Homophones & Homographs when writing Penang Hokkien using Taiji Romanisation

Homophones are words that share the same pronunciation and tone, but have different spelling and meaning. Homographs are words that share the same pronunciation, tone and spelling, but have different meaning. They are different from tonemes, which are words that share the same spelling but have different tones and meaning.

Example of tonemes: When I develop Taiji Romanisation for writing Penang Hokkien, I am aware of the problem that plague previous attempts to romanise tonal languages. Unlike non-tonal languages, where each word is likely to have many syllables, words in tonal languages tend to economize on the number of syllables by stacking up with tones. However, when tonal languages are phonetically romanized, it results in many words sharing the same spelling. This is the problem with the romanisation of Chinese to hanyu pinyin. It is easier to read using the Chinese characters than with the romanized pinyin text, due to having to determine the meaning of each homograph through context.

Purpose of Homophones

Homophones serve the two main purposes: Clearing up ambiguity
Generally speaking, homographs impedes smooth reading. To facilitate smooth reading, I attempt to reduce homographs by replacing them with homophones. That is why in Taiji Romanisation some vowel sounds may be written in more than one way. Consider the following, paying attention to the words in bold: He and I work together.
He works for me.
He taught me to do the work.
He is very good at delegating work for me to do. A phonetically precise system will render all four (and, works, taught and delegating) with the same spelling, ka3. However, a phonetically indicative system provides a different spelling for each instance. Ie1 kah1 wah4 co1 kang1.
Ie1 ka3 wah4 co1 kang1.
Ie1 kah3 wah4 co1 kang1.
Ie1 gau3 kar3 wah4 co1 kang1. All four words (kah1, ka3, kar3 and karh3) have the same pronunciation, perhaps with just a tone difference for kah1, but because each carries its own meaning, any ambiguity is cleared up.

Meaning Retention
The two languages that will impact Penang Hokkien most greatly are English and Mandarin. The romanized writing system for Penang Hokkien has to be able to retain the meaning of works translated from these two languages without loss in meaning. Consider the following sentence: He can't sell her his horse because she cannot buy it. As many of the words in the above sentence have the same pronunciation and tone, a phonetically precise system render each of them with the same spelling. As a result, clarity is lost. POJ: I bē bē i i ê bé•, eng-ūi i bē bé i
Tailo: i bē bē i i ê bé in-uī i bē bé i
As a phonetically indicative system assigns a different spelling for words that have different meaning but sound the same and have the same tone. As such, the same sentence translated using Taiji Romanization looks like this: Ie1 be33 beh33 ee1 ie1-eh3 bae4 eng3-goay33 ee1 be33 beh4 i1. The sentence written in Taiji Romanisation can be translated back into English or further translated into Mandarin without any loss in meaning. The sentences in POJ and Tailo, in comparison, have become ambiguious unless they are re-phrased, replacing the pronouns with antecedents.

Although a person learning a phonetically indicative system has to memorize the spelling of every word, he does that only once. Having committed the spelling to memory, he enjoys clearer comprehension without having to face ambiguities regularly. A person using a phonetically precise system, in comparison, is plagued with ambiguity that slows down his comprehension.

List of Homophones in Taiji Romanisation of Penang Hokkien

This is not an exhaustive list, but are some of the homographs I have come across in my Penang Hokkien dictionary. To qualify as homophones, two separate words must share the same IPA symbol as well as tone number, but have different spelling.

List of Homographs in Taiji Romanisation of Penang Hokkien

Although I try to reduce homographs, sometimes it is not possible to entirely eliminate them, particularly where there are no other alternative spellings. Some words retain commonly accepted spelling though they might not be phonetically accurate. Also, some of the common words fit nicely within the context and have been accepted as having the same meaning and pronunciation. The following are some that I have come across.

List of Heteronyms in Taiji Romanisation of Penang Hokkien

Heteronyms are words sharing the same spelling but different pronunciation and meaning. As far as possible, I try to avoid these, except in situations where one of the words have become commonly accepted as being spelled as such, even though it may not have been phonetically accurate.

Penang Hokkien Grammar

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