p. 21. ISBN 978-3-447-05093-7.
- ^ Hsieh, Shelley Ching-yu (October 2005). "Taiwanese Loanwords in Mandarin Chinese: Language Interaction in Taiwan" (PDF). Taiwan Papers. 5. Southern Taiwan University of Technology. Retrieved 2011-07-01.
- ^ Hompot, Sebestyén (2018). Schottenhammer, Angela (ed.). "Xiamen at the Crossroads of Sino-Foreign Linguistic Interaction during the Late Qing and Republican Periods: The Issue of Hokkien Phoneticization" (PDF). Crossroads: Studies on the History of Exchange Relations in the East Asian World. 17/18. OSTASIEN Verlag: 176. ISSN 2190-8796.
- ^ Douglas, Carstairs (1873). "Preface". Chinese-English dictionary of the vernacular or spoken language of Amoy (in English & Hokkien). London: Presbyterian Church of England. pp. viii.
{{cite book}}
: CS1 maint: unrecognized language (link) - ^
參 、臺灣 閩南語 (PDF). National Languages Committee (in Chinese). ROC Ministry of Education. Retrieved 2 July 2011. - ^ Ong, Iok-tek (1993). Independence Evening Post
臺灣 話 講座 [Lectures on Taiwanese] (in Chinese).自立 晚 報 社 文化 出版 部 . ISBN 9789575962456.
Further reading
[edit]- Branner, David Prager (2000). Problems in Comparative Chinese Dialectology—the Classification of Miin and Hakka. Trends in Linguistics series, no. 123. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. ISBN 3-11-015831-0.
- Chung, Raung-fu (1996). The Segmental Phonology of Southern Min in Taiwan. Taipei: Crane Pub. ISBN 957-9463-46-8.
- DeBernardi, Jean (1991). "Linguistic Nationalism: The Case of Southern Min". Sino-Platonic Papers. 25. OCLC 24810816.
- Ding, Picus Sizhi (2016). Southern Min (Hokkien) as a Migrating Language. Singapore: Springer. ISBN 978-981-287-593-8.
- Klöter, Henning (2011). The Language of the Sangleys: A Chinese Vernacular in Missionary Sources of the Seventeenth Century. Brill. ISBN 978-90-04-18493-0. An analysis and facsimile of the Arte de la Lengua Chio-chiu (1620), the oldest extant grammar of Hokkien.
- Hompot, Sebestyén (2018). Schottenhammer, Angela (ed.). "Xiamen at the Crossroads of Sino-Foreign Linguistic Interaction during the Late Qing and Republican Periods: The Issue of Hokkien Phoneticization" (PDF). Crossroads: Studies on the History of Exchange Relations in the East Asian World. 17/18. OSTASIEN Verlag: 167–205. ISSN 2190-8796. - Chapter examining and detailing the history of Hokkien dictionaries and similar works and the history of Hokkien writing systems over the centuries, especially phonetic scripts for Hokkien