Taiwanese kana (,

Pe̍h-ōe-jī (; ; ), also sometimes known as the Church Romanization, is an orthography used to write variants of Southern Min Chinese, particularly Taiwanese and Amoy Hokkien. Developed by Western missionaries working among the Chinese diaspora in Sout ...

: "tâi oân gí ká biêng", IPA : ) is a

katakana is a Japanese syllabary, one component of the Japanese writing system along with hiragana, kanji and in some cases the Latin script (known as rōmaji). The word ''katakana'' means "fragmentary kana", as the katakana characters are derived f ...

-based writing system that was used to write Taiwanese Hokkien (commonly called "Taiwanese") when the

island of Taiwan Taiwan, officially the Republic of China (ROC), is an island country located in East Asia. The main island of Taiwan, formerly known in the Western political circles, press and literature as Formosa, makes up 99% of the land area of the territor ...

was under Japanese rule. It functioned as a phonetic guide to hanzi, much like

furigana is a Japanese reading aid consisting of smaller kana or syllabic characters printed either above or next to kanji (logographic characters) or other characters to indicate their pronunciation. It is one type of ruby text. Furigana is also kn ...

in Japanese or

Zhuyin fuhao Bopomofo (), or Mandarin Phonetic Symbols, also named Zhuyin (), is a Chinese transliteration system for Mandarin Chinese and other related languages and dialects. More commonly used in Taiwanese Mandarin, it may also be used to transcribe ...

in Chinese. There were similar systems for other languages in Taiwan as well, including

Hakka The Hakka (), sometimes also referred to as Hakka Han, or Hakka Chinese, or Hakkas are a Han Chinese subgroup whose ancestral homes are chiefly in the Hakka-speaking provincial areas of Guangdong, Fujian, Jiangxi, Guangxi, Sichuan, Hunan, Zhej ...

and Formosan languages. The system was imposed by Japan at the time and used in a few dictionaries, as well as textbooks. The Taiwanese-Japanese Dictionary, published in 1931–32, is an example. It uses various signs and

diacritic A diacritic (also diacritical mark, diacritical point, diacritical sign, or accent) is a glyph added to a letter or to a basic glyph. The term derives from the Ancient Greek (, "distinguishing"), from (, "to distinguish"). The word ''diacrit ...

s to identify sounds that do not exist in Japanese. The system is chiefly based on the Amoy dialect of

Hokkien The Hokkien () variety of Chinese is a Southern Min language native to and originating from the Minnan region, where it is widely spoken in the south-eastern part of Fujian in southeastern mainland China. It is one of the national languages ...

. Through the system, the Office of the Governor-General of Taiwan aimed to help Taiwanese people learn the Japanese language, as well as help

Japanese people The are an East Asian ethnic group native to the Japanese archipelago."人類学上は，旧石器時代あるいは縄文時代以来，現在の北海道〜沖縄諸島（南西諸島）に住んだ集団を祖先にもつ人々。" () Ja ...

learn the Taiwanese language. Linguistically speaking, however, the syllabary system was cumbersome for a language that has

phonology Phonology is the branch of linguistics that studies how languages or dialects systematically organize their sounds or, for sign languages, their constituent parts of signs. The term can also refer specifically to the sound or sign system of a ...

far more complicated than Japanese. After Japanese administration ended, the system soon became obsolete. Now, only a few scholars, such as those who study the aforementioned dictionary, learn Taiwanese kana. The system has undergone some modification over time. This article is mainly about the last edition, used from roughly 1931.

Basic rules

Mapped sounds are mostly similar to

in Japanese, with the kana , , , , , and not used. Each syllable is written with two or three kana (with a few exceptions). Notable differences include:

Vowels

* There are six vowels in Taiwanese: , , , , , . Note that the pronunciations of ,, and are different from Japanese (which are respectively.) * The vowel is pronounced in the diphthongs and , also their extensions such as , . In some dialects may be pronounced or . * In syllables with a single vowel, the kana for the vowel is repeated, like the long vowels in Japanese. For example, , , , . * The small kana , , , , , are defined as short vowels. They are used to represent the second vowel in the middle of a syllable, or a final glottal stop. For example, , for , . * There are two optional vowel kana for Choâⁿ-chiu accent ( Quanzhou dialect): and . For example, , , .

Consonants

* is pronounced , not as in Japanese. * There are five overlined kana to distinguish and /. , , , , ''or'' . : * The aspirated consonants , , , / are represented by adding an underdot to the kana. For example, for . * Final

nasal consonants In phonetics, a nasal, also called a nasal occlusive or nasal stop in contrast with an oral stop or nasalized consonant, is an occlusive consonant produced with a lowered velum, allowing air to escape freely through the nose. The vast major ...

are written as , , . Note that , are pronounced , when they are used as initials. For example, , for . * The syllabic consonant is spelt (u+), for example ŋ̍ Note that without a preceding vowel is written as a single , not or . * The syllabic consonant is spelt (u+), for example . Note that without a preceding vowel is written as a single , not or . * Initial is spelt as with a nasal tone sign. For example, , . * Final plosives (which have no audible release) are , , , similar to the kana used in Ainu. * Final glottal stops are represented by the short-vowel small kana (, , , , , ) at the end. For example, , .

Tone signs

There are different tone signs for normal vowels and nasal vowels. : * When a text is written vertically, these signs are written on the right side of letters. Taiwanese kana is only attested in vertical orientation, so it is unknown where the signs would be placed if it were written horizontally. * Initial consonants , , are always written with nasal vowel tone signs, whereas , , are always with normal vowels. Note that and share the same initial kana.

Taiwanese kana chart

Rime chart

Syllable chart

# Tone signs are always needed for a syllable. # always takes normal vowel tone signs; , , always take nasal vowel tone signs. # Some spellings are not clear. 仔(á) was sometimes written as rather than . 的(ê) was sometimes written as rather than . # is spelt with , such as in , , , , and so on.

Example

Unicode support

Amongst

software Software is a set of computer programs and associated documentation and data. This is in contrast to hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work. At the lowest programming level, executable code consist ...

/ encodings, Mojikyo fully supports the system. Unicode has been able to represent small ku () and small pu () since Unicode 3.2, small katakana wo () since Unicode 12.0, and tone signs since Unicode 14.0 (2021). It also requires the use of the combining overline and combining dot below with kana to represent overlined and underdotted kana (like so: ). Font support for these small kana and for sensible rendering of these uncommon combining sequences is in practice limited; overlines and less well-supported small kana are simulated in the tables below using markup.