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Taiwanese Phonetic Symbols

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Direction
  
Left-to-right

Type
  
Semisyllabary (letters for onsets and rimes; diacritics for tones)

Creator
  
Chu Chao-hsiang, Taiwan NLC

Time period
  
1946 to the present, used as ruby characters in Taiwan

Parent systems
  
Oracle Bone ScriptSeal ScriptClerical ScriptMandarin Phonetic SymbolsTaiwanese Phonetic Symbols

Sister systems
  
Simplified Chinese, Kanji, Hanja, Chữ Nôm, Khitan script

Taiwanese Phonetic Symbols (Chinese: 臺語方音符號; TPS: ㄉㄞˊ ㆣ丨ˋ ㄏㆲ 丨ㆬ ㄏㄨˊ ㄏㄜ˫) is a system of phonetic notation for the transcription of Taiwanese languages, especially Taiwanese Hokkien. The system is designed by Professor Chu Chao-hsiang, a member of National Languages Committee in Taiwan, in 1946. The system is derived from Mandarin Phonetic Symbols by creating additional symbols for the sounds that do not appear in Mandarin phonology.

Contents

Symbols

There are 49 symbols used in standard Taiwanese Hokkien. Of these 49 symbols, 26 are from the original Mandarin Phonetic Symbols, while 23 are additional, created for Taiwanese languages.

  • The symbols in blue do not exist in Mandarin phonology.
  • Four voiceless consonants may be written in lower case for an unreleased coda: ㄅ [p̚ ], ㄉ [t̚ ], ㄍ [k̚ ], ㄏ [ʔ].
  • Some extra symbols are used in other Taiwanese dialects: ㄬ[ɲ], ㄛ [o], ㄝ [ɛ], ㆨ [ɨ].

    • Unicode support

    The Mandarin Phonetic Symbols were added to the Unicode Standard in October 1991 with the release of version 1.0. The Unicode block for Mandarin Phonetic Symbols is U+3100 ... U+312F.

    The extended phonetic symbols were added to the Unicode Standard in September 1999 with the release of version 3.0. The Unicode block for the extended symbols is U+31A0 ... U+31BF.

    However, there are several errors in the extended symbols

    References

    Taiwanese Phonetic Symbols Wikipedia
    (Text) CC BY-SA


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