Pha̍k-fa-sṳ (白話字) is an orthography similar to Pe̍h-ōe-jī and used to write Hakka, a Chinese language. It was invented by the Presbyterian church in the 19th century. The Hakka New Testament published in 1924 is written in this system.
Contents
Writing system
Phak-fa-sṳ uses a modified Latin alphabet (an additional trema ṳ for the close central unrounded vowel /ɨ/) and some diacritics for tones. A single hyphen is added to indicate a compound.
History
Shortly after the missionaries of the Basel Missionary Society, Reverend Theodore Hamberg and Rudolf Lechler arrived in China in 1847, Hamberg and his colleagues began compiling the Hakka to English to Hakka to German dictionaries. Lechler was initially allocated the evangelizing work amongst the Shantou population, however due to opposition from the local authorities there, the Shantou mission was abandoned and he joined Hamberg in the mission work amongst the Hakka in 1852. After Hamberg died unexpectedly in 1854, Lechler continued with the dictionary work together with fellow missionary colleagues for over fifty years. During this time, Reverend Charles Piton also made several revisions to the dictionary.
The first publication of Romanized Hakka in Pha̍k-fa-sṳ was done by Donald MacIver in 1905 at Shantou titled "A Chinese-English Dictionary: Hakka Dialect as Spoken in Guangdong Province" and he noted that some of the content was based on the dictionaries compiled by the previous Basel missionaries. However the basel missionaries had been using the Lepsius Romanization system which was different from Pha̍k-fa-sṳ.