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
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 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 | Portugal-guo：sabon |
| 甲 | 土地面積單位 | kaq | Hølaan-oe：akker (acre) |
| 紅毛塗 | 水泥 | angmngthoo | because they called Dutch "angmo" savages (紅毛番)。 |