Dictionary of Frequently-Used Taiwan Minnan/Monosyllables
A lot of Taiwanese monosyllables are homophones: same sound, different meaning. But just how many are there? 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. We folded in the backquoted words, for example `lie was counted as lix. Then we counted the frequency of each sound with Python's collections.Counter, which tells the number of homophonic dictionary rows, and got 1,800 distinct sounds. Then we used Counter again on those results and found:
- 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 homophones cover two rows: 896 rows (31%), 448 distinct sounds (25%)
- some sounds cover three rows: 516 rows (18%), 172 sounds (10%)
- the rest match from four to seven rows: 441 rows (15%), 97 sounds (5%)
Data
Trivia
The frequently-used monosyllables use 258 MTL finals. The polysyllables use 266, or eight more: mh, mm, oaai, oai, vaai, vau, vo, vuix. They belong to the following nine syllables: gvau, gvo, hmh, hmm, hoaai, hoai, khvuix, kvaai, mm.