Computers and romanised Taiwanese

In the comments section of this blog, Prince Roy asked a question about fonts for Taiwanese romanisation – a fleshed out answer is the subject of this post.

One of the problems with POJ being a fairly obscure system for writing a neglected language is that of entering the romanisation on a computer. Hanyu Pinyin for Mandarin Chinese is pretty well established on the internet – all the necessary accented characters exist in standard unicode set. The same cannot be said of POJ (also called Church Romanisation) which is probably the most used system for the Southern Min dialect group, which includes Taiwanese. There are many different ways to produce POJ, some of which are outlined below.

The first thing to consider is whether you want to write your POJ for general consumption. If not, the answer is pretty easy – there are POJ-specific fonts you can download which replace seldom-used characters in the palette with appropriately accented characters. Trouble with this approach is that as soon as you change your writing into another font or transfer it to a computer without the font, it becomes gibberish.

A better approach for producing POJ that is readable on (nearly) all systems without the need to download new programs is to use an IME (Input Method Editor) which converts keyed input into POJ viewable by anyone (this is the approach I use). For the Mac OpenVanilla does the job like a charm and is very easy to use. I’m not aware of a similar IME for the PC, but if anyone is, please let me know.

The third option if the two above are unsuitable is to combine diacritics with regular roman letters to result in the characters required. The tricky accents in POJ are the 8th tone mark (a straight vertical line over the relevant letter: e.g. “a̍”) and a variety of tones over consonants. This is fiddly, time-consuming and so not ideal. Alternatively cutting and pasting the correct characters is an option for short texts.

The difficulties with typing POJ led me to use my own system when I first started learning Taiwanese – one much closer to Hanyu Pinyin (easing the transition). Taiwanese suffers from not having a standardised romanisation system – POJ, TLPA and other be-acronym’d scripts all compete for attention, to the detriment of the language as a whole. Ideally someone (Taiwan’s Guóyǔ Tuīxíng Wěiyuánhuì [國語推行委員會], perhaps?) would regulate, choose one (I don’t really care which one, at this point) and get on with the business of teaching and promoting it.

Having said all this, the best way for the average PC user to input POJ is to install a unicode font, but this does involve reprogramming your shortcuts in Word (or whatever) to output the correct characters. This should however be viewable by other users who don’t have the font installed.

If enough people are interested I could work on a web-based converter (not now, though – fearsome busy at the moment) to move between the major varieties of Taiwanese romanisation. I also plan to post about my adapted Hanyu Pinyin that is (I feel) more intuitive for those who already know the system for Mandarin Chinese.

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