Introduction to Taiwanese Vocabulary

Introduction to Taiwanese

Overview

The modern language that we call Taiwanese has been passed on for several generations primarily through oral tradition without a standardized writing system. It may be considered a variant of the Amoy dialect of Chinese brought by Fujianese settlers from mainland China to the island of Taiwan (Formosa). The Taiwanese language has captured the history of the island in its borrowing of words from Aboriginal Languages, Spanish, Dutch, Japanese, and English.

Modern Taiwanese has extensive colloquial vocabulary from Ancient Chinese (ca. start of common era) as well as literary vocabulary from the eras of the Tang Dynasty (ca. 618-907) and South Song Dynasty (1127-1279). However, it is still not natural for many people to write modern Taiwanese with Han characters. Until the late 19th century, educated Taiwanese speakers wrote solely in literary Chinese. Where Han characters have been used to record spoken Taiwanese, they are not always etymological or genetic; the borrowing of similar-sounding or similar-meaning characters is a common practice. The lack of a written standard and the difficulty in learning the relatively complicated Han characters posed a great barrier to written record of Taiwanese speech.

A system of writing Taiwanese using Latin characters called POJ, meaning "vernacular writing", was developed in the 19th century. The indigenous Presbyterian Church in Taiwan has been active in promoting the language since the late 19th century. In 1945, Professor Liim Keahioong, formerly of the Cheng-Kung University in Taiwan, pioneered a system based on POJ called the Taiwanese Modern Spelling System (TMSS). TMSS has evolved into Modern Taiwanese Language (MTL), also known as Modern Literal Taiwanese (MLT). This page uses MTL to write Taiwanese.

Common Phrases

Main article: Common Taiwanese phrases

Lie hør! 你好!

Hello!

Ciaqpar`boe? 食飽未?

Hello. (Literally, "have you eaten your fill?")

Bexbae 🔊! 未僫

Not bad.

Kafmsia 🔊 感謝

Thank you.

Mxbiern-khehkhix 🔊. 呣免客氣

You're welcome. / That's OK.

Lexicon

Han Chinese

Modern linguistic studies (by Robert L. Cheng and Chin-An Li, for example) estimate that most (75% to 90%) Taiwanese words have cognates in other Han Chinese languages. False friends do exist; for example, zao 🔊 (走) means "to run" in Taiwanese, whereas the Mandarin cognate, zǒu, means "to walk". Moreover, cognates may have different lexical categories; for example, the morpheme phvi 🔊 (鼻) means not only "nose" (a noun, as in Mandarin bí) but also "to smell" (a verb, unlike Mandarin).

Harnji	MTL	English
天	thvy/thiefn	day, sky, God
日	jit	day, sky, heaven, sun, date
月	gøeh/goat	moon, month
水	zuie	water
江	kafng	river
人	laang/jiin	person
馬	bea/mar	horse
鳥	ciao	bird
地	tøe	ground, earth
風	hofng	wind
火	høea	fire
國	kog	kingdom, country, nation
家	kaf/kef	household, clan/home, family

Some words just have no standard Harnji, and are variously considered colloquial, intimate, vulgar, uncultured, or more concrete in meaning than the pan-Chinese synonym. Some examples: laang (person, concrete) vs. jiin (人, person, abstract); zabor (查某, woman) vs. lwjiin (女人, woman, literary). See Taiguo Siong'iong 460-ji and 臺灣閩南語推薦用字.

Austronesian

Some Taiwanese terms came from the Austronesian Formosan Aboriginal Languages. The often used example is from Sirayan: asef, meaning "silly goose". But the major legacy is in Taiwanese place names.

Japanese

Main article: Taiwanese words from Japanese

The Japanese ruled Taiwan from 1895 to 1945. Extensive contact with the Japanese language has left a legacy of Japanese loanwords. Examples are: otofbae (from オートバイ ootobai "autobike", an "Engrish" word) and pharng (from パン pan "bread", which is itself a loanword from Portuguese). Grammatical particles borrowed from Japanese, notably tek (from teki 的) and kaf (from か), show up in the Taiwanese of older speakers.

Western Languages

Harnji	Hg	MTL	Notes
雪文	肥皂	sapbuun	Portuguese: sabon
甲	土地面積單位	kaq	Dutch: akker (acre)
紅毛塗	水泥	angmngthoo	they called the Dutch "angmo" savages (紅毛番)。

Words you may recognize

MTL	Tai. Hanji	English Meaning
tee	茶	tea (from Amoy)
khaothaau	叩頭	kowtow (to kneel and touch the forehead to the ground in token of homage, worship, or deep respect)
kafmsia	感謝	cumshaw (grateful thanks, from Amoy)
sampafn'ar	舢舨仔	sampan (a flat-bottomed skiff used in eastern Asia and usually propelled by two short oars)
Jidpurn	日本	Japan/Nippon
Sekkhiaf	釋迦	sweetsop (sugar-apple), resembles top part of Gautama Buddha's (Sakyamuni) head