Vowels and Digraphs in Penang Hokkien

A host of vowels and digraphs are used to represent the various sounds in Penang Hokkien. In this article, I explain how I created the spelling system that forms the Taiji Romanisation of Penang Hokkien.

From small, we were taught that the vowels are a, e, i, o and u. However our primary school teachers usually do not explain to us why they are called vowels and what duties they perform. Over time, we just intuitively get the hang of their functions. In most languages, each of the aforementioned letters perform multiple functions. This is especially so for English.

Take 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. Quite often, we interchange the /o/ and /ɔ/ sounds and still retain the meaning, pronouncing kotak and kɔtak, for example. 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 questioning why the o is sometimes pronounced /o/ and sometimes pronounce /ɔ/.

When Christian missionaries romanised 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 o·("o" with a dot somewhere at two o'clock). In the same way, the /ɛ/ sound is assigned the unique letter e·.

The o· and e· are very difficult to produce on a standard keyboard. From the moment I learned this, I decided that this method of writing will hamper the spread of Penang Hokkien. The Taiwanese Romanisation System is derived from the Church Romanisation. However I observe that they sensibly replaced the o· with oo. Nevertheless, 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.

I determined therefore that Penang Hokkien needs its own writing system that encapsulates local spelling convention, is simple enough to write, and yet is sufficiently sophisticated to capture every nuances of the language. I decided from early on that the use of diacritics and unique characters have no place in local spelling convention. In fact, I regard them as a bane to the language, preventing its popularity from becoming more widespread.

To ensure that Penang Hokkien is easy to write, I decided that the writing system has to be ASCII-based. That means, it can be typed on a standard keyboard, without using accent marks. 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 o·, I use "or". The "or" is the same sound as the English word "or", and most locals have no problem pronouncing this correctly. Thus a word like kor3 (to care) is pronounced /kɔ/. In contrast, most locals would not be able to pronounce ko· correctly without first learning what o· represents.

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, the same way h is used in Malay and English. The Church Romanisation of Hokkien does not use the final h in the same way, which is again another reason 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.

To me, a writing system is more than simply committing to paper what one speaks orally. A writing system is a written language that is different from the spoken one. It is a method 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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Hello and thanks for reading this page. My name is Timothy and my hobby is in describing places so that I can share the information with the general public. My website has become the go to site for a lot of people including students, teachers, journalists, etc. whenever they seek information on places, particularly those in Malaysia and Singapore. I have been doing this since 5 January 2003, for over twenty years already. You can read about me at Discover Timothy. By now I have compiled information on thousands of places, mostly in Peninsular Malaysia and Singapore, and I continue to add more almost every day. My goal is to describe every street in every town in Malaysia and Singapore.

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