If it is common everyday subjects where the breadth of vocabulary employed is relatively limited (e.g. food, the weather, your health), then yes, I will readily agree with you that homonyms in Romanised Hoklo is not so much of a problem (though, I still find that I read slower, as Ah-bin pointed out, I need to 念 liam the words beneath my breath to figure out the texts!).amhoanna wrote:
I think "real-life" Hoklo and Cantonese are pretty lean on the homophones, maybe even leaner than English. In other words, w/o having given it much thought, I'm questioning your statement that homonyms are a characteristic of Hoklo, among other languages.
But once you start going into more complicated texts where you start venturing outside of everyday conversational vocabulary - and again, I cite the Peh-Oe-Ji Bible as an example, then it gets complicated. E.g. if you know that the text you are reading is from the Bible, and you see the words te-gek, you would intuitively know that it is 地獄 Hell. But if a single sentence with the word Hell was extracted and presented in isolation to the reader without the benefit of the full context, I am sure he/she would be scratching his head wondering which te and which gek it is, even if the tone marks were included - one does not normally speak/read of Hell in regular conversations, so that would probably be the last thing on his/her mind!
Speaking of Hell, that also begs another problem - Depending on the reader's sub-dialectal background, it could be te-gek or te-giok. And then we end up in one of our old Forum friends' favourite topics on how all variants of Minnan should be scrapped in favour of the Amoy variant as standard.
Of course, one would then argue that the Hokkien used in Peh-Oe-Ji Bibles falls in a different and more complex category from normal conversational Hokkien that is Romanised on paper/screen (and one could say that at that point, the lines start to blurr between collouquial spoken Hokkien, Bible vernacular Hokkien and the Literary Chinese language as a whole). That would open up a whole new set of questions along the lines of "so, what level of complexity in Hokkien can feasibly be Romanised, and what cannot?"
The point I am trying to make is that, if whatever system of writing Hokkien chosen is not efficient enough to venture beyond basic topics such as food, the weather and everybody's health (and I would hope that Hokkien as a living language is capable of much more than that!) without ambuguity, then the said writing system does not complement the spoken language very well. Again, to be fair, Hangeul in Korea and Quoc Ngu in Vietnam are notable success stories, so if a well-developed Peh-Oe-Ji system can take up the role for Hokkien (and its main variants, please!), then sure, that would be a good thing for the dialect (even if I, for one, would certainly weep for the resultant severance of its Sinitic roots).
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I realise that I am bordering on creating and battling my own straw-men in favour of Chinese characters as the preferred method for writing Hokkien while subtly lampooning Romanised Hokkien, so I think I will stop here for now.
