Hangŭl for Hokkien

[amhoanna]

Re: the frequencies -- yes, by personal observation, and also from the informal observations of others. U can take any text or dialog and count the number of syllables with tones in each series. I guarantee U U'll find that the 阴 series carries a lot more syllables. This is true across languages, even into Vietnamese.

So one could speculate now, why the preference for the male before the female was powerful enough to create 男女 and 父母, but not 陰陽 and 雌雄? My guess would be that it was because they were not percieved as human.

I second this guess of yours.

[Abun]

I tried counting 陰 and 陽 syllables in my introduction text (http://www.chineselanguage.org/forums/v ... =6&t=58302 first post) for about the first third (up until 聯絡) and the result was rather close, 107/105. Of course, the result is probably slightly corrupted by the fact that I'm not a native speaker, and I might also have miscounted. I have to do a bit more testing there.

I also am testing a few other ideas for changes in the writing system:
First, I merged b-/m- into ㅁ, g-/ng- into ㆁ and l-/n- into ㄴ, thus making the system phonologically more consistent. However, I still have difficulties to convince myself to read those chamo as plosives (for some reason much more in the cases of ㆁ and ㄴ than with ㅁ), but that may just be conservatism.
I also tried a new system of indicating the tones using the idea I got from amhoanna (the one which uses only three indicators, one for 陽 register and one for 上 and 去 tones each). Since the dots next to the syllable were used to indicate 上 (one dot) and 去 (two dots) in Korean too, when they transcribed Chinese, I adopted this, leaving only the problem of indicating 陽 register open. Luckily, the merging of voiced plosives and nasals (see above) provided me with an idea, since it did away with the only two doubled consonants I was using. So my current idea would be to indicate 陽 register by doubling the initial (i.e. ㄲ instead of ㄱ, ᄔ instead of ㄴ and so on).
So:
tan tán tàn tat tân tãn tān ta̍t becomes
단 ·단 :단 닫 딴 ·딴 :딴 딷
Although this method does a way with the double character 받침 I had before, most of which are not included in any font, it requires a lot of doubled initial consonants which equally don't exist in fonts (i.e. 쌍ㆁ (not to be confused with 쌍이응, which exists in a few old Hangŭl fonts), 쌍ㅁ, 쌍ㅿ and the doubled aspiratae).

But apart from feedback, I would also ask for a bit of information about pronunciations across the variants:

• 1. I still am not sure how to render Choanchiu -er. Is this a glide anyway, which always leads to an -e sound or is it a monotone vowel?
  2. I'm still having some questions as to variants, though. As far as I'm informed, there are four kinds of -e/-ue syllables:
  • a. Type 尾: Choanciu (Cn): -ere (or just -er?); Chiangchiu (C) and Tailam (Tl): -oe; Emng (E) and Taipak (Tp): -e
    b. Type 買: Cn, E and Tp: -oe, C and Tl: -e
    c. Type 馬: all -e
    d. Type 杯: all -oe
    (of course there are differences within the respective cities, especially now that mobility is much higher than it used to be, but you know what I mean)
  Anyway, a) can be transcribed as -ere (or -er) and everybody can read the way he speaks, and c) and d) don't make a problem anyway, but I'd like to find a way to transcribe b) in a distinct way but I don't know how... Does anybody know of a "middle way" between the two pronunciations as with Cn -er(e) with type a)? There probably used to be in former times...

[amhoanna]

1. I still am not sure how to render Choanchiu -er. Is this a glide anyway, which always leads to an -e sound or is it a monotone vowel?

It can stand alone. There are some dialects in the hill country where it can be a glide. The sound is very similar to a schwa.

2. I'm still having some questions as to variants, though. As far as I'm informed, there are four kinds of -e/-ue syllables:
a. Type 尾: Choanciu (Cn): -ere (or just -er?); Chiangchiu (C) and Tailam (Tl): -oe; Emng (E) and Taipak (Tp): -e
b. Type 買: Cn, E and Tp: -oe, C and Tl: -e
c. Type 馬: all -e
d. Type 杯: all -oe
(of course there are differences within the respective cities, especially now that mobility is much higher than it used to be, but you know what I mean)

It's cool that your project is pan-dialectal.

I'm vaguely aware that the "four-way split" U just mentioned is actually a simplification. The reality of the hill dialects of Coanciu is more complex than almost anybody realizes.

As for counting syllables, U might want to try it with authentic material. Your self-intro was a gallant attempt at using the language -- as I said, worthy even of someone with Hoklophone heritage -- but it's not "representative" of the Hoklo language by a long shot.

[Abun]

1. I still am not sure how to render Choanchiu -er. Is this a glide anyway, which always leads to an -e sound or is it a monotone vowel?

It can stand alone. There are some dialects in the hill country where it can be a glide. The sound is very similar to a schwa.

Ok, in that case, I guess I think it would be sensible to use just plain arae-a for that rhyme instead of ㆍㅔ, which would be yet another vowel which is not encoded.

I'm vaguely aware that the "four-way split" U just mentioned is actually a simplification. The reality of the hill dialects of Coanciu is more complex than almost anybody realizes.

Yes, of course the split is not that clean. For example, I have the feeling a lot of Taiwanese people, while usually having a tendency into the direction of either Chiangchiu or Choanchiu, still mix these rather freely. Especially 欲, 袂, 未 seem to be more popular in Choanchiu (i.e. beh, buē, bē), even with people who usually rather tend to have a Chiangchiu-like accent.
If there are more splits in smaller dialects, that makes the situation more difficult. I doubt that it's possible to take every single one of them into account though... Right now, I'd tend to make it my priority to render Chiangchiu and Choanchiu, which would enable one to write most of the bigger variants at least. Which is the reason why I wondered if there's an "intermediate" form for the 買 group which I could use to distinguish it from the other ones

As for counting syllables, U might want to try it with authentic material. Your self-intro was a gallant attempt at using the language -- as I said, worthy even of someone with Hoklophone heritage -- but it's not "representative" of the Hoklo language by a long shot.

That is very true, I just took that one because I didn't have that many longer texts available (the only other one I could think of was the 紅皮聖典 and that's not ideal either because of the high frequency of non-Hokkien names). I was going to run a few more tests (in fact, that's why I haven't answered until now), but I don't find the time (and the nerves) for this rather dull work and I now doubt it's worth the time, too. I'll just mark 陽 for now and should it ever dawn on me that 陰 would be more economic, I can still change it.

[Abun]

Small update:
I'm still unhappy with using both ㅇ and ㆁ for different phonemes (zero initial and [ŋ]) because I think they look too similar at least on the computer (in handwriting one could of course intentionally make the hook on top of ㆁ more prominent). However, I came to realize that if I consider it possible to distinguish them in initial position, the same should be true in final position. I therefor decided to use ㅇ as nazalization indicator, disposing of the little circles on the vowel chamo which I didn't like at all because I found it difficult to come up with a consistent rule where exactly to add them and still have all possible outcomes look acceptable.
So with this change, I would for example spell:
姓 as :싱 (or :셍 in Chiangchiu), as opposed to 四 :시 or 細 :세, or
行 as 꺙, as opposed to 奇 꺄