( ; , , ; POJ), also known as Church Romanization, is an
orthography
An orthography is a set of convention (norm), conventions for writing a language, including norms of spelling, punctuation, Word#Word boundaries, word boundaries, capitalization, hyphenation, and Emphasis (typography), emphasis.
Most national ...
used to write variants of
Hokkien
Hokkien ( , ) is a Varieties of Chinese, variety of the Southern Min group of Chinese language, Chinese languages. Native to and originating from the Minnan region in the southeastern part of Fujian in southeastern China, it is also referred ...
Southern Min,
particularly
Taiwanese and
Amoy Hokkien, and it is widely employed as one of the writing systems for Southern Min. During its peak, it had hundreds of thousands of readers.
Developed by Western
missionaries working among the
Chinese diaspora in
Southeast Asia
Southeast Asia is the geographical United Nations geoscheme for Asia#South-eastern Asia, southeastern region of Asia, consisting of the regions that are situated south of China, east of the Indian subcontinent, and northwest of the Mainland Au ...
in the 19th century and refined by missionaries working in
Xiamen and
Tainan
Tainan (), officially Tainan City, is a Special municipality (Taiwan), special municipality in southern Taiwan, facing the Taiwan Strait on its western coast. Tainan is the oldest city on the island and commonly called the "Taiwan Prefecture, ...
, it uses a modified
Latin alphabet
The Latin alphabet, also known as the Roman alphabet, is the collection of letters originally used by the Ancient Rome, ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered except several letters splitting—i.e. from , and from � ...
and some
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 represent the spoken language. After initial success in
Fujian
Fujian is a provinces of China, province in East China, southeastern China. Fujian is bordered by Zhejiang to the north, Jiangxi to the west, Guangdong to the south, and the Taiwan Strait to the east. Its capital is Fuzhou and its largest prefe ...
, POJ became most widespread in
Taiwan
Taiwan, officially the Republic of China (ROC), is a country in East Asia. The main geography of Taiwan, island of Taiwan, also known as ''Formosa'', lies between the East China Sea, East and South China Seas in the northwestern Pacific Ocea ...
and, in the mid-20th century, there were over 100,000 people literate in POJ. A large amount of printed material, religious and secular, has been produced in the script, including
Taiwan
Taiwan, officially the Republic of China (ROC), is a country in East Asia. The main geography of Taiwan, island of Taiwan, also known as ''Formosa'', lies between the East China Sea, East and South China Seas in the northwestern Pacific Ocea ...
's first newspaper, the ''
Taiwan Church News''.
During
Japanese rule (1895–1945), the use of was suppressed and
Taiwanese kana encouraged; it faced further suppression during the
Kuomintang
The Kuomintang (KMT) is a major political party in the Republic of China (Taiwan). It was the one party state, sole ruling party of the country Republic of China (1912-1949), during its rule from 1927 to 1949 in Mainland China until Retreat ...
martial law period (1947–1987). In Fujian, use declined after the establishment of the
People's Republic of China
China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. With population of China, a population exceeding 1.4 billion, it is the list of countries by population (United Nations), second-most populous country after ...
(1949) and by the early 21st century the system was not in general use there. However, Taiwanese
Christians
A Christian () is a person who follows or adheres to Christianity, a monotheistic Abrahamic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus Christ. Christians form the largest religious community in the world. The words '' Christ'' and ''C ...
, non-native learners of Southern Min, and native-speaker enthusiasts in Taiwan are among those that continue to use . Full computer support was achieved in 2004 with the release of
Unicode
Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...
4.1.0, and POJ is now implemented in many
font
In metal typesetting, a font is a particular size, weight and style of a ''typeface'', defined as the set of fonts that share an overall design.
For instance, the typeface Bauer Bodoni (shown in the figure) includes fonts " Roman" (or "regul ...
s,
input methods, and is used in extensive online dictionaries.
Versions of have been devised for other Southern
Chinese varieties, including
Hakka and
Teochew Southern Min. Other related scripts include for
Hakka, for
Hainanese, for
Fuzhou
Fuzhou is the capital of Fujian, China. The city lies between the Min River (Fujian), Min River estuary to the south and the city of Ningde to the north. Together, Fuzhou and Ningde make up the Eastern Min, Mindong linguistic and cultural regi ...
, for
Teochew, for
Northern Min, and for
Pu-Xian Min.
In 2006, the
Taiwanese Romanization System (), a government-sponsored successor based on , was released. Despite this, native language education, and writing systems for Taiwanese, have remained a fiercely debated topic in Taiwan.
POJ laid the foundation for the creation of new literature in Taiwan. Before the 1920s, many people had already written literary works in POJ, contributing significantly to the preservation of Southern Min vocabulary since the late 19th century. On October 14, 2006, the Ministry of Education in Taiwan announced the Taiwanese Romanization System or based on POJ as the standard spelling system for Southern Min.
Name
The name ( zh, t=白話字, p=Báihuà zì) means "vernacular writing", written characters representing everyday spoken language. The name ''vernacular writing'' could be applied to many kinds of writing, romanized and character-based, but the term is commonly restricted to the
Southern Min romanization system developed by
Presbyterian
Presbyterianism is a historically Reformed Protestant tradition named for its form of church government by representative assemblies of elders, known as "presbyters". Though other Reformed churches are structurally similar, the word ''Pr ...
missionaries in the 19th century.
The missionaries who invented and refined the system used, instead of the name , various other terms, such as "Romanized
Amoy Vernacular" and "Romanized Amoy Colloquial." The origins of the system and its extensive use in the Christian community have led to it being known by some modern writers as "Church Romanization" ( zh, t=教會羅馬字, poj=Kàu-hōe Lô-má-jī , labels=no; zh, p=Jiàohuì Luōmǎzì, labels=no) and is often abbreviated in POJ itself to . ( zh, t=教羅, p=Jiàoluō, labels=no) There is some debate on whether "" or "Church Romanization" is the more appropriate name.
Objections to the name are that it can refer to more than one system and that both
literary and colloquial register Southern Min appear in the system and so describing it as "vernacular" writing might be inaccurate. Objections to "Church Romanization" are that some non-Christians and some secular writing use it. POJ today is largely disassociated from its former religious purpose. The term "romanization" is also disliked by some, who see it as belittling the status of by identifying it as a supplementary phonetic system instead of a standalone orthography.
History
The history of has been heavily influenced by official attitudes towards the Southern Min vernaculars and the Christian organizations that propagated it. Early documents point to the purpose of the creation of POJ as being pedagogical in nature, closely allied to educating
Christian converts.
Early development
The first people to use a romanized script to write Southern Min were Spanish missionaries in
Manila
Manila, officially the City of Manila, is the Capital of the Philippines, capital and second-most populous city of the Philippines after Quezon City, with a population of 1,846,513 people in 2020. Located on the eastern shore of Manila Bay on ...
in the 16th century. However, it was used mainly as a teaching aid for Spanish learners of Southern Min, and seems not to have had any influence on the development of . In the early 19th century, China was closed to
Christian missionaries, who instead proselytized to
overseas Chinese communities in
South East Asia
Southeast Asia is the geographical United Nations geoscheme for Asia#South-eastern Asia, southeastern region of Asia, consisting of the regions that are situated south of China, east of the Indian subcontinent, and northwest of the Mainland Au ...
. The earliest origins of the system are found in a small vocabulary first printed in 1820 by
Walter Henry Medhurst, who went on to publish the ''Dictionary of the Dialect of the Chinese Language, According to the Reading and Colloquial Idioms'' in 1832.
This dictionary represents the first major reference work in POJ, although the romanization within was quite different from the modern system, and has been dubbed ''Early Church Romanization'' by one scholar of the subject. Medhurst, who was stationed in
Malacca, was influenced by
Robert Morrison's romanization of
Mandarin Chinese
Mandarin ( ; zh, s=, t=, p=Guānhuà, l=Mandarin (bureaucrat), officials' speech) is the largest branch of the Sinitic languages. Mandarin varieties are spoken by 70 percent of all Chinese speakers over a large geographical area that stretch ...
, but had to innovate in several areas to reflect major differences between Mandarin and Southern Min. Several important developments occurred in Medhurst's work, especially the application of consistent tone markings (influenced by contemporary linguistic studies of
Sanskrit
Sanskrit (; stem form ; nominal singular , ,) is a classical language belonging to the Indo-Aryan languages, Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages. It arose in northwest South Asia after its predecessor languages had Trans-cultural ...
, which was becoming of more mainstream interest to Western scholars). Medhurst was convinced that accurate representation and reproduction of the tonal structure of Southern Min was vital to comprehension:

The system expounded by Medhurst influenced later dictionary compilers with regard to tonal notation and initials, but both his complicated vowel system and his emphasis on the literary register of Southern Min were dropped by later writers. Following on from Medhurst's work,
Samuel Wells Williams became the chief proponent of major changes in the orthography devised by Morrison and adapted by Medhurst. Through personal communication and letters and articles printed in ''The Chinese Repository'' a consensus was arrived at for the new version of POJ, although Williams' suggestions were largely not followed.
The first major work to represent this new orthography was
Elihu Doty's ''Anglo-Chinese Manual with Romanized Colloquial in the Amoy Dialect'', published in 1853. The manual can therefore be regarded as the first presentation of a pre-modern POJ, a significant step onwards from Medhurst's orthography and different from today's system in only a few details. From this point on various authors adjusted some of the consonants and vowels, but the system of tone marks from Doty's ''Manual'' survives intact in modern POJ.
John Van Nest Talmage has traditionally been regarded as the founder of POJ among the community which uses the orthography, although it now seems that he was an early promoter of the system, rather than its inventor.
In 1842 the
Treaty of Nanking was concluded, which included among its provisions the creation of
treaty ports in which Christian missionaries would be free to preach.
Xiamen (then known as Amoy) was one of these treaty ports, and British, Canadian and American missionaries moved in to start preaching to the local inhabitants. These missionaries, housed in the cantonment of
Gulangyu, created reference works and religious tracts, including a
bible translation. Naturally, they based the pronunciation of their romanization on the speech of Xiamen, which became the de facto standard when they eventually moved into other areas of the Hokkien
Sprachraum, most notably Taiwan. The 1858
Treaty of Tianjin officially opened Taiwan to western missionaries, and missionary societies were quick to send men to work in the field, usually after a sojourn in Xiamen to acquire the rudiments of the language.
Maturity
Quanzhou
Quanzhou is a prefecture-level city, prefecture-level port city on the north bank of the Jin River, beside the Taiwan Strait in southern Fujian, China, People's Republic of China. It is Fujian's largest most populous metropolitan region, wi ...
and
Zhangzhou are two major varieties of Southern Min, and in Xiamen they combined to form something "not Quan, not Zhang" – i.e. not one or the other, but rather a fusion, which became known as ''Amoy Dialect'' or ''Amoy Chinese''. In Taiwan, with its mixture of migrants from both Quanzhou and Zhangzhou, the linguistic situation was similar; although the resulting blend in the southern city of
Tainan
Tainan (), officially Tainan City, is a Special municipality (Taiwan), special municipality in southern Taiwan, facing the Taiwan Strait on its western coast. Tainan is the oldest city on the island and commonly called the "Taiwan Prefecture, ...
differed from the Xiamen blend, it was close enough that the missionaries could ignore the differences and import their system wholesale.
The fact that religious tracts, dictionaries, and teaching guides already existed in the Xiamen tongue meant that the missionaries in Taiwan could begin proselytizing immediately, without the intervening time needed to write those materials.
Missionary opinion was divided on whether POJ was desirable as an end in itself as a full-fledged orthography, or as a means to literacy in
Chinese characters
Chinese characters are logographs used Written Chinese, to write the Chinese languages and others from regions historically influenced by Chinese culture. Of the four independently invented writing systems accepted by scholars, they represe ...
.
William Campbell described POJ as a step on the road to reading and writing the characters, claiming that to promote it as an independent writing system would inflame nationalist passions in China, where characters were considered a sacred part of Chinese culture. Taking the other side,
Thomas Barclay believed that literacy in POJ should be a goal rather than a
waypoint:
A great boon to the promotion of POJ in Taiwan came in 1880 when
James Laidlaw Maxwell, a medical missionary based in
Tainan
Tainan (), officially Tainan City, is a Special municipality (Taiwan), special municipality in southern Taiwan, facing the Taiwan Strait on its western coast. Tainan is the oldest city on the island and commonly called the "Taiwan Prefecture, ...
, started promoting POJ for writing the Bible, hymns, newspapers, and magazines. He donated a small printing press to the local church,
which
Thomas Barclay learned how to operate in 1881 before founding the Presbyterian Church Press in 1884. Subsequently, the ''
Taiwan Prefectural City Church News'', which first appeared in 1885 and was produced by Barclay's Presbyterian Church of Taiwan Press,
[ became the first printed newspaper in Taiwan, marking the establishment of POJ in Taiwan, giving rise to numerous literary works written in POJ.]
As other authors made their own alterations to the conventions laid down by Medhurst and Doty, evolved and eventually settled into its current form. Ernest Tipson's 1934 pocket dictionary was the first reference work to reflect this modern spelling. Between Medhurst's dictionary of 1832 and the standardization of POJ in Tipson's time, there were a number of works published, which can be used to chart the change over time of :
Competition for POJ was introduced during the Japanese era in Taiwan (1895–1945) in the form of Taiwanese kana, a system designed as a teaching aid and pronunciation guide, rather than an independent orthography like POJ.
During the Japanese rule period, the Japanese government began suppressing POJ, banning classes, and forcing the cessation of publications like the ''Taiwan Church News''. From the 1930s onwards, with the increasing militarization of Japan and the movement encouraging Taiwanese people to " Japanize", there were a raft of measures taken against native languages, including Taiwanese. While these moves resulted in a suppression of POJ, they were "a logical consequence of increasing the amount of education in Japanese, rather than an explicit attempt to ban a particular Taiwanese orthography in favor of Taiwanese kana".
The Second Sino-Japanese War
The Second Sino-Japanese War was fought between the Republic of China (1912–1949), Republic of China and the Empire of Japan between 1937 and 1945, following a period of war localized to Manchuria that started in 1931. It is considered part ...
beginning in 1937 brought stricter measures into force, and along with the outlawing of romanized Taiwanese, various publications were prohibited and Confucian-style ( zh, t=書房, p=shūfáng, poj=su-pâng) – private schools which taught Classical Chinese
Classical Chinese is the language in which the classics of Chinese literature were written, from . For millennia thereafter, the written Chinese used in these works was imitated and iterated upon by scholars in a form now called Literary ...
with literary Southern Min pronunciation – were closed down in 1939. The Japanese authorities came to perceive POJ as an obstacle to Japanization and also suspected that POJ was being used to hide "concealed codes and secret revolutionary messages". In the climate of the ongoing war the government banned the ''Taiwan Church News'' in 1942 as it was written in POJ.
After World War II
Initially the Kuomintang
The Kuomintang (KMT) is a major political party in the Republic of China (Taiwan). It was the one party state, sole ruling party of the country Republic of China (1912-1949), during its rule from 1927 to 1949 in Mainland China until Retreat ...
government in Taiwan had a liberal attitude towards "local dialects" (i.e. non-Mandarin varieties of Chinese). The National Languages Committee produced booklets outlining versions of Zhuyin fuhao for writing the Taiwanese tongue, these being intended for newly arrived government officials from outside Taiwan as well as local Taiwanese. The first government action against native languages came in 1953, when the use of Taiwanese or Japanese for instruction was forbidden. The next move to suppress the movement came in 1955, when the use of POJ for proselytizing was outlawed. At that point in time there were 115,000 people literate in POJ in Taiwan, Fujian, and southeast Asia.
Two years later, missionaries were banned from using romanized bibles, and the use of "native languages" (i.e. Taiwanese Hokkien, Hakka, and the non-Sinitic Formosan languages
The Formosan languages are a geographic grouping comprising the languages of the indigenous peoples of Taiwan, all of which are Austronesian. They do not form a single subfamily of Austronesian but rather up to nine separate primary subfamili ...
) in church work became illegal. The ban on POJ bibles was overturned in 1959, but churches were "encouraged" to use character bibles instead. Government activities against POJ intensified in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when several publications were banned or seized in an effort to prevent the spread of the romanization. In 1964, use of Taiwanese in schools or official settings was forbidden, and transgression in schools was punished with beatings, fines and humiliation. The ''Taiwan Church News'' (printed in POJ) was banned in 1969, and only allowed to return a year later when the publishers agreed to print it in Chinese characters
Chinese characters are logographs used Written Chinese, to write the Chinese languages and others from regions historically influenced by Chinese culture. Of the four independently invented writing systems accepted by scholars, they represe ...
. In the 1970s, the Nationalist government in Taiwan completely prohibited the use of POJ, causing it to decline.
In 1974, the Government Information Office
The Government Information Office, Executive Yuan (GIO; ) was a cabinet-level agency of the Executive Yuan of Taiwan, Taiwan (the Republic of China) in charge of promoting government policies and regulating media in Taiwan, domestic media.
Histo ...
banned '' A Dictionary of Southern Min'', with a government official saying: "We have no objection to the dictionary being used by foreigners. They could use it in mimeographed form. But we don't want it published as a book and sold publicly because of the Romanization it contains. Chinese should not be learning Chinese through Romanization." Also in the 1970s, a POJ New Testament
The New Testament (NT) is the second division of the Christian biblical canon. It discusses the teachings and person of Jesus in Christianity, Jesus, as well as events relating to Christianity in the 1st century, first-century Christianit ...
translation known as the "Red Cover Bible" () was confiscated and banned by the Nationalist regime. Official moves against native languages continued into the 1980s, the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of the Interior decided in 1984 to forbid missionaries to use "local dialects" and romanizations in their work.
It was not until the late 1980s, with the lifting of martial law, that POJ slowly regained momentum under the influence of the native language movement. With the ending of martial law in 1987, the restrictions on "local languages" were quietly lifted, resulting in growing interest in Taiwanese writing during the 1990s. For the first time since the 1950s, Taiwanese language and literature was discussed and debated openly in newspapers and journals. There was also support from the then opposition party, the Democratic Progressive Party, for writing in the language. From a total of 26 documented orthographies for Taiwanese in 1987 (including defunct systems), there were a further 38 invented from 1987 to 1999, including 30 different romanizations, six adaptations of bopomofo and two hangul
The Korean alphabet is the modern writing system for the Korean language. In North Korea, the alphabet is known as (), and in South Korea, it is known as (). The letters for the five basic consonants reflect the shape of the speech organs ...
-like systems. Some commentators believe that the Kuomintang, while steering clear of outright banning of the native language movements after the end of martial law, took a "divide and conquer" approach by promoting Taiwanese Language Phonetic Alphabet (TLPA), an alternative to POJ, which was at the time the choice of the majority within the nativization movement.
Native language education has remained a fiercely debated topic in Taiwan into the 21st century and is the subject of much political wrangling.
Current system
The current system of has been stable since the 1930s, with a few minor exceptions (detailed below). There is a fair degree of similarity with the Vietnamese alphabet
The Vietnamese alphabet (, ) is the modern writing script for the Vietnamese language. It uses the Latin script based on Romance languages like French language, French, originally developed by Francisco de Pina (1585–1625), a missionary from P ...
, including the distinction and the use of in Vietnamese compared with in POJ. POJ uses the following letters and combinations:
Chinese phonology traditionally divides syllables in Chinese into three parts; firstly the ''initial'', a consonant or consonant blend which appears at the beginning of the syllable, secondly the ''final'', consisting of a ''medial vowel'' (optional), a ''nucleus vowel'', and an optional ''ending''; and finally the tone, which is applied to the whole syllable. In terms of the non-tonal (i.e. phonemic) features, the ''nucleus vowel'' is the only required part of a licit syllable in Chinese varieties. Unlike Mandarin but like other southern varieties of Chinese, Taiwanese has final stop consonant
In phonetics, a plosive, also known as an occlusive or simply a stop, is a pulmonic consonant in which the vocal tract is blocked so that all airflow ceases.
The occlusion may be made with the tongue tip or blade (, ), tongue body (, ), lip ...
s with no audible release, a feature that has been preserved from Middle Chinese
Middle Chinese (formerly known as Ancient Chinese) or the Qieyun system (QYS) is the historical variety of Chinese language, Chinese recorded in the ''Qieyun'', a rime dictionary first published in 601 and followed by several revised and expande ...
. There is some debate as to whether these stops are a tonal feature or a phonemic one, with some authorities distinguishing between as a tonal feature, and , , and as phonemic features. Southern Min dialects also have an optional nasal property, which is written with a superscript and usually identified as being part of the vowel. Vowel nasalisation also occurs in words that have nasal initials (⟨m-⟩, ⟨n-⟩, ⟨ng-⟩), however in this case superscript is not written, e.g. (). The letter appears at the end of a word except in some interjections, such as (), however more conservative users of Pe̍h-ōe-jī write such words as .
A valid syllable in Hokkien takes the form (initial) + (medial vowel) + nucleus + (stop) + tone
, where items in parentheses indicate optional components.
The initials are:
Vowels:
Coda endings:
POJ has a limited amount of legitimate syllables, although sources disagree on some particular instances of these syllables. The following table contains all the licit spellings of POJ syllables, based on a number of sources:
Tone markings
In standard Amoy or Taiwanese Hokkien there are seven distinct tones, which by convention are numbered 1–8, with number 6 omitted (tone 6 used to be a distinct tone, but has long since merged with tone 7 or 2 depending on lexical register). Tones 1 and 4 are both represented without a 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 ...
, and can be distinguished from each other by the syllable ending, which is a vowel, , , or for tone 1, and , , , and for tone 4.
Southern Min dialects undergo considerable tone sandhi, i.e. changes to the tone depending on the position of the syllable in any given sentence or utterance. However, like pinyin
Hanyu Pinyin, or simply pinyin, officially the Chinese Phonetic Alphabet, is the most common romanization system for Standard Chinese. ''Hanyu'' () literally means 'Han Chinese, Han language'—that is, the Chinese language—while ''pinyin' ...
for Mandarin Chinese
Mandarin ( ; zh, s=, t=, p=Guānhuà, l=Mandarin (bureaucrat), officials' speech) is the largest branch of the Sinitic languages. Mandarin varieties are spoken by 70 percent of all Chinese speakers over a large geographical area that stretch ...
, POJ always marks the citation tone (i.e. the original, pre-sandhi tone) rather than the tone which is actually spoken. This means that when reading aloud the reader must adjust the tone markings on the page to account for sandhi. Some textbooks for learners of Southern Min mark both the citation tone and the sandhi tone to assist the learner.
There is some debate as to the correct placement of tone marks in the case of diphthong
A diphthong ( ), also known as a gliding vowel or a vowel glide, is a combination of two adjacent vowel sounds within the same syllable. Technically, a diphthong is a vowel with two different targets: that is, the tongue (and/or other parts of ...
s and triphthongs, particularly those which include and . Most modern writers follow six rules:
#If the syllable has one vowel, that vowel should be tone-marked; viz. , ,
#If a diphthong contains or , the tone mark goes above the ''other'' vowel; viz. , ,
#If a diphthong includes both and , mark the ; viz. ,
#If the ''final'' is made up of three or more letters, mark the second vowel (except when rules 2 and 3 apply); viz. , ,
#If occurs with or , mark the (except when rule 4 applies); viz. ,
#If the syllable has no vowel, mark the nasal consonant; viz. , ,
Hyphens
A single hyphen is used to indicate a compound. What constitutes a compound is controversial, with some authors equating it to a "word" in English, and others not willing to limit it to the English concept of a word. Examples from POJ include "forty", "circus", and "recover (from illness)". The non-final syllables of a compound typically undergo tone sandhi, but exact rules have not been clearly identified by linguists.
A double hyphen is used when POJ is deployed as an orthography (rather than as a transcription system) to indicate that the following syllable should be pronounced in the neutral tone. It also marks to the reader that the preceding syllable does not undergo tone sandhi, as it would were the following syllable non-neutral. Morpheme
A morpheme is any of the smallest meaningful constituents within a linguistic expression and particularly within a word. Many words are themselves standalone morphemes, while other words contain multiple morphemes; in linguistic terminology, this ...
s following a double hyphen are often (but not always) grammatical function words. Some authors use an interpunct
An interpunct , also known as an interpoint, middle dot, middot, centered dot or centred dot, is a punctuation mark consisting of a vertically centered dot used for interword separation in Classical Latin. ( Word-separating spaces did not appe ...
in place of the second hyphen.
Audio examples
Regional differences
In addition to the standard syllables detailed above, there are several regional variations of Hokkien which can be represented with non-standard or semi-standard spellings. In the Zhangzhou-type varieties, spoken in Zhangzhou, parts of Taiwan (particularly the northeastern coast around Yilan City
Yilan City (Taiwanese Mandarin, Mandarin pinyin: ''Yílán Shì''; Hokkien Pe̍h-ōe-jī, POJ: ''Gî-lân-chhī'') is a county-administered city and the county seat of Yilan County, Taiwan, Yilan County, Taiwan. The city lies on the north side o ...
), and parts of Malaysia
Malaysia is a country in Southeast Asia. Featuring the Tanjung Piai, southernmost point of continental Eurasia, it is a federation, federal constitutional monarchy consisting of States and federal territories of Malaysia, 13 states and thre ...
(particularly in Penang), there is a final , for example in "egg" and "cooked rice" , which has merged with in mainstream Taiwanese. Zhangzhou-type varieties may also have the vowel / ɛ/, written as [Tan Siew Imm. ''Penang Hokkien-English Dictionary, With an English-Penang Hokkien Glossary.'' Sunway University Press, 2016]
pp. iv–v.
or (with a dot above right, by analogy with ), which has merged with in Taiwanese.
Texts
Due to POJ's origins in the Christian church, much of the material in the script is religious in nature, including several Bible translations, books of hymns, and guides to morality. The Tainan Church Press, established in 1884, has been printing POJ materials ever since, with periods of quiet when POJ was suppressed in the early 1940s and from around 1955 to 1987. In the period to 1955, over 2.3 million volumes of POJ books were printed, and one study in 2002 catalogued 840 different POJ texts in existence. Besides a Southern Min version of Wikipedia in the orthography, there are teaching materials, religious texts, and books about linguistics, medicine and geography.
* (1873 translation of the New Testament
The New Testament (NT) is the second division of the Christian biblical canon. It discusses the teachings and person of Jesus in Christianity, Jesus, as well as events relating to Christianity in the 1st century, first-century Christianit ...
)
* , by George Gushue-Taylor, 1917
*'' Chinese–English dictionary of the vernacular or spoken language of Amoy'', by Carstairs Douglas, 1873
* , translation of King Lear
''The Tragedy of King Lear'', often shortened to ''King Lear'', is a Shakespearean tragedy, tragedy written by William Shakespeare. It is loosely based on the mythological Leir of Britain. King Lear, in preparation for his old age, divides his ...
by Tē Hūi-hun
Computing
POJ was initially not well supported by word-processing applications due to the special diacritics needed to write it. Support has now improved and there are now sufficient resources to both enter and display POJ correctly. Several input methods exist to enter Unicode
Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...
-compliant POJ, including OpenVanilla (macOS
macOS, previously OS X and originally Mac OS X, is a Unix, Unix-based operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 2001. It is the current operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. With ...
and Microsoft Windows
Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...
), the cross-platform
Within computing, cross-platform software (also called multi-platform software, platform-agnostic software, or platform-independent software) is computer software that is designed to work in several Computing platform, computing platforms. Some ...
Tai-lo Input Method released by the Taiwanese Ministry of Education, and the Firefox
Mozilla Firefox, or simply Firefox, is a free and open-source web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation. It uses the Gecko rendering engine to display web pages, which implements curr ...
add-on Transliterator, which allows in-browser POJ input. When POJ was first used in word-processing applications it was not fully supported by the Unicode standard, thus necessitating work-arounds. One employed was encoding the necessary characters in the "Private Use" section of Unicode, but this required both the writer and the reader to have the correct custom font installed. Another solution was to replace troublesome characters with near equivalents, for example substituting for or using a standard followed by an interpunct
An interpunct , also known as an interpoint, middle dot, middot, centered dot or centred dot, is a punctuation mark consisting of a vertically centered dot used for interword separation in Classical Latin. ( Word-separating spaces did not appe ...
to represent . With the introduction into Unicode 4.1.0 of the combining character
In digital typography, combining characters are Character (computing), characters that are intended to modify other characters. The most common combining characters in the Latin script are the combining diacritic, diacritical marks (including c ...
in 2004, all the necessary characters were present to write regular POJ without the need for workarounds. However, even after the addition of these characters, there are still relatively few fonts which are able to properly render the script, including the combining characters.
Unicode codepoints
The following are tone characters and their respective Unicode codepoints used in POJ. The tones used by POJ should use Combining Diacritical Marks instead of Spacing Modifier Letters used by bopomofo
Bopomofo, also called Zhuyin Fuhao ( ; ), or simply Zhuyin, is a Chinese transliteration, transliteration system for Standard Chinese and other Sinitic languages. It is the principal method of teaching Chinese Mandarin pronunciation in Taiwa ...
. As POJ is not encoded in Big5, the prevalent encoding used in Traditional Chinese, some POJ letters are not directly encoded in Unicode, instead should be typed using combining diacritical marks officially.
Superscript n is also required for POJ to indicate nasalisation:
Characters not directly encoded in Unicode (especially O͘ series which has 3 different permutations) requires premade glyphs in fonts in order for applications to correctly display the characters.
Font support
Fonts that currently support POJ includes:
* Charis SIL
* DejaVu
* Doulos SIL
* Linux Libertine
Linux Libertine is a typeface released in 2003 by the Libertine Open Fonts Project, which aims to create FOSS, free and open alternatives to Proprietary software, proprietary typefaces such as Times New Roman. It was developed with the free font e ...
* Taigi Unicode
* Source Sans Pro
I.Ming
(8.00 onwards) fro
Ichiten Font Project
* Fonts made by justfont foundry
* Fonts modified and release in GitHub repositor
POJFonts
: POJ Phiaute, Gochi Hand POJ, Nunito POJ, POJ Vibes, and POJ Garamond.
* Fonts modified and released by But Ko based on Source Han Sans
Genyog
Genseki
Gensen
; based on Source Han Serif
Genyo
Genwan
Genryu
Han-Romanization mixed script
One of the most popular modern ways of writing Taiwanese is by using a mixed orthography called ( zh, t=漢羅, p=Hàn-Luó, s=汉罗, l=Chinese-Roman), and sometimes ''Han-Romanization mixed script'', a style not unlike written Japanese or (historically) Korean. In fact, the term does not describe one specific system, but covers any kind of writing in Southern Min which features both Chinese characters and romanization. That romanization is usually POJ, although recently some texts have begun appearing with Taiwanese Romanization System (Tâi-lô) spellings too. The problem with using only Chinese characters to write Southern Min is that there are many morphemes (estimated to be around 15 percent of running text) which are not definitively associated with a particular character. Various strategies have been developed to deal with the issue, including creating new characters, allocating Chinese characters used in written Mandarin with similar meanings (but dissimilar etymology) to represent the missing characters, or using romanization for the "missing 15%". There are two rationales for using mixed orthography writing, with two different aims. The first is to allow native speakers (almost all of whom can already write Chinese characters) to make use of their knowledge of characters, while replacing the missing 15% with romanization. The second is to wean character literates off using them gradually, to be replaced eventually by fully romanized text.
Examples of modern texts in include religious, pedagogical, scholarly, and literary works, such as:
*
*
Adaptations for other Chinese varieties
POJ has been adapted for several other varieties of Chinese
There are hundreds of local Chinese language varieties forming a branch of the Sino-Tibetan languages, Sino-Tibetan language family, many of which are not Mutual intelligibility, mutually intelligible. Variation is particularly strong in the m ...
, with varying degrees of success. For Hakka, missionaries and others have produced a Bible translation, hymn book, textbooks, and dictionaries. Materials produced in the orthography, called , include:
*
*
*
*
A modified version of POJ has also been created for Teochew.
Current status
Most native Southern Min speakers in Taiwan are unfamiliar with POJ or any other writing system, commonly asserting that "Taiwanese has no writing", or, if they are made aware of POJ, considering romanization as the "low" form of writing, in contrast with the "high" form (Chinese characters). For those who are introduced to POJ alongside and completely Chinese character-based systems, a clear preference has been shown for all-character systems, with all-romanization systems at the bottom of the preference list, likely because of the preexisting familiarity of readers with Chinese characters.
POJ remains the Taiwanese orthography "with the richest inventory of written work, including dictionaries, textbooks, literature ..and other publications in many areas". A 1999 estimate put the number of literate POJ users at around 100,000, and secular organizations have been formed to promote the use of romanization among Taiwanese speakers.
Outside Taiwan, POJ is rarely used. For example, in Fujian, Xiamen University uses a romanization known as , based on Pinyin
Hanyu Pinyin, or simply pinyin, officially the Chinese Phonetic Alphabet, is the most common romanization system for Standard Chinese. ''Hanyu'' () literally means 'Han Chinese, Han language'—that is, the Chinese language—while ''pinyin' ...
. In other areas where Hokkien is spoken, such as Singapore
Singapore, officially the Republic of Singapore, is an island country and city-state in Southeast Asia. The country's territory comprises one main island, 63 satellite islands and islets, and one outlying islet. It is about one degree ...
, the Speak Mandarin Campaign is underway to actively discourage people from speaking Hokkien or other non-Mandarin varieties in favour of switching to Mandarin instead.
In 2006, Taiwan's Ministry of Education chose an official romanization for use in teaching Southern Min in the state school system. POJ was one of the candidate systems, along with , but a compromise system, the Taiwanese Romanization System or , was chosen in the end. Tâi-Lô retains most of the orthographic standards of POJ, including the tone marks, while changing the troublesome character for , swapping for , and replacing in diphthong
A diphthong ( ), also known as a gliding vowel or a vowel glide, is a combination of two adjacent vowel sounds within the same syllable. Technically, a diphthong is a vowel with two different targets: that is, the tongue (and/or other parts of ...
s with . Supporters of Taiwanese writing are in general deeply suspicious of government involvement, given the history of official suppression of native languages, making it unclear whether or POJ will become the dominant system in the future.
Notes
References
Citations
Works cited
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
**
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
* }
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
External links
*
* – information on Unicode encodings for POJ text
* – group dedicated to the promotion of Taiwanese and Hakka romanization
* – cross-platform
Within computing, cross-platform software (also called multi-platform software, platform-agnostic software, or platform-independent software) is computer software that is designed to work in several Computing platform, computing platforms. Some ...
input method released by Taiwan's Ministry of Education.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Peh-Oe-Ji
Latin-script orthographies
Languages of Taiwan
Romanization of Chinese
Southern Min
Hakka Chinese
Romanization of Hokkien
Written Hokkien
Writing systems introduced in the 19th century