Spelling the Nasal Sound in Penang Hokkien

The presence of the nasal sound, particularly the voiced alveolar nasal, presents a challenge to writing Penang Hokkien. Many speakers of the language do notice the difference in pronunciation between the non-nasal and the nasal sound, but they have difficulties in distinguishing one from the other when writing. Traditional romanisation such as Church Romanisation (also known as Pe̍h-ōe-jī) represents the voiced alveolar nasal with a superscript n behind the final consonant, like this: aⁿ, eⁿ, iⁿ, oⁿ. This makes it challenging to write Church Romanisation on the ASCII-based keyboards and keypads, which diacritics, superscripts and unique letters require additional plug in or app. Taiwanese Romanization, a system based on Pe̍h-ōe-jī, partly solves the issue by added nn to the vowel, creating rimes such as ann, enn, inn and onn which are unfamiliar to most speakers of Penang Hokkien.

How the Nasal Sound is Represented in Taiji Romanisation

Taiji Romanisation leans on existing local spelling convention, in order for speakers of Penang Hokkien to correctly pronounce words based on intuition. From observation, it has been noted that some people nasalise by inserting an n between a preceding consonant and a succeeding vowel. This is adopted into the writing system.

For example, the word for biscuit, a nasalized word, is spelled as pneah4 in Penang Hokkien. Without the n, peah4 will sound like this: In the same way, other nasalized words such as knia3 (mirror) can be differentiated from kia3 (send), and snua1 (mountain) from sua1 (sand). Nasalized words that are already in common usage, such as ooi2 (yellow) retain their spelling, even though they do not observe the convention.

Without a preceding consonant

If a preceding consonant is absent, a nasalized vowel sound is created by repeating the vowel letter before the n and twice again after it, creating a four-letter cluster with "n" being the second letter. Although the presence of the "n" in the middle may cause some to mistake it as two separate syllables, in practise this is not possible, as every syllable in Taiji has to end with a tone number.

Carrier Syllable / Resulting IPA / Resulting Syllables



















The three main nasalized sounds in Penang Hokkien are /ã/, /ĩ/ and /ɛ̃/, represented by the vowels a and i, and the digraph ae. Other nasalized sounds are usually formed in the presence of these three. Note that the "i" is represented by the "e" in the absence of an initial consonant, so enee1 instead of inii1. For IPA rendering, in diphthongs where both i and a are present, the tilde (~) is usually placed over the a. In Taiji, this does not matter, as no diacritic marks are employed. The "n" is the second letter after the initial consonant (i.e. pni4 ), or third letter in an aspirated syllable (i.e. phni33 ). Unlike Pe̍h-ōe-jī and Tâi-lô, there is no /ẽ/, /ɔ̃/ and other nasalized vowels.

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Dear visitor, thank you so much for reading this page. My name is Timothy Tye and my hobby is to find out about places, write about them and share the information with you on this website. I have been writing this site since 5 January 2003. Originally (from 2003 until 2009, the site was called AsiaExplorers. I changed the name to Penang Travel Tips in 2009, even though I describe more than just Penang but everywhere I go (I often need to tell people that "Penang Travel Tips" is not just information about Penang, but information written in Penang), especially places in Malaysia and Singapore, and in all the years since 2003, I have described over 20,000 places.

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