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 Formosan languages, Spanish, Dutch, Japanese, and English.
Modern Taiwanese has words coming from Old Chinese (ca. 0 BCE/CE) as well as the Tang Dynasty (ca. 618-907). 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
Main article: Taiwanese words from 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: piexntofng, iafkiuu, piexnsor, huilengky, bixsox.
- otofbae (from オートバイ ootobai "autobike", an "Engrish" word)
- 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
Taiwanese has words that come from Dutch, Portuguese, and Spanish via its history (see Hølaan ee Formosa). Aside from placenames (like Samtiaukag), most western words might be English via Japanese (see Taiwanese words from English).
| 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 |
How to Count
There are two sets of numbers in Taiwanese, colloquial and literary. Use the colloquial style to count objects. Listen to the machine: cit, nng, svaf, six, go, lak, chid, peq, kao, zap 🔊
| 1 | 2 | 3 / 三 | 4 / 四 | 5 / 五 | 6 / 六 | 7 / 七 | 8 / 八 | 9 / 九 | 10 / 十 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Peh | cit (蜀) | nng (兩) | svaf | six | go | lak | chid | pøeq | kao | zap |
| Buun | id (一) | ji (二) | safm | sux | gvor | liok | pad | kiuo | sip |