Get to know the new Penang Hokkien writing system

With members of Penang Tour Guide Association, including Yeap Peng Hoe and Gillian Oon (7 July, 2012)


This article is intended for people who already speak Penang Hokkien and are keen to learn to write in it. (If you do not speak Penang Hokkien, please go to the beginner lessons instead).

If you have already known a different system for writing Hokkien, but are keen to learn this system, I would urge you to park aside your existing knowledge. You should take the advice of Yoda in Empire Strikes Back and, "Unlearn what you have learned," so that you don't allow your existing knowledge intrude and confuse you.

Other systems were used to write Penang Hokkien simply because this system was not yet created back then. But now that it has, this is the one to learn, because eventually most writing material in Penang Hokkien that you will encounter will be in this system.

Why learn to write Penang Hokkien

If you grew up speaking Penang Hokkien as an oral language, now, for the first time, you are able to achieve literacy in it. But why, in the first place, should you learn to write Penang Hokkien?

Imagine for a moment being able to communicate with your children studying overseas, or with your parents back home, in the language you speak at home. While you can use English and Mandarin, there's nothing like the intimacy of writing in your own household language.

In the past, Penang Hokkien speakers simply transcribe the sound of Hokkien words, expecting the reader to glean the meaning from context. This form of communication has a high degree of ambiguity. Take, for example:

Wah beh cit ciak kau.

Is that "I buy a dog", "I sell a dog", "I buy a monkey" or "I sell a monkey"? Without the benefit of context, anything is possible. The writing system you are about to learn disambiguate such sentences, leaving no doubt over their meaning. If you see, "Wah1 beh4 cit3-ciak1 kau2", because you are literate in Penang Hokkien, you know the sentence means, "I bought a monkey".

long kau knia

If someone writes the above sentence, does he mean "small drain" or "hit a little puppy"? We do not know. However, if he is literate in Penang Hokkien, he would not be transcribing sounds. He would use the exact words for the meaning he wishes to convey. If he wants to say "small drain", he would write "long3kau3 knia4", if he intends to write to mean "hit a little puppy", he would write "long3 kau1 knia4".

Cim2 lok3 cui4 chim3-chim1.

Does that mean "the crab goes deep into the water", or "dip it deeply into the water"? If you are literate in Penang Hokkien, you will know what it means.

This free online course teaches you to write clear sentences that your reader (if he also takes the same course as you) will be able to understand. On the other hand, you will also understand clearly when someone writes in Penang Hokkien to you. There is no more ambiguity once you learn the writing system.

As you already speak Penang Hokkien, attaining literacy is easy! All you need to do is to learn the system, so that you will stop transcribing sounds, and start writing actual words. The words you will use in writing Penang Hokkien are those listed in the Penang Hokkien Dictionary. Yes, it may be tough having to memorize their spelling, but once you remember them, they become second nature to you, and then you can use them to communicate with your friends and family members. And they understand you much better than if you simply transcribe sounds.

Question?

What to do if the word you need is not in the dictionary. Admittedly, as of now, the dictionary is still quite small, but words are being added into it rapidly, so you should be able to find most. Still, if a word you need to use is not in, please inform me, and I'll work on adding it in for you.

The best way to contact me is via Facebook. Join the Learn Penang Hokkien Facebook Group as a member, and then post your question.

What is Penang Hokkien

Penang Hokkien is a Minnan dialect that was brought to the northern coast of the Malay peninsula in the mid-17th century by refugees who fled Fujian Province following the collapse of the Ming Dynasty to the Manchus who subsequently established the Qing Dynasty. Penang Hokkien is older than Penang by over a hundred years. As the refugees fled from different parts of Fujian Province, those settling on the northern coast of the Malay peninsula speak a different variant of Hokkien from those who settled further south on the peninsula. For a period of time, the early pioneers lived in isolation, cut off from their motherland. During that period they adopted many loanwords from Malay. (To learn more about the history of the language, read Arrivals of the Chinese in the Malay Peninsula).

When Penang was established in 1786, the Hokkien descendants of these pioneers, already living in coastal villages in Kedah, brought the language to the island. By the second half of the 19th century, there was a new influx of Chinese immigrants from various parts of southern China to Penang. Though tested, the position of Penang Hokkien as the local vernacular of the various Chinese groups in Penang was unmoved until the 20th century, when the use of Mandarin became dominant, eroding the position once enjoyed by Hokkien.

By helping you learn to write Penang Hokkien, this website hopes to rejuvenate interest and appreciation in the language.

How to write Penang Hokkien?

Up until now, most people who speak Penang Hokkien simply transcribe what they say according to sound. As each person follows his own system, the result is highly ambiguous, and requires the reader to decipher from context.

Many words in Penang Hokkien can be spelled the same way. Such words are called homographs. A writing system with a lot of homographs is weak, as the reader has to stop and decide which of the words is the one the writer meant. Take the sound "kau", for example. In Penang Hokkien, it can mean "hang", "monkey", "dog", "enough", "arrive", "nine", "thick", even "Christianity". Without a good writing system, one spends an unnecessary amount of time trying to decipher meaning from context.

The Writing System for Penang Hokkien

To overcome this issue, a new writing system called Taiji Romanisation was created. This system takes a two-tier approach to make words written in Penang Hokkien easy to understand.

Firstly, Taiji Romanisation separates out words according to their tone. It employs a four-tone system that roughly corresponds to the four tones in Mandarin. So the sound "kau" is split into kau1 (hang), kau2 (monkey), kau3 (thick) and kau4 (nine). Words with the same pronunciation but different tones are called toneme. For more details, see the chapter on Intonation.

Secondly, if a sound of the same pronunciation and tone has more than one meaning, there is likelihood for confusion, so Taiji Romanisation further disambiguates by using a different spelling for a different meaning, where possible. Words with the same pronunciation and tone, but has different spelling and meaning, are called homophones. For example, the word kau4 (nine) and kaw4 (dog) are homophones.

Finally, if it is unlikely for confusion, some words are allowed to have the same spelling and tone, with different meanings. These are the homographs. To help you see them all, I have create a list of homophones and homographs.

How to learn the words written in Taiji Romanisation

Taiji Romanisation is phonetically indicative. That means, the words provide a high degree of indication of the pronunciation. It is a lot like Chinese characters. When you encounter a Chinese word for the first time, you may be able to guess the pronunciation based on the phono-semantic characteristic of the pictograms of the compound character. For example, the word for river, 江 (kang4 in Penang Hokkien) has the three short strokes on the left to pictorially indicate water, while on the right side the pictogram of 工 (kang1) which serves as a phonetic indicator, meaning the presence of the pictogram 工 indicates that 江 should bear a similar sound (and it does, albeit at a different tone).

Despite having many words of the same pronunciation and tone, one can read Mandarin as each character retains its meaning via word recognition. The various Chinese words that carry the same pronunciation and tone are essentially homophones. The homophonous nature of the characters is lost when Mandarin is converted to pinyin.

Hanyu pinyin is phonetically precise. Its purpose is to convey the exact sound, not to convey the exact meaning. While there are attempts to write in pinyin, intelligibility is compromised by the homographs.

The same is true with the International Phonetic Alphabet. It too is intended to convey exact sounds. Anything with the same sound will be rendered with the same IPA symbols. So, it is impossible to tell apart words of the same pronunciation and tone, but carry different meaning.

Although on the surface, Taiji Romanisation seems to be anarchic in how it spells words, there is a system in place that ensures most words are in fact phonetically logical, while at the same time convey specific meaning.

The way to learn the words in Taiji Romanisation is to always learn the spelling and the pronunciation together, and not attempt to use the spelling as the precise way to pronounce. You may get it right, but you may also get it wrong. Rely on the IPA symbols, and your chances of saying it wrongly is reduced.

Why establish a dedicated system for romanizing Penang Hokkien?

Taiji Romanisation is certainly not the only way to write romanized Penang Hokkien. However, as it is the newest, it take lessons from existing systems of romanising the language.

Until now, people wanting to write Penang Hokkien relied on the two most popular systems of Hokkien romanisation, Peh-oe-ji and Tai-lo. I created Taiji Romanisation because of three major reasons why these two existing systems are not ideal method for writing Penang Hokkien.

Firstly, both of them use diacritic marks. These are the accents placed above the vowel letters. For example, POJ is written as Pe̍h-ōe-jī using diacritic marks. In Taiji Romanisation, it is written (according to Penang Hokkien pronunciation) as Paek3wa3ji3. Some of the diacritic marks and letters in POJ are very difficult to type (for example, e̍ and o·, to show two). Many people simply do not bother to add them in when they write. As a result, the Hokkien tonemes merge to become homographs, so again, apart from simple sentences where the meaning can easily be gleaned from context, intelligibility suffers. This is part of the reasons why POJ is used only by a niche group of enthusiasts though it has been around for over a century. In comparison, Taiji Romanisation replaces diacritic marks with numbers which are common on all standard keyboards. Being much easier to type, they are less likely to be ignored.

Secondly, both POJ and Tailo are phonetically precise (especially when writing Amoy Hokkien and Taiwanese). They are like pinyin and IPA. While phonetically precise alphabets are excellent at rendering exact pronunciation, they are much less useful as a written language, because phonetically precise systems cannot differentiate homophones. In POJ, both "nine" and "dog" are spelled káu, whereas in Taiji, "nine" is spelled kau4 while "dog" is spelled kaw4.

Thirdly, each morphemes (the basic components of a word) in POJ and Tailo are always written in the citation form, even though they undergo tone change within a sentence. POJ employs a complex system of hyphenation to modify the tone, and expect the reader to make the changes as he reads. It's like writing the sentence "He buy she a dog" but expecting the reader to read, "He buys her a dog." In comparison, sentences in Taiji are always written exactly as it is supposed to be read. Not only that, but a person writing in Taiji Romanisation has a higher liberty to provide emphasis to words by changing its tone (i.e. Wah1 mai1 lai2 versus wah4 mai1 lai2.)

In addition, the 4-tone system and tone sandhi rule is much less complex compared to that of POJ. While POJ was created for the Amoy Dialect and Tai-lo for Taiwanese, Taiji Romanisation is the only system created specially for Penang Hokkien. As such, it takes into account the cultural expectations, such as Malay loanwords, apparent in the language.

How to pronounce the words written in Penang Hokkien

You will notice in the dictionary that each word is followed by a set of symbols in square brackets. These symbols are called the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). They are used in dictionaries to show you how to pronounce the word. I employ a very basic form of IPA intended to show only the pronunciation, without the tone. The pronunciation of words and phrases are always marked with the square brackets [].

Most of the IPA symbols are pronounced the same way as the letters of the English alphabet. Those that require your special attention are listed below:

Step-by-Step to writing Penang Hokkien

As with learning a new language, you need to memorize words, particularly those that you will be using regularly. However, as you already speak Penang Hokkien, your task is to remember how to spell each word. Gone are the days when you spell as you please. From now on, you must rely on the dictionary to render the correct spelling. Otherwise a person who understand this writing system will not understand you.

The first thing to do the spelling for the words you will be using most regularly. Start with the pronouns. I list them below, but you can see more details in the chapter on Pronouns.

Next, learn to spell the most commonly used words:


Let these above words be the first set to be added to your vocabulary. Memorize how they are spelled. For other words, get them from the dictionary and use them in writing your emails and letters. Encourage the recipient of your communication to read this page and get to know the words too, so that they can understand your writing.

Tone Sandhi

Though you may have been speaking Penang Hokkien your whole life, you might not notice that the words often change their tone within a sentence. In the dictionary, the words are shown in the citation form, also called the basic form or standing form. When employed in a sentence, most words change their tone, to the sandhied form, also called the modified form or running form.

There is a simple rule to learn on how to modify. Words in the dictionary that have tones 1 and 2 modify to tone 3, while words with tone 3 and 4 modify to tone 1. There are some words with tone 3 that don't modify. These are called the "regular words". The rest (those that modify) are "irregular words". For more details, read Tone Sandhi.

How to write Penang Hokkien

When you first start writing Penang Hokkien, you must pay close attention to the tone numbers that you place on the syllable. Most verbs change tones from the basic to modified form, except when they are the final word in a sentence. The pronouns wah4 and lu4 change to wah1 and lu1 when they are not the last word of a sentence, unless you keep them in the basic form for emphatic purpose. Wah1 mai1 lai2. I don't want to come.
Wah4 mai1 lai2. I don't want to come. In the above example, you can place a stress on wah4 by retaining it in the basic form.

In order to write Penang Hokkien, you need to become very sensitive to the tone changes, so that you can modify the tone in your sentence according to how you want to express something.

How to gain literacy in writing Penang Hokkien

Considering you are already able to speak the language, the swiftest ways to gain literacy of Penang Hokkien is to use it with other people. Pay attention to how you spell the common words, so that the standard spelling becomes second nature to you.

A good place to find people who are familiar with Taiji Romanisation is at the Learn Penang Hokkien Facebook Group. This is an informal language lab where new words are tested out, and feedback from members of the group enables further refinement to be carried out on the writing system.

I welcome you to join us in the Facebook Group. Your interaction with us in Penang Hokkien not only helps you brush up your writing skill in the language, it also provides me the chance to seek your input, as I continue to refine and improve on the writing system.

Read also Penang Hokkien Vocabulary

Learn Penang Hokkien with Memrise

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About this website

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.