Peh-oe-ji Lite

Wu Yu Wei published on June 03, 2020

3 min, 406 words

Peh-oe-ji Lite (POJL) is a dialect of Pe̍h-ōe-jī, one of the first orthography in Taiwan and is still widely in use nowadays. It's literally the same BUT:

No need for tone marking anymore. You can type Goa (我) instead of Goá.
Special letters, ⁿ and o͘, are simplified to n and o. Mo͘ can now be Mo (毛), and Saⁿ can just be San (衫). Here's the compaison of all letters between original and lite: TODO
(Optional) Hyphens - can be removed or become a space instead. Peh-oe-ji, peh oe ji, and pehoeji are all valid in POJ lite. Just choose the one you think is the most readable.
(Optional) Same with double hyphen --. chiah-pa--be (食飽袂), chiah-pa-be, chiah pa be, and chiahpabe are all valid.

The reason that hyphen elision is optional is because there are more scenarios need to be considered actually. We will figure this out once the proposal is finalized.

Motiviation

Pe̍h-ōe-jī and Tâi-uân Lô-má-jī are two mainstream romanization systems in Taiwan that are easy to read and write until they meet modern computation systems. Despite there are so many input methods to support on different platforms. It's still a huge gap to actually type these words. IMHO, we should be able to just use simple alphabet charaters to express our sentences. Furthermore, it also increases the readability a lot once tone marks are removed. After all, we usually read texts in any language instead of pronunciation.

To be clear again, POJL is just a dialect and is not trying to replace any existing format. It aims to help people type Taiwanese easier, and potentailly flatten the learning curve for beginner. Eventually, we expect POJL can be commonly used in casual situations.

Sample

Here's what it looks like if we type in POJL:

Peh-oe-ji (POJ) si 1 khoan iong Latin (Lo-ma) pheng-im he-thong lai sia Tai-oan e gi-gian e su-bin bun-ji. In-ui tong-chho si thoan-kau-su in--jip-lai e, so-i iah-u-lang ka POJ kio-cho kau-hoe Lo-ma-ji, hek-chia si kan-chheng kau-lo. Put-ji-ko hian-tai e su-iong-chia be-chio m-si kau-to, kau-to ma chin che be-hiau POJ.