2: What is Romanisation?

The Roman Script

The Roman Script, also known as the Latin Alphabet, is the collection of letters originally used by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language and its extensions used to write modern languages. 

Some languages have used the script for thousands of years up till this very day, some examples being: English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, and of course, Latin. 

Romanisation

Romanisation however, refers to the conversion of text from a different writing system to the Roman script, or a system for doing so. Writers either follow rules and conventions from an established romanisation system, or spell out following their own intuition and logic. The latter is known as ad-hoc romanisation, which does not follow a consistent system.

Here is an example of romanisation following a standard romanisation system and ad-hoc romanisation: My child lives in Singapore now.

English	me	(poss. particle)	child	now	live	in	Singapore
Mandarin	我	的	孩子	现在	住	在	新加坡
Hanyu Pinyin	wǒ	de	hái zǐ	xiàn zài	zhù	zài	xīn jiā pō
Ad-hoc	war	der	hi tzu	sien chye	choo	chye	sin chiah puor

Hanyu Pinyin, which should be familar to most who have learnt Mandarin in Singaporer, is a form of romanisation for Mandarin.

Romanisation and Chinese languages

Romanisation is valuable to the learning of Chinese languages because the script that Chinese is traditionally written in, Chinese characters, does not offer any direct phonetic indication as to how the character is meant to be pronounced exactly. Romanisation is thus a convenient solution to faithfully and consistently represent the sounds of different Chinese characters in a familiar script. 

If you speak, read, and write in Mandarin, you should understand. Although some characters offer clues into their pronunciations, there is no way to precisely derive the exact, accurate pronunciation of it. This is why Hanyu Pinyin is valuable to Mandarin speakers in reading and writing, as it can logically represent the sounds of the language. Actually, besides Hanyu Pinyin, other romanisation systems for Mandarin exist... :0

This same logic applies to other Chinese languages, besides Mandarin. Like how Mandarin has Hanyu Pinyin, most Chinese languages have their own romanisation systems. I will be focusing on the romanisation of Hokkien and Teochew for now. 

Romanisation of Hokkien and Teochew 

Within Hokkien and Teochew, many competing romanisation systems exist. Among them, there are three systems that are more predominantly used. These are:

1️⃣ Peh-oe-ji (POJ). This system is used to write variants of Southern Min (read up here), being based on Amoy Hokkien. Because of this, it is mainly used to write Taiwanese and Amoy Hokkien, but has seen widescale adoption outside these areas. It was developed by western missionaries working in Southeast Asia, and was refined by missionaries in Taiwan and Amoy, with a large amount of both secular and religious material being printed in the script. 

2️⃣ Tai-lo. This system was derived from POJ, and is used by the Taiwanese Ministry of Education in its publications, such as its Dictionary of Frequently-Used Taiwan Minnan. It is nearly identical to POJ, but took slight influence from IPA orthography. It is mainly used in writing Taiwanese Hokkien, but has also seen adoption outside Taiwan.

3️⃣ Peng'im. This system is primarily used to write Teochew. It was published by the Guangdong Provincial Education Department. It superceded Peh-ue-ji (PUJ), a system for Teochew based on POJ, and is used in most Teochew publications now. Peng'im shares consistencies with systems used by other Chinese languages in Guangdong, such as Cantonese, Hakka, and Hainanese. 

Let us compare the systems with the example sentence: My child lives in Singapore now.     

English	Me	(poss.)**	child	now	live	in	Singapore
Mandarin	我	的	孩子	现在	住	在	新加坡

Hokkien	我	个	囝	这阵	徛	伫	新加坡
Hokkien POJ	óa	ê	kiáⁿ	chit-chūn	khiā	tī	sin-ka-po
Hokkien Tai-lo	uá	ê	kiánn	tsit-tsūn	khiā	tī	sin-ka-po
Hokkien Peng’im	ua2	e5	gian2	zid4* zun7*	kia7	di7	sin1*-ga1-bo1

Teochew	我	个	囝	只阵	徛	在	新加坡
Teochew POJ	óa	kâi	kiáⁿ	chí-chûng	khiã*	tõ*	sing-kia-po
Teochew Tai-lo	uá	kâi	kiánn	tsí-tsûng	khiã*	tõ*	sing-kia-po
Teochew Peng’im	ua2	gai5	gian2	zi2 zung5	kia6	do6	sing1-gia1-bo1

**possessive particle (added to 我 'me' to form 'my')
***tone change is not shown

Here are some problems encountered, denoted with asteriks in the table:

Teochew preserves the 6th tone, which Hokkien has lost. POJ and Tai-lo thus do not use a diacritic to mark this tone. As such, tone 6 words like khiã and tõ cannot be represented in standard POJ/Tai-lo. The example above uses ~, which is used to represent the 6th tone in PUJ. Refer to Tones.

Hokkien retains certain ending sounds that Teochew has lost. Peng'im does not take into account these ending sounds, which makes it totally unsuitable for Hokkien usage. Refer to End Consonants.

Given the large amount of material that is already written in these systems, one would need to familiarise themselves with them in order to make sense of what sounds the writer is trying to represent in their writing.

A more detailed look into romanisation and Hokkien and Teochew phonology can be found in sections under Learn Romanisation.

The romanisation systems that Hokkien and Teochew use right now are actually very effective in fulfilling their core purpose - representing the sounds of these languages in the Roman script. However, they do so with a somewhat limited cross-compatibility with other dialects.

Singaporeans, who mostly speak Hokkien and Teochew by mixing accents and dialects together, may face trouble in using these systems to faithfully represent their speech...

~桂壱 😐