Pe̍h-ōe-jī Information
Pe̍h-ōe-jī (pronounced [peʔ˩ ue˩ dzi˨] ( listen), abbreviated POJ, literally vernacular writing, also known as Church Romanization) is an orthography used to write variants of Southern Min, a Chinese language or dialect, particularly Taiwanese and Amoy Hokkien. Developed by Western missionaries working among the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia in the 19th century and refined by missionaries working in Xiamen and Tainan, it uses a modified Latin alphabet and some diacritics to represent the spoken language. After initial success in Fujian, POJ became most widespread in Taiwan, and in the mid-20th century there were over 100,000 people literate in POJ. A large amount of printed material, religious and secular, has been produced in the script, including Taiwan's first newspaper, the Taiwan Church News.
The orthography was suppressed during the Japanese era in Taiwan (1895–1945), and faced further countermeasures during the Kuomintang martial law period (1947–1987). In Fujian, use declined after the establishment of the People's Republic of China (1949) and in the early 21st century the system was not in general use there. Use of pe̍h-ōe-jī is now restricted to some Taiwanese Christians, non-native learners of the language, and native-speaker enthusiasts in Taiwan. Full native computer support was developed in 2004, and users can now call on fonts, input methods, and extensive online dictionaries. Rival writing systems have been developed over time, and there is ongoing debate within the Taiwanese mother tongue movement as to which system should be used. Versions of pe̍h-ōe-jī have been devised for other languages, including Hakka and Teochew.
Contents |
Name
| Pe̍h-ōe-jī | |||||||||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Traditional Chinese | 白話字 | ||||||||||||||||||||||
| Simplified Chinese | 白话字 | ||||||||||||||||||||||
| Hokkien POJ | Pe̍h-ōe-jī | ||||||||||||||||||||||
| Literal meaning | Vernacular writing | ||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
The name pe̍h-ōe-jī (simplified Chinese: 白话字; traditional Chinese: 白話字) means "vernacular writing", that is, written characters representing everyday spoken language.[1] Though the name vernacular writing could be applied to many kinds of writing, romanized and character-based, the term pe̍h-ōe-jī is commonly restricted to the Southern Min romanization system developed by Presbyterian missionaries in the 19th century.[2] The missionaries who invented and refined the system didn't use the name pe̍h-ōe-jī, however, instead using various terms such as "Romanised Amoy Vernacular" and "Romanised Amoy Colloquial".[1] The origins of the system and its extensive use in the Christian community has led to it being known by some modern-day writers as "Church Romanization" (simplified Chinese: 教会罗马字; traditional Chinese: 教會羅馬字; pinyin: Jiàohuì Luōmǎzì; Pe̍h-ōe-jī: Kàu-hōe Lô-má-jī); often abbreviated in POJ itself to "Kàu-lô" (simplified Chinese: 教罗; traditional Chinese: 教羅; pinyin: Jiàoluō).[3] There is some debate as to whether "pe̍h-ōe-jī" or "Church Romanization" is the more appropriate name. Objections raised to "pe̍h-ōe-jī" include that the surface meaning of the word itself is more generic than one specific system, and that both literary and colloquial register Southern Min appear in the system (meaning that describing it as "vernacular" writing might be inaccurate).[1] Opposition to the name "Church Romanization" is based on the identification with the church, as the writing is used by a wider community than just Christians, and for secular as well as sacred writing.[4] One commentator observes that POJ "today is largely disassociated from its former religious purposes".[5] The term "romanization" is also disliked by some, who see it as belittling the status of pe̍h-ōe-jī by identifying it as a supplementary phonetic system, rather than a fully-fledged orthography.[4] Sources disagree on which represents the more commonly used name of the two.[3][4]
History
Pe̍h-ōe-jī inscription at a church in Tâi-lâm commemorating Thomas BarclayThe history of Peh-oe-ji has been heavily influenced by official attitudes towards the Southern Min vernaculars and the Christian organisations that propagated it. Early documents point to the purpose of the creation of POJ as being pedagogical in nature, closely allied to educating Christian converts.[6]
Early development
The first people to use a romanized script to write Southern Min were Spanish missionaries in Manila in the 16th century.[2] However, it was used mainly as a teaching aid for Spanish learners of the language, and seems not to have had any influence on the development of pe̍h-ōe-jī.[7] In the early 19th century, China was closed to Christian missionaries, who instead proselytized to overseas Chinese communities in South East Asia.[8] The earliest origins of the system are found in a small vocabulary first printed in 1820 by Walter Henry Medhurst,[9][10] who went on to publish the Dictionary of the Hok-këèn Dialect of the Chinese Language, According to the Reading and Colloquial Idioms in 1832.[9] This dictionary represents the first major reference work in POJ, although the romanization within was quite different from the modern system, and has been dubbed Early Church Romanization by one scholar of the subject.[3] Medhurst, who was stationed in Malacca, was influenced by Robert Morrison's romanization of Mandarin Chinese, but had to innovate in several areas to reflect major differences between Mandarin and Southern Min.[11] Several important developments occurred in Medhurst's work, especially the application of consistent tone markings (influenced by contemporary linguistic studies of Sanskrit, which was becoming of more mainstream interest to Western scholars).[12] Medhurst was convinced that accurate representation and reproduction of the tonal structure of Southern Min was vital to comprehension:
Respecting these tones of the Chinese language, some difference of opinion has been obtained, and while some have considered them of first importance, others have paid them little or no intention. The author inclines decidedly to the former opinion; having found, from uniform experience, that without strict attention to tones, it is impossible for a person to make himself understood in Hok-këèn. —W.H. Medhurst[13]Frontispiece of Doty's Anglo Chinese Manual of the Amoy Dialect (1853)
The system expounded by Medhurst influenced later dictionary compilers with regard to tonal notation and initials, but both his complicated vowel system and his emphasis on the literary register of Southern Min were dropped by later writers.[14][15] Following on from Medhurst's work, Samuel Wells Williams became the chief proponent of major changes in the orthography devised by Morrison and adapted by Medhurst. Through personal communication and letters and articles printed in The Chinese Repository a consensus was arrived at for the new version of POJ, although Williams' suggestions were largely not followed.[16] The first major work to represent this new orthography was Elihu Doty's Anglo-Chinese Manual with Romanized Colloquial in the Amoy Dialect,[16] published in 1853. The manual can therefore be regarded as the first presentation of a pre-modern POJ, a significant step onwards from Medhurst's orthography and different from today's system in only a few details.[17] From this point on various authors adjusted some of the consonants and vowels, but the system of tone marks from Doty's Manual survives intact in modern POJ.[18] John Van Nest Talmage has traditionally been regarded as the founder of POJ among the community which uses the orthography, although it now seems that he was an early promoter of the system, rather than its inventor.[10][16]
In 1842 the Treaty of Nanking was concluded, which included among its provisions the creation of treaty ports in which Christian missionaries would be free to preach.[6] Xiamen (then known as Amoy) was one of these treaty ports, and British, Canadian and American missionaries moved in to start preaching to the local inhabitants. These missionaries, housed in the cantonment of Gulangyu, created reference works and religious tracts, including a bible translation.[6] Naturally, they based the pronunciation of their romanization on the speech of Xiamen, which became the de facto standard when they eventually moved into other areas of the Hokkien Sprachraum, most notably Taiwan.[19] The 1858 Treaty of Tianjin officially opened Taiwan to western missionaries, and missionary societies were quick to send men to work in the field, usually after a sojourn in Xiamen to acquire the rudiments of the language.[19]
Maturity
Khó-sioh lín pún-kok ê jī chin oh, chió chió lâng khòaⁿ ē hiáu-tit. Só͘-í góan ū siat pa̍t-mih ê hoat-tō͘, ēng pe̍h-ōe-jī lâi ìn-chheh, hō͘ lín chèng-lâng khòaⁿ khah khòai bat... Lâng m̄-thang phah-sǹg in-ūi i bat Khóng-chú-jī só͘-í m̄-bián o̍h chit-hō ê jī; iā m̄-thang khòaⁿ-khin i, kóng sī gín-á só͘-tha̍k--ê.
Because the characters in your country are so difficult only a few people are literate. Therefore we have striven to print books in pe̍h-ōe-jī to help you to read... don't think that if you know Chinese characters you needn't learn this script, nor should you regard it as a childish thing.
Thomas Barclay, Tâi-oân-hú-siâⁿ Kàu-hōe-pò, Issue 1Quanzhou and Zhangzhou are two major varieties of Southern Min, and in Xiamen they combined to form something "not Quan, not Zhang" – i.e. not one or the other, but rather a fusion, which became known as Amoy Dialect or Amoy Chinese.[20] In Taiwan, with its mixture of migrants from both Quanzhou and Zhangzhou, the linguistic situation was similar; although the resulting blend in the southern city of Tainan differed from the Xiamen blend, it was close enough that the missionaries could ignore the differences and import their system wholesale.[19] The fact that religious tracts, dictionaries, and teaching guides already existed in the Xiamen tongue meant that the missionaries in Taiwan could begin proselytizing immediately, without the intervening time needed to write those materials.[21] Missionary opinion was divided on whether POJ was desirable as an end in itself as a full-fledged orthography, or as a means to literacy in Chinese characters. William Campbell described POJ as a step on the road to reading and writing Hanzi, claiming that to promote it as an independent writing system would inflame nationalist passions in China, where Hanzi were considered a sacred part of Chinese culture.[22] Taking the other side, Thomas Barclay believed that literacy in POJ should be a goal rather than a waypoint:
Soon after my arrival in Formosa I became firmly convinced of three things, and more than fifty years experience has strengthened my conviction. The first was that if you are to have a healthy, living Church it is necessary that all the members, men and women, read the Scriptures for themselves; second, that this end can never be attained by the use of the Chinese character; third, that it can be attained by the use of the alphabetic script, this Romanised Vernacular. —Thomas Barclay[23]
A great boon to the promotion of POJ in Taiwan came in 1880 when James Laidlaw Maxwell, a medical missionary based in Tainan, donated a small printing press to the local church,[24] which Thomas Barclay learned how to operate in 1881 before founding the Presbyterian Church Press in 1884. Subsequently the Taiwan Prefectural City Church News, which first appeared in 1885 and was produced by Barclay's Presbyterian Church of Taiwan Press,[24] became the first printed newspaper in Taiwan.[25]
As other authors made their own alterations to the conventions laid down by Medhurst and Doty, pe̍h-ōe-jī evolved and eventually settled into its current form. Ernest Tipson's 1934 pocket dictionary was the first reference work to reflect this modern spelling.[26] Between Medhurst's dictionary of 1832 and the standardisation of POJ in Tipson's time, there were a number of works published, which can be used to chart the change over time of pe̍h-ōe-jī:[27]
| IPA | Medhurst 1832[28] | Doty 1853[29] | MacGowan 1869[30] | Douglas 1873[31] | Van Nest Talmage 1894[32] | Warnshuis & De Pree 1911[33] | Campbell 1913[34] | Barclay 1923[35] | Tipson 1934[36] |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| tɕ | ch | ch | ts | ch | ch | ch | ch | ch | ch |
| ts | ch | ch | ts | ts | ch | ch | ts | ts | ch |
| ŋ | gn | ng | ng | ng | ng | ng | ng | ng | ng |
| ɪɛn/ɛn | ëen | ian | ien | ien | ian | ian | ian | ian | ian |
| iat̚ | ëet | iat | iet | iet | iat | iat | iat | iet | iat |
| ɪk | ek | iek | ek | ek | ek | ek | ek | ek | ek |
| iŋ | eng | ieng | eng | eng | eng | eng | eng | eng | eng |
| ɔ | oe | o͘ | o͘ | ɵ͘ | o͘ | o͘ | o͘ | o͘ | o͘ |
| ʰ | ’h | ’ | h | h | h | h | h | h | h |
Competition for POJ was introduced during the colonial era in Taiwan (1895–1945) in the form of Taiwanese kana, a system designed as a teaching aid and pronunciation guide, rather than an independent orthography like POJ.[37] From the 1930s onwards, with the increasing militarization of Japan and the Kōminka movement encouraging Taiwanese people to "Japanize", there were a raft of measures taken against native languages, including Taiwanese.[38] While these moves resulted in a suppression of POJ, they were "a logical consequence of increasing the amount of education in Japanese, rather than an explicit attempt to ban a particular Taiwanese orthography in favor of [Taiwanese kana]".[39] The Second Sino-Japanese War beginning in 1937 brought stricter measures into force, and along with the outlawing of romanized Taiwanese, various publications were prohibited and Confucian-style shobō (Chinese: 書房; pinyin: shūfáng; Pe̍h-ōe-jī: su-pâng) – private schools which taught Classical Chinese with literary Southern Min pronunciation – were closed down in 1939.[40] The Japanese authorities came to perceive POJ as an obstacle to Japanization and also suspected that POJ was being used to hide "concealed codes and secret revolutionary messages".[41] In the climate of the ongoing war the government banned the Taiwan Church News in 1942 as it was written in POJ.[42]
After World War II
Initially the Kuomintang government in Taiwan had a liberal attitude towards "local dialects" (i.e. non-Mandarin varieties of Chinese). The Mandarin Promotion Council produced booklets outlining versions of Mandarin Phonetic Symbols ("Bopomofo") for writing the Taiwanese tongue, these being intended for newly arrived government officials from outside Taiwan as well as local Taiwanese.[43] The first government action against native languages came in 1953, when the use of Taiwanese or Japanese for instruction was forbidden.