Dictionary of Frequently-Used Taiwan Minnan/Monosyllables

A lot of Taiwanese monosyllables are homonyms: same sound, different meaning. 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:

• 1103 MTL (61%) and 1103 rows (38%) uniquely match one-to-one
• as expected, many MTL (710, or 39%) match more than one row, affecting 1833 rows (62%):
  • lie, ky, køf, match the most (7 rows each)
  • cie, kafn, kefng, sefng, kaf, kaq, zngf, ti, sw, leeng, kerng, match 6 rows each
  • a lot of MTL match up twice (443 MTL (24%) match 2 rows (30% rows))
  • some MTL match up thrice (173 MTL (10%) match 3 rows (18% rows))
  • a small percentage match up more than thrice (94 MTL (5%) match 4 to 7 rows (15% rows))

File:Rows and matching MTL vs. match level.png

Data

• File:TSS rows per group1monosyllable.ods

See also

• Frequently-Used Taiwanese Polysyllable Homonyms