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

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. Then we counted the frequency of each MTL with Python's collections.Counter, which tells the number of dictionary rows matching each MTL, and got 1,813 unique MTL. Then we used Counter again on those results and found:

• 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