Home > Scripts
Writing Systems for Taiwanese
A widely held belief about written Chinese is that it is the unified language which brings together the disparate 'dialects' of Chinese. In fact, written Chinese is a form of standardized Mandarin and consequently is like learning a foreign language for speakers of Chinese variants other than Mandarin.
Over the years a number of methods have been devised for writing in Taiwanese. These systems fall in to three basic categories: character-based, romanizations, and other phonetic scripts.
Character-Based Systems
In Taiwan today almost everyone has at least a basic standard of literacy in written Mandarin. This pre-existing character literacy is used by some as a platform for writing Taiwanese in characters.
For words in Taiwanese that are cognate with Mandarin words, this presents no problem. The Taiwanese word for dog (káu) and the Mandarin translation gǒu both share a common semantic root, and so there is no difficulty in using the same character (狗) for both.
However, other words don't have immediately obvious cognates in Mandarin; for example the word lóng, meaning 'all, completely', is often used where the word 全 (quán) would be used in Mandarin - but the two are not related. The two main methods of writing Taiwanese with characters differ in how they approach this problem.
Character-Romanization Mix
All Characters
Romanizations
The early Western missionaries who came to China were confronted with two major problems - how to communicate with a largely illiterate population; and how to go about learning a language that wasn't written down at all. In those days, the only form of written Chinese was wenyan, which is now known as Classical Chinese or Literary Chinese. This was purely a written language, and only distantly related to the different kinds of Chinese that people actually spoke.
To many of these missionaries the answer was simple - compile a romanized form of the local speech and use it both to teach the language to Christian proselytizers and to their local converts. This had the advantage not only of closely mirroring the spoken form, but also of being far easier to learn than Chinese characters.
Today Chinese-speaking children typically spend five years acquiring the written language, a process which involves the rote memorization of thousands of characters. The romanized form, on the other hand, whether it be Mandarin, Cantonese or Taiwanese, can be successfully learned in a couple of weeks, and has the huge benefit that anything a student can say, they can write.
There is also a conversion table available for some of the various romanizations, plus Chu-im.
Peh-oe-ji
Tai-lo
Tong-iong
TLPA
PSDB
Daibing
Other Phonetic Scripts
There have also been other scripts used to represent Taiwanese, not based on either characters or the roman alphabet. During the Japanese colonial period (1895-1945) Japanese kana were adapted for use as ruby characters, while during the period of KMT rule (1945-2000) an altered form of Zhuyin (commonly known as Bopomofo) was sometimes promoted, although the KMT administration often moved between supression and tacit acceptance of Taiwanese during the martial law era.
Latterly there have also been other creations aimed at giving Taiwanese an independent writing system - none of which have gathered any real momentum, but Tai-oan-ji is one interesting example of this kind of 'new phonetic script' thinking.
