Hokkien

terminology

Southern Min 閩南語 bân-lâm-gí

properly speaking, a group of languages which includes other languages than the one in question here, such as Teochew 潮州話 (although in the past this distinction may have been less clear).

Hokkien 福建話

established usage in english, but by its literal geographic denotation ought also to include all of the Fujian, of multiple branches.

Quan–Zhang dialect continuum 泉漳片

probably the most technically-accurate designation for the language, which everyone says is, in each of its local realizations, only a mixture in some proportion of the pronunciation systems of Quanzhou, Zhangzhou, and Xiamen. As hokkienese.com puts it, 「所講的『福建話』是『廈漳泉台番爿…的閩南語』」。

Taiwanese 台語 tâi-gí

this phrase for the Hokkien spoken in Taiwan is convenient in Chinese but horrifically confusing in English. i am averse to the nationalistic implications of taking this region as the most salient horizon of categorization in most use cases, but most recent Hokkien learning materials do focus on the language as spoken in Taiwan.

squaracters 方塊字 fāngkuàizì

AKA hanzi/kanji/hanji/et cetera (my coinage). i favor this as a general designation that includes both those disseminated from the center and those invented to record speech at the periphery. let's get this trending!

Tai–Min characters 台閩字

squaracters used to write Hokkien, some novel and some shared with Mandarin. the MOE's list of 700 recommended characters marks the first thing approaching a standard, and other usages remain not only prevalent, but often defensible on grounds of either greater historical precedent or greater philological accuracy.

POJ 白話字 pe̍h-ōe-jī

AKA Church Romanization, the most venerable and widespread system of Hokkien romanization.

tâi-lô 台羅

the modified form of POJ promoted by the Ministry of Education in Taiwan since 2006. despite its parochialism, i personally favor it over POJ, as i think it cleans up several of the very awkard points of POJ while remaining basically familiar.

Mandarin 官話 guānhuà

collective term for the late imperial official koiné and its contemporary relatives. standardized as pǔtōnghuà 普通話 in Mainland China, as guóyǔ 國語 in Taiwan, and called huáyǔ in Southeast Asia.

Written Vernacular Mandarin 官白 guānbái

the written form of Mandarin.

writing Hokkien

Hokkien plainly has no generally-recognized written standard, though its written history goes back centuries. the following table highlights a few major words i've encountered and how drastically their transcription options can differ.

Paul CockrumCockrum, “Reanalyzing Variation in Written Taiwanese Southern Min.”

proposes an interesting three-way division of camps involved in promoting specific methods of writing Taiwan Minnan in particular, arguing that the situation is not complete chaos, but sensible when viewed in terms of the motivations with which different options are proposed.

1. the "etymologist camp 本字派"i put these chinese glosses in quotation marks because they are not chinese words, but Cockrum's personal coinages in an English-language publication
   
   consists of those whose overriding interest is in associating each spoken morpheme to a predecessor old/classical chinese morpheme with an established character, valuing cognacy over convenience or convention. his main specimen for dissection is Wu Zaiye 吳在野, a total crank who claims that Min represents "Old Chinese," whereas Mandarin is "barbarian Chinese" 胡漢語. the premises of this project are ridiculous and its success thankfully impossible. it's simply not possible to universally associate every morpheme of a sinitic language to a classical root. very many have hopelessly ambiguous roots, or have extra-sinitic, even pre-sinitic origins, or their roots are simply inexplicable—things true also of literary sinitic at any point in its history—and so for such a framework to take off, many familiar characters would have to be replaced with others chosen according to an infinitesimally tenuous pseudo-etymological conceit.

   the fascist manufactured archaism of Wu's claim to a truer chinese identity for Taiwan is also laughable. the story goes that the split between Min and other chinese languages occured much earlier than those between the other languages; Hokkien therefore possesses a systematic distinction between the stratum of colloquial readings (natively inherited from the ancient period) and literary readings (rereceived from government speech in medieval times). this fact entails precisely nothing, as both Min and Mandarin have passed through the same quantity of history and mutation over the last 2,000 years—precisely 2,000 years of it.

2. the "modernist camp 現代派" is represented by the ROC Ministry of Education's list of 700 Taiwan Minnan Recommended Characters 臺灣閩南推薦用字 and subsequent Dictionary of Frequently-Used Taiwan Minnan Terms 臺灣閩南常用詞典, phonetically glossed according to the MOE-released tâi-lô romanization system. these two sources are the closest thing to a state-backed standard Hokkien that has yet existed. the modernist standard generally prioritizes convenience over cognancy or convention—character recommendations are made sometimes on etymological grounds, sometimes on those of existing folk usage, and sometimes merely by borrowing those used in Mandarin, despite there existing neither etymological connexion nor traditional usage. as with the etymologist camp, one can object to novel orthographic suggestions on the grounds that getting anyone to actually adopt them is difficult or impossible, and this is even more true when those suggestions come from an entity which has historically been the organ of linguistic oppression. the ROC's 21st century forays into promoting local (non-Mandarin) languages have overall been half-assed. however, if there is anyone that could succeed in making such prescriptions catch on, it's surely the state, which now produces educational materials and media using this orthography.

3. the "localist camp 當地派" prioritizes pre-ROC taiwanese convention over contemporary convenience or chinese cognates. this is represented in the tai character field 台字田 website, which compiles character recommendations based on the most common variants used in written Hokkien sources that predate the ROC, while steadfastly refusing to list as variants any novel recommendations from the Ministry of Education. if you search for an MOE character, the site will return the historical alternatives, but it will not facilitate the opposite transition. the political thrust of these recommendations is a comically mechanical anti-"chinese" and pro-"taiwanese," anti-ROC and pro-本省人 nationalism. the MOE's semantic borrowing of mandarin characters (你，個，的) is rejected, presumably as a foreign and colonial intrusion, but the katakana レ re—a relic of the japanese colonial imposition of kana as a transcription of Hokkien—is accepted, despite its being flagrantly illegible in any Hokkien-speaking context outside Taiwan. both the tai character field and MOE recommendations employ purely semantic loans from standard (literary or mandarin) chinese, these intrusions differing only in that the ROC's have not yet been stamped by the passage of time with the name of tradition.

   similarly, this camp favors the Protestant POJ romanization to the exclusion of the MOE's tâi-lô. POJ is, in my eyes, an ugly mess and nearly impossible to type or digitally represent. its phonemes include o͘ (o with a tiny raised dot to the right), ⁿ (superscript n), and even its choices of ASCII can be confusing. its tone diacritics are not iconically intuitive like those of pinyin, and one of them is, Heaven alone knows why, a vertical line which you'll be lucky to find a single font on your system that supports. tâi-lô manages to address several of these issues while still remaining readily readable for those familiar with POJ. however, the localist camp tends to promote POJ not only as a phonetic aid for squaracters, but as their equal or superior orthographic alternative, because squaracters strike some in this political vein as too "chinese," and therefore foreign, whether measured on a 75-year or 375-year scale.

while interesting, i want to draw attention to some important ways i find Cockrum's work amateurish and shortsighted. first, he analyzes as a representative of the localist camp the text Gínná Ôngchú 囝仔王子, a Hokkien edition of Le Petit Prince which provides both POJ and the corresponding squaracters recommended by 台字田, including katakana レ for –leh. the editor of this text is Ko An-ióng 高安勇, AKA Aiong of the Aiong Taigi youtube channel, who also runs the 食飽沒 "Tâi-gí" forum, and whose resource and learning guide published thereupon is linked in the sidebar of the r/ohtaigi, the only Hokkien-dedicated subreddit. Aiong is not a native speaker, but an insane pro-Trump transphobe whiteoid ameriKKKan (as is clear from his twitter)—and an advocate of "taiwanese" nationalism who rejects the ROC, anything connected to it, and anything "chinese" whatsoever as an imposition by the evil chinese upon the integral holo people. despite this, according to Cockrum, "the various views and practices that Aiong promotes have received positive reception by at least some members of the community. As such, Aiong’s views can themselves been seen as representative of a portion of the population’s views as well." this is not a valid inference! maybe the conclusion is correct, and "localists" about orthography are generally rabid fascists, but technically speaking, even if each of Aiong's views has been positively received somewhere, we should say his views are represented among the population, not that they are representative of "a portion" (what portion?) of the population.

another text Cockrum questionably chooses to represent the "localists" is the textbook Southern Hokkien: An Introduction by Bernhard Fuehrer and Yang Hsiu-fang. Cockrum notes that the textbook, directed firstly but not exclusively to English-speakers, is published by National Taiwan University, that it takes a descriptive approach to Hokkien as spoken in Taiwan, and that it makes a variant of POJ romanization its first-class means of transcription, relegating characters to the function of a crutch for easing the student's transition from Mandarin. all of these points are true. but it is a wild distortion to claim that the authors' main topic is "Taiwanese, which they call Southern Hokkien" (emphasis added), or that, by providing a Japanese transcription of a Japanese loanword, "this book is promoting a clearly Taiwan-centric view." it's not that the text is Taiwan-centric (as opposed to China-centric), but that Cockrum has adopted a methodologically nationalist, Taiwan-centric (as opposed to transnational or Hokkien-centric) approach to the language, and so made himself unable to even recognize when someone refrains from doing so. Fuehrer has written at lengthBernhard Fuehrer, “Southern Hokkien.”

about the motivation and goals of the textbook he cowrote, which, although published by NTU Press, emerged from the difficulties he encountered using other textbooks to teach Hokkien at SOAS in London. the first of these was the Maryknoll Catholic textbook. that text is aimed not at scholars but at missionaries, who conduct their brainwashing through oral means only, and so it dedicates a great deal of paper to tedious christian terminology but not a square cun to characters. in fact, to my knowledge, there to this day exist no Hokkien-English reference works that do provide character transcriptions. SOAS quickly switched to a second textbook, which used mixed script, was directed at Mandarin speakers, and was lacking in explanatory apparatus. Southern Hokkien: An Introduction developed from the experience of the deficiencies of these texts at SOAS, and through a SOAS–NTU joint project funded by the MOE. the characters in it are chosen etymologically where feasible, and replaced with explicitly marked Mandarin semantic hint-characters or mixed roman script where not. they should be measured as a step taken away from the existing body of Western materials produced for outsiders aiming to speak Hokkien, not situated as a prescriptive contribution to a vernacular writing debate on the terrain of Formosa or anywhere else in Asia. unlike the tai character field, they do not follow pre-ROC precedent, and many of them would be baffling if considered for written communication. the text present the Hokkien spoken in Taiwan as distinctive to a regional or national entity. pronunciations are distinguished according to Zhangzhou, Quanzhou, and Amoy dialects, with (median, southern) Taiwan pronunciation as merely the highlighted permutation of these mainland-derived options. the text goes out of its way to include in its dialogues a character who employs Amoy pronunciation and vocabulary, and occasionally offers mainland or Malaysian Hokkien alternatives to Taiwan-specific terms. again, the choice of a POJ variant is here not a signal of taiwanese nativism, but an inheritance from previous English-language learning materials, and unlike the tâi-lô alternative can claim international historical relevance.

as an alternative exemplar of what Cockrum calls the localist camp,how about "common law camp"?

i offer Lañitri Kirinputra'stwitter: KIRINPUTRA, bluesky: kirinputra.bsky.social

essay "Confessions of an Ex-Hokkien Creationist" over at Language Log.Kirinputra, “Confessions of an Ex-Hokkien Creationist.”

retrospectively rejecting the basis of the project of orthographic reform, viz. that pre-ROC written Hokkien was an inconsistent mess of no use to us in the present, the author argues that consistent conventions did obtain in texts from the 16th to 20th centuries, between Lâm-kuán-hì 南管戲 drama manuals and the subsequent Kua-á-tsheh 歌仔冊 rhyming storybooks. for Kirinputra, "creationists" (members of either of the other two camps) have a 中文-centrism which determines their priorities thus: use a good Middle Chinese cognate if possible, then fall back to a sketchy cognate, then fall back to a semantic loan from Mandarin, so long as it saves one from using a phonetic loan, even one with precedent. the alternative is not Taiwan-centrism but Hokkien-centrism, which was the principle of pre-ROC orthography. my question: why not compromise by taking the pre-ROC phonetic loan and adding a disambiguating semantic radical, resulting in a proper 中式 phono-semantic compound? isn't this basically what the MOE choice of 睏 over 困 (see table above) amounts to?

what kind of character choices should we make if we wish to avoid the political limitations that attach to the proposals of each of Taiwan's three camps? ideally, i would like to see a reference work analogous to the tai character field but which does not limit itself to one region, including usages from mainland China, Taiwan, SEA, et cetera, and whenever possible making recommendations that everyone can understand (not katakana!). i would also like to see analysis of online contexts where people have to find ways to get around these issues already. in the meantime, it seems like there's license to be a bit ad hoc about one's choices. even if the recommendations of the ROC MOE have limited geographical purchase, i find tâi-lô a worthwhile revision of POJ, and some or most of their character suggestions agreeable defaults (囡仔 is woke and better than 囝仔 because it has a woman component). however, the several new Mandarin semantic loans seem to me inferior to the more obviously Hokkien alternatives (汝 beats 你 for the same reason). for now, i'll keep referencing both MOE and 台字田, and maybe at some point another tool will present itself that corrects for their limitations.

textbooks

resources

webpages and software