OH and OR sounds in Penang Hokkien
Go BackTake the letter o as an example. We can see in words such as love, mother, low and lot, the o carries a different sound in each case. Some languages attempt to separate each of the functions perform by a vowel letter by assigning diacritics to them.
English is a language that is famously devoid of diacritics, loanwords aside. Romanisation systems devised in countries that were once used by the British tend to follow the same trend. Thus, there is no diacritics in Malay today (even though the e-breve, or e-sempang as it was known in Malay, used to feature in Malay before the spelling refinement of the 1970s).
Malay is often considered a phonetic language, in that the words are pronounced according to how they are spelled. In fact, that is not completely true. Even in Malay, some letters have more than one function to perform. Again, taking the letter o as example, it is used to represent the /o/ sound, in words like boleh, kotak and sopan, and to represent the /ɔ/ sound, in words like otak, botol and doktor. As a child learning Malay, we simply associated the spelling to the pronunciation, get familiar with it, and proceed to use it as it is, without question why the o is sometimes pronounced /o/ and sometimes pronounce /ɔ/.
When Christian missionaries decided to romanise Hokkien in the 19th century, they want to be phonetically precise. As with Malay, there exists in Hokkien both the /o/ and /ɔ/ sounds. The Church Romanisation that the missionaries created assigned the letter o to the /o/ sound. But for the /ɔ/ sound, they assigned a unique letter, which they wrote as . In the same way, the /ɛ/ sound is assigned the unique letter .
When I set forth to preserve Penang Hokkien, I have determined from the start that the use of diacritics and unique characters is not compatible with local spelling convention. In fact, I felt this has become a bane to the language, preventing its popularity from becoming more widespread.
I also took note that when the Taiwanese Romanisation System was created, derived from the Church Romanisation, they sensibly replaced the with oo. However, even oo is not compatible with local spelling convention, as people in Penang will intuitively pronounce oo as /u/, not as /ɔ/. Moreover the Taiwanese system retains the use of diacritics to mark out the tones.
To ensure that Penang Hokkien is easy to write, I decided that the language needs a new writing system, and this writing system has to be ASCII-based. That means, it can be typed on a standard keyboard, without resorting to accent marks, unique or otherwise. Secondly, how sounds are spelled has to reflect local spelling convention.
As mentioned in the beginning, the five vowels a, e, i, o and u often have multiple tasks to perform. To represent all the various vowel sounds in Penang Hokkien, I complement the five vowels with a host of digraphs. These are pairs of characters used together to represent a single sound. In the case of the /ɔ/ sound, while the Church Romanisation uses , I use "or". Thus a word like kor3 (to care) is pronounced /kɔ/.
The /o/ sound can be represented by a single vowel, "o", or a digraph, "oh". The h here is a pseudo-fricative. Its presence indicates that this is not a plosive; it's not a stop sound, it's a continuous one. The use of the final h is aligned to local spelling convention, but is not compatible to the Church Romanisation of Hokkien, which is again why I decided not to adopt it for writing Penang Hokkien.
As in the case with /o/, I make available several ways to represent a single sound. This is because, as a tonal language, Penang Hokkien economizes on the number of syllables, but as a result, has a plethora of homographs. The availability of different ways to represent a single sound enables the creation of homophones, each to represent a different meaning.
Many people thought that a writing system is simply be a means to commit to paper what one speaks orally. I differ on that. To me, a writing system is a written language that is different from the spoken one. A written language is a system of communication that comes with its own set of rules which one needs to learn, in order to be able to communicate ideas and thoughts effectively. Children usually learn the spoken language from their parents in informal settings. In contrast, they need some form of formal education to learn the written language.
An effective writing system is expected to perform a task beyond representing sounds. It should encapsulate meaning in the most economical way. In other words, one should not be forced to circumnavigate due to difficiencies in the writing system. And as important a task of phonetically representing sounds, this has to take second place to representing meaning.
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