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 chart (PDF) of all the sounds organized by initial consonant and 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 the backquoted words, for example `lie was counted as 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. The results:

Most of Taiwanese monosyllables are homophones. The most common case is 2:1 overlap, affecting 31% of rows.

• 1853 rows (63%) are homophonic, 1083 rows (37%) are not
• the most homophonic sounds are: lie, ky, and køf, which match 7 rows each, followed by cie, kafn, kefng, sefng, kaf, kaq, zngf, ti, sw, leeng, and kerng, which match 6 rows each
  • most commonly, homophones cover two rows: 896 rows (31%), 448 distinct sounds (25%)
  • some three rows: 516 rows (18%), 172 sounds (10%)
  • lumping together the rest, four to seven rows: 441 rows (15%), 97 sounds (5%)

Here is the: data (ODS)

Trivia

The frequently-used monosyllables use 258 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: gvau, gvo, hmh, hmm, hoaai, hoai, khvuix, kvaai, mm.

See also

• Frequency of syllables in the Taiwanese dictionary
• Twenty-seven Taiwanese words beginning with the backquote
• Frequently-used Taiwanese polysyllable homophones