Reading Penang Hokkien using Taiji Romanisation

When I enter a word in the dictionary, the word is an "entry". When a user goes to my dictionary and looks up a word, finds it, and takes it from from the dictionary, he is "citing" it. The word that he cites, before it undergoes any change in form, is in the "citation form". This is the root form, like "fly", before it becomes flies, flew, flown, flying and so on.

If a user looks up "husband" in the dictionary, the word in citation form is ang1 . If he looks up "couple", the word in citation form is ang3bor4 . Notice that the morpheme ang1 has changed in form to ang3, to form ang3bor4. While it appears pretty straightforward, it represents a radical shift to how romanised Hokkien is being written.

All along, until Taiji Romanisation came into the scene, the practice has been to write the morphemes without any change in form. The reader is expected to mentally make the change in tone when he reads. The word ang3bor4, when written in the older Tâi-lô System, looks like this: ang-bóo. If you transcribe that to Taiji Romanisation, it becomes ang1-bor4. Notice no change in the morpheme ang1. However, the reader is expected to see ang1-bor4 and read it as ang3bor4.

When you write in Taiji Romanisation, all the morphemes have undergone tone changes, and are reproduced based on the tone you expect the reader to read it. The compound nouns in the dictionary will include morphemes that have undergone tone change.

A sentence such as "The couple in red buys a barrel" comes out as "Heh1-leh1 ang3 sna1-eh3 ang3bor4 beh1 ang3." Notice the word ang3 seems to appear three times. The first ang3 means "red", the second (which is part of the word for "couple") means "husband", while the third ang3 means "barrel". If you look up ang3 in the dictionary, you will get only the meaning for "barrel", not "red" or "husband". That's because red and husband in the dictionary are in their citation forms, ang2 and ang1 respectively.

With Taiji Romanisation, you are expected to know, or able to guess, the citation tone based on how the word fits into the sentence. It's almost like English - instead of looking up the word "flew", you need to look up "fly". I will teach you in the next lesson how to derive the citation tone, when you see it in a sentence. For now, just bear with me that words in sentences written in Taiji Romanisation always appear in the "changed form".

The great advantage of the Tâi-lô and other preceeding romanised systems, is that they appear in the "unchanged form". You can always see the morphemes exactly as they are, because these systems leave all tone changes to the reader to mentally perform them. It's like seeing "He buy two box of colour pencil" and reading that as "He buys two boxes of colour pencils." You see X but you read Y. With practice, it is certainly possible for a reader to make the mental shifts in tone, even though all the morphemes are holding their original tones. But that's not the issue.

With Tâi-lô, you see X but you read Y. But in actual fact, there's a whole range of options to read X. Not just Y, but A, B, C and D. Even a very simple sentence like "I eat fish" can be written as (A) "Wah1 ciak3 hu2" (regular), (B) "Wah4 ciak3 hu2" (emphasizing subject), (C) "Wah1 ciak1 hu2" (emphasizing verb) and (D) "Wah4 ciak1 hu2" (emphasizing both subject and verb). A Tâi-lô sentence will be written like option D but read like option A. Even if the writer actually wants the reader to read it as B, C or D, he cannot indicate that. The writing system has limited the option to read it to one.

This limitation became very apparent to me when I recently worked on a movie script in Penang Hokkien. For almost every sentence, the director wants to emphasize specific words. This would not have been possible using Tâi-lô or the Missionary system. To use those systems, the director has to inform the actors off-script how he wants them to tone the words. In comparison, with Taiji Romanisation, the director can impregnate the word with the actual tone he expects them to utter the words.

But of course we can argue that Hokkien dramas are being produced in Taiwan where the script is written in Chinese characters. My respond to that is, as Taiwan is most comfortable with Chinese characters, let them do as they have always been doing. But in Penang, I will do things differently.

When you read Penang Hokkien using Taiji Romanisation, every syllable is toned according to how it is expected to be read. Yes, it might be slightly harder to find the actual word in the dictionary, but as I will teach you in the next lesson, you can do it.

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Thanks for reading this page. My name is Timothy Tye. My hobby is to research information about places, and share the information with people on this website. I started this website on 5 January 2003, and since then, have written about over 20,000 places, mostly in Malaysia and Singapore.

Please use the information on this page as guidance only. While I try my best to provide you information that is as accurate as I can get it to be, I do apologize for any errors. Also, as I might not be able to update some information on time, some of these pages may contain outdated information.