The official romanization system for Taiwanese Hokkien in Taiwan is locally referred to as Tâi-uân Bân-lâm-gí Lô-má-jī Phing-im Hong-àn or Taiwan Minnanyu Luomazi Pinyin Fang'an (lit.'Taiwanese Southern Min Romanization Solution'),[I][1] often shortened to Tâi-lô. It is derived from Pe̍h-ōe-jī and since 2006 has been one of the phonetic notation systems officially promoted by Taiwan's Ministry of Education.[2] The system is used in the MoE's Dictionary of Frequently-Used Taiwan Minnan. It is nearly identical to Pe̍h-ōe-jī, apart from: using ts tsh instead of ch chh, using u instead of o in vowel combinations such as oa and oe, using i instead of e in eng and ek, using oo instead of o͘, and using nn instead of ⁿ.
Taiwanese Romanization System
Alphabet
The Taiwanese Romanization System uses 16 basic Latin letters (A, B, E, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, S, T, U), 7 digraphs (Kh, Ng, nn, Oo, Ph, Th, Ts) and a trigraph (Tsh). In addition, it uses 6 diacritics to represent tones.
"nn" is only used after a vowel to express nasalization, so it only appears capitalized in all-caps texts.
Palatalization occurs when "j, s, ts, tsh" are followed by "i", so "ji, si, tsi, tshi" are sometimes governed as trigraphs and tetragraphs.
Of the 10 unused basic Latin letters, "R" is sometimes used to express dialectal vowels (somewhat similar to erhua), while the others (C, D, F, Q, V, W, X, Y, Z) are only used in loanwords.
Sample texts
Tâi-lô
Pe̍h-uē-jī (PUJ) sī tsı̍t khuán iōng Latin (Lô-má) phìng-im hē-thóng lâi siá Tâi-uân ê gí-giân ê su-bīn bûn-jī. In-uī tong-tshoo sī thuân-kàu-sū ín--jı̍p-lâi ê, sóo-í ia̍h-ū-lâng kā PUJ kiò-tsò Kàu-huē Lô-má-jī, hı̍k-tsiá sī kán-tshing Kàu-lô. Put-jî-kò hiān-tāi ê sú-iōng-tsiá bē-tsió m̄-sī kàu-tôo, kàu-tôo mā tsin tsē bē-hiáu PUJ.
Pe̍h-ōe-jī
Pe̍h-ōe-jī (POJ) sī chı̍t khoán iōng Latin (Lô-má) phèng-im hē-thóng lâi siá Tâi-ôan ê gí-giân ê su-bīn bûn-jī. In-ūi tong-chho͘ sī thôan-kàu-sū ín--jı̍p-lâi ê, só͘-í ia̍h-ū-lâng kā POJ kiò-chò Kàu-hōe Lô-má-jī, he̍k-chiá sī kán-chheng Kàu-lô. Put-jî-kò hiān-tāi ê sú-iōng-chiá bē-chió m̄-sī kàu-tô͘, kàu-tô͘ mā chin chē bē-hiáu POJ.
A hyphen links elements of a compound word. A double hyphen indicates that the following syllable has a neutral tone and therefore that the preceding syllable does not undergo tone sandhi.
The following are tone characters and their respective Unicode codepoints used in Tâi-lô. The tones used by Tâi-lô should use Combining Diacritical Marks instead of Spacing Modifier Letters used by bopomofo.[5][6] As Tâi-lô is not encoded in Big5, the prevalent encoding used in Traditional Chinese, some Taiwanese Romanization System letters are not directly encoded in Unicode, instead should be typed using combining diacritical marks officially.[7]
Characters not directly encoded in Unicode requires premade glyphs in fonts in order for applications to correctly display the characters.[6]
^"Táiwān mǐnnányǔ luómǎzì pīnyīn fāng'àn" 臺灣閩南語羅馬字拼音方案 [Taiwanese Hokkien Romanization Solution] (PDF) (in Traditional Chinese). 2006. Retrieved 20 November 2019 – via language.moe.edu.tw.
^Táiwān mǐnnányǔ luómǎzì pīnyīn fāng'àn shǐyòng shǒucè 臺灣閩南語羅馬字拼音方案使用手冊 [Practical Manual for the Taiwan Southern Min Romanization System] (PDF) (in Traditional Chinese) (2nd ed.). Ministry of Education (Taiwan). 2008 [first edition 2007]. ISBN 978-986-01-6637-8.
^Táiwān mǐnnányǔ luómǎzì pīnyīn fāng'àn shǐyòng shǒucè 臺灣閩南語羅馬字拼音方案使用手冊 [Practical Manual for the Taiwan Southern Min Romanization System] (PDF) (in Traditional Chinese). Ministry of Education (Taiwan). 2007. ISBN 978-986-00-7755-1. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2017-11-18. Retrieved 2014-06-23.
^"Language Subtag Registry". Internet Enginnering Task Force. 2024-05-16. Retrieved 22 May 2024.
^aiongg (2020-11-22). "aiongg/POJFonts". GitHub - POJ Fonts. Archived from the original on 2021-04-12. Retrieved 2020-12-02.
^ a b c dTseng Gorong (2019-01-11). "談金萱的台羅變音符號設計". justfont blog (in Chinese (Taiwan)). Archived from the original on 2021-04-12. Retrieved 2020-12-02.
^"FAQ - Characters and Combining Marks". unicode.org. Archived from the original on 2021-04-12. Retrieved 2020-12-02.
^Iûⁿ (2009), p. 24
^"Fonts version 3.006 (OTF, TTF, WOFF, WOFF2, Variable)". GitHub. Adobe Systems Incorporated. 2010-09-06. Archived from the original on 2020-12-24. Retrieved 2010-09-06.
^Iûⁿ, Ún-giân (2009). Processing Techniques for Written Taiwanese – Tone Sandhi and POS Tagging (PhD). National Taiwan University. p. 20. OCLC 367595113.
External links
臺灣閩南語羅馬拼音及其發音學習網 (in Chinese), Taiwanese Romanization System (Tai-lo) learning site by the Ministry of Education of Taiwan