In case I haven't pointed out clearly: Tadpolenese tries to be a
formal written language as much as possible. Hoklo unfortunately has a
large number of dialects: Quanzhou, Teochew, Taiwanese, Zhangzhou,
Xiamen, etc. Not counting Hainan. (I basically gave up Hainan because
so little information about it is available on the internet.) But
Taiwanese, Teochew and Quanzhou are important dialects, and so, we
should try to minimize the spelling differences across these dialects.
That's is why I think it is worth the effort to look into the e-ue-oe-
eu issue. Because once you standardize the spelling, words can be
pronounced in these dialects, with no change in their written forms.
It's like the English word "tomato", some people say "tuh-may-toe",
some people say "tuh-mah-toe", or "data", which some people pronounce
as "day-tah", and some other people as "dah-tah". I don't think
Teochew, Quanzhou and Taiwanese can one day be written in the same way
(in fact, they are as different as Spanish vs Portuguese vs Catalan),
but I do think a great degree of uniformity can be achieved.
On Jun 18, 10:48 pm, Little Tadpole <
tadpolen...@gmail.com> wrote:
> This is a very deep subject in the phonology of modern Hoklo.
>
> Historically, Hoklo had four unrelated vowels, their approximate
> phonetic values are: /e/ /ue/ /uə/ /əi/, but then later on they
> evolved and simplified into /e/ /ue/ in Taiwan and Xiamen accents. The
> problem is, the evolution paths are different for different dialects.
> So in Taiwan, some people say /ge/ for "chicken", while some others
> use /gue/. Hung Weijen 洪惟仁 has a paper on this issue. Please see:http://www.tadpolenese.com/theory/on-the-e-ue-issueandhttp://www.uijin.idv.tw/papers/論文/歷史語言學/廈門音與漳州音開合口對調(flip-flop)的歷史原因.pdf