Dictionary of Frequently-Used Taiwan Minnan/Monosyllables

Some words sound the same but mean different things...they are homonyms. How many homonyms does Taiwanese have? To help answer the question, we singled out monosyllables from the Dictionary of Frequently-Used Taiwan Minnan (MoeDict) and did some analysis.

Method

Python's collections.Counter was used to count the frequency of the MTL monosyllables taken from the first section of the dictionary:

• 1,813 unique MTL were collected from 2,936 rows
• as expected, many MTL (39%) match more than one row. This affects 62% of rows
• however, 61% of MTL and 38% of rows uniquely match one-to-one
• 24% MTL match 2 rows (30% rows)
• 10% MTL match 3 rows (18% rows)
• 5% MTL match 4 to 6 rows (14% rows)
• the most matched MTL are lie, ky, køf, which have 7 matches each, affecting <1% MTL and rows

Data

• File:TSS rows per group1monosyllable.ods