From: vunzndi@vfemail.net
Date: Fri Jan 26 2007 - 22:44:34 CST
The different approaches below definitely have parallels elsewhere,
though usually there is not access to televison or school text books
for the similar situations I can think of. With mother tongue in
literacey very high for some languages, and dialects, I am always
impressed with any system that works, regardless of my own preferences.
John
Quoting "Arne Gotje (高盛冿)" <arne@linux.org.tw>:
>> Is the use of 食 and 吃 in Minnan based one any of the above
>> mechanisms is it like writing "I could 吃 a 马" (I could eat a horse)
>> where the charcter is used is used solely for it's meaning -- what
>> one might call an ideographic loan.
>
> In Minnan the character 吃 has two meanings. 1. it is indeed an
> ideographic loan from Mandarin and has the same meaning like in
> Mandarin... this is due to the fact that people are lazy or didn't know
> that the original character for "eat" is 食. Many people indeed think
> that 吃 is the correct character for "eat" when it is actually not. Lack
> of education I would say... 2. the pronunciation of 吃 is kih8 and is
> the sound when someone is laughing.
> The dictionary lists both usages but notes that 食 is the correct
> character for "eat" and that it should be preferred.
>
> This is not the only case, where Mandarin characters got embedded into
> Minnan, because due to Big5 encoding, there was no room for the
> original Minnan characters to be encoded (and it was probably
> politically not wanted). So, most people where not able to use them on
> their computers and they just used the Mandarin characters which have
> the same meaning. We can still see this on TV here and then. Nowadays
> we have a total mess of different publications using different
> characters for the same words. We can group them into the following
> categories:
> 1. Original characters: they use Unicode and publish with the original
> Minnan characters. These publications are usually written and read by
> higher educated people.
> 2. Borrowed characters from Mandarin which have the same meaning and
> just got branded with a new "sound". This is due to Big5 and the lack
> of typing the original characters. Unfortunately most people don't know
> this issue and take these characters as "correct" characters.
> 3. Phonetical similar Mandarin characters. This is the ugliest of all
> variants and usually found in schoolbooks. :( Here the authors didn't
> care about the original characters for Minnan and just use Mandarin
> characters which sound similar like the Minnan pronunciation they want
> to display. Here the meaning of the characters makes absolutely no
> sense, they are purely used as pronunciation aid. Their idea is, that
> Minnan is primarily a spoken, not a written language and therefor they
> don't need to care about characters.
> 4. POJ enthusiasts, who detest the Han characters and claim that the POJ
> romanization using Latin script is the "true Taiwanese"... (no comment
> from my side to that claim... it's just not worth discussing).
>
> Cheers
> Arne
> --
> Arne G
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