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. Then we counted the frequency of each MTL with Python's collections.Counter, which tells the number of dictionary rows matching each MTL, and got 1,813 unique MTL. Then we used Counter again on those results and found:

• 1103 MTL (61%) and 1103 rows (38%) uniquely match one-to-one
• as expected, most rows (1833 or 62%) have at least one homophone. Out of the corresponding 710 MTL (39%):
  • lie, ky, and køf match the most (7 rows each), and cie, kafn, kefng, sefng, kaf, kaq, zngf, ti, sw, leeng, and kerng match 6 rows each
  • most of the homophones cover two rows (443 MTL (24%), 886 rows (30%))
  • some MTL cover three rows (173 MTL (10%), 519 rows (18%))
  • a small fraction match up four to seven rows (94 MTL (5%), 428 rows (15%))

File:Rows and matching MTL vs. match level.png

Data

• File:TSS rows per group1monosyllable.ods

Trivia

The frequently-used monosyllables use most of the 266 finals used by polysyllables, except for these eight: mh, mm, oaai, oai, vaai, vau, vo, vuix. They belong to the following nine syllables: gvau, gvo, hmh, hmm, hoaai, hoai, khvuix, kvaai, mm.

See also

• Frequently-Used Taiwanese Polysyllable Homonyms