View source for Dictionary of Frequently-Used Taiwan Minnan/Monosyllables

A monosyllable is a word with only one syllable. Looking at the ''[[Dictionary of Frequently-Used Taiwan Minnan]]'' (''MoeDict''), we found almost 3,000 monosyllable words covering 1,800 distinct sounds. Here is a [[:File:MTL examples for each final.pdf|chart (PDF)]] of all the sounds organized by [[List of all initial consonants in MTL|initial consonant]] and [[Table of all finals in MTL|final part]].
 
== Analysis ==
We isolated 2,936 rows from the dictionary that are monosyllables and converted their TRS to MTL. We only considered words from the first section of the dictionary because they appear to be frequently used, and ignored the second section. We folded in [[Twenty-seven Taiwanese words beginning with the backquote|the backquoted words]], for example ''{{x|`lie}}'' was counted as ''{{x|lix}}''. Then we used Python's collections.Counter to count the frequency of each sound. This yielded 1,800 distinct sounds. 

We went further and used Counter again on those results to find out how common homophones are among the monosyllables, and discovered that 63% of rows are homophonic. Those 1853 rows are distributed as follows:
[[File:Percent of rows per homophone overlap.png|thumb|left|Most of Taiwanese monosyllables are homophones. The most common case is 2:1 overlap, affecting 31% of rows.]]
* most commonly, homophones cover two rows (2 rows:1 sound). 31% of rows use 25% of the distinct sounds set (896 rows:448 sounds)
* about 18% of rows use 10% of the sound set, 516 rows:172 sounds, 3:1 overlap
* we lump together the remaining 15% of rows having 4:1 to 7:1 overlap, or 441 rows:97 sounds, 5% of the sound set
* the most homophonic sounds are: ''{{x|lie}}'', ''{{x|ky}}'', and ''{{x|køf}}'', which match 7 rows each, followed by ''{{x|cie}}'', ''{{x|kafn}}'', ''{{x|kefng}}'', ''{{x|sefng}}'', ''{{x|kaf}}'', ''{{x|kaq}}'', ''{{x|zngf}}'', ''{{x|ti}}'', ''{{x|sw}}'', ''{{x|leeng}}'', and ''{{x|kerng}}'', which match 6 rows each
* about 37% of rows are not homophonic (1,083 rows:1,083 sounds), using 60% of the sound set

Here is the: [[:File:TSS_rows_per_group1monosyllable.ods|data (ODS)]]

== Trivia == 
The frequently-used monosyllables use 258 [[Table of all finals in MTL|MTL finals]]. 154 of those are words on their own. The polysyllables use 266 finals, or eight more: ''mh'', ''mm'', ''oaai'', ''oai'', ''vaai'', ''vau'', ''vo'', ''vuix'', which belong to the following nine syllables: ''{{x|gvau}}'', ''{{x|gvo}}'', ''{{x|hmh}}'', ''{{x|hmm}}'', ''{{x|hoaai}}'', ''{{x|hoai}}'', ''{{x|khvuix}}'', ''{{x|kvaai}}'', ''{{x|mm}}''.

== See also ==
* [[Frequency of syllables in Dictionary of Frequently-Used Taiwan Minnan|Frequency of syllables in the Taiwanese dictionary]]
* [[Twenty-seven Taiwanese words beginning with the backquote]]
* [[Frequently-used Taiwanese polysyllable homophones]]