Daī-ghî tōng-iōng pīng-im (Taiwanese phonetic transcription system,

abbr An abbreviation (from Latin ''brevis'', meaning ''short'') is a shortened form of a word or phrase, by any method. It may consist of a group of letters or words taken from the full version of the word or phrase; for example, the word ''abbrevi ...

: DT; ) is an

orthography An orthography is a set of conventions for writing a language, including norms of spelling, hyphenation, capitalization, word breaks, emphasis, and punctuation. Most transnational languages in the modern period have a writing system, and ...

in the

Latin alphabet The Latin alphabet or Roman alphabet is the collection of letters originally used by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered with the exception of extensions (such as diacritics), it used to write English and the ...

for

Taiwanese Hokkien Taiwanese Hokkien () (; Tâi-lô: ''Tâi-uân-uē''), also known as Taigi/Taigu (; Pe̍h-ōe-jī/ Tâi-lô: ''Tâi-gí / Tâi-gú''), Taiwanese, Taiwanese Minnan, Hoklo and Holo, is a variety of the Hokkien language spoken natively by about ...

based upon

Tongyong Pinyin Tongyong Pinyin () was the official romanization of Mandarin in Taiwan between 2002 and 2008. The system was unofficially used between 2000 and 2002, when a new romanization system for Taiwan was being evaluated for adoption. Taiwan's Ministry ...

. It is able to use the

to indicate the proper variation of pitch with nine

diacritic A diacritic (also diacritical mark, diacritical point, diacritical sign, or accent) is a glyph added to a letter or to a basic glyph. The term derives from the Ancient Greek (, "distinguishing"), from (, "to distinguish"). The word ''diacrit ...

symbols.

Phonology

DT in its present form has 17 initials, 18 finals and 8 tones.

Tone number

Taiwanese Taiwanese may refer to: * Taiwanese language, another name for Taiwanese Hokkien * Something from or related to Taiwan (Formosa) * Taiwanese aborigines, the indigenous people of Taiwan * Han Taiwanese, the Han people of Taiwan * Taiwanese people, r ...

is a

tonal language Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning – that is, to distinguish or to inflect words. All verbal languages use pitch to express emotional and other paralinguistic information and to convey emph ...

, so the pitch ( tone) of a spoken word affects its meaning, same as the written words. However, in non-tonal languages, a word's pitch constantly conveys emotion but often does not influence its meaning.Charles Q. Choi,"Speaking in Tones",

Scientific American ''Scientific American'', informally abbreviated ''SciAm'' or sometimes ''SA'', is an American popular science magazine. Many famous scientists, including Albert Einstein and Nikola Tesla, have contributed articles to it. In print since 1845, it ...

Magazine,September 2007,2 Page(s). In Taiwanese, which has nine tones and two extra tones, neutral tone and

nasal vowel A nasal vowel is a vowel that is produced with a lowering of the soft palate (or velum) so that the air flow escapes through the nose and the mouth simultaneously, as in the French vowel or Amoy []. By contrast, oral vowels are produced with ...

Tone definition

Tone marks

Tones are expressed by

s; checked syllables (i.e. those ending with

glottal stop The glottal plosive or stop is a type of consonantal sound used in many spoken languages, produced by obstructing airflow in the vocal tract or, more precisely, the glottis. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents thi ...

s) are followed by the letter h. Where diacritics are not technically available, e.g. on some parts of the internet, tone alphabet may be used instead. # a (1st tone; yinping) # à (2nd tone; yingshang) # a̠ (3rd tone; yinqu) # ā (ptkh) (4th tone; yinru) # ă (5th tone; yangping) # ä (6th tone; yangshang) # ā (7th tone; yangqu) # a (ptkh) (8th tone; yangru) # á (9th tone; high rising) # å (neutral tone) # aⁿ (ann) (

) Examples for these tones: ciūⁿ (elephant), bâ (leopard), bhè (horse), di (pig), zŭa (snake), āh (duck), lok (deer). And, a neutral tone, sometimes indicated by å(aj) in DT, has no specific contour; its pitch always depends on the tones of the preceding syllables. Taiwanese speakers refer to this tone as the "neutral tone" ().

Tone sandhi

Tone sandhi or chain shift by circulation, as the tones are encoded by appending and modifying spellings with attention to the rules of the DT system. The basic tone has no modification and tone mark. Generally speaking, the basic tone means the 7th tone (mid even tone; yangqu).Li, Hen-zng(李獻璋),"Introduction to Ho-gen hue(福建語法序說)",Minami-kaze Bookstore(南風書局),

Tokyo Tokyo (; ja, 東京, , ), officially the Tokyo Metropolis ( ja, 東京都, label=none, ), is the capital and largest city of Japan. Formerly known as Edo, its metropolitan area () is the most populous in the world, with an estimated 37.46 ...

Japan Japan ( ja, 日本, or , and formally , ''Nihonkoku'') is an island country in East Asia. It is situated in the northwest Pacific Ocean, and is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan, while extending from the Sea of Okhotsk in the n ...

, Dec. 1950.

Morphology

A DT word, like an English word, can be formed by only one syllable or several syllables, with the two syllables being the general typicality. Each syllable in DT follows one of the six underlying patterns:Dan, Hue-liong(陳輝龍),"Taiwanese(臺灣語法(全));Appendum: the Taiwanese auxiliary(附臺灣語助數詞)",Anonymous association publ.(無名會出版部),

Taipei Taipei (), officially Taipei City, is the capital and a special municipality of the Republic of China (Taiwan). Located in Northern Taiwan, Taipei City is an enclave of the municipality of New Taipei City that sits about southwest of the ...

Taiwan Taiwan, officially the Republic of China (ROC), is a country in East Asia, at the junction of the East and South China Seas in the northwestern Pacific Ocean, with the People's Republic of China (PRC) to the northwest, Japan to the no ...

,July 1934.

Alphabet

The DT alphabet adopts the

of 19 letters, 4 digraphs, and 6

s to express the basic sounds of

Initials

bh, z, c, gh, h, r, g, k, l, m, n, ng, b, p, s, d, t Note that unlike their typical interpretation in modern

English language English is a West Germanic language of the Indo-European language family, with its earliest forms spoken by the inhabitants of early medieval England. It is named after the Angles, one of the ancient Germanic peoples that migrated to the ...

, ''bh'' and ''gh'' are voiced and unaspirated, whereas ''b'', ''g'', and ''d'' are plain unvoiced as in

Hanyu Pinyin Hanyu Pinyin (), often shortened to just pinyin, is the official romanization system for Standard Mandarin Chinese in China, and to some extent, in Singapore and Malaysia. It is often used to teach Mandarin, normally written in Chinese for ...

. ''p'', ''k'', and ''t'' are unvoiced and aspirated, corresponding closer to ''p'', ''t'', and ''k'' in English. It is inconsistent with the use of h's in the Legge romanization and the use of the diacritic in the

International Phonetic Alphabet The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin script. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the late 19th century as a standardized representation ...

to signal consonantal aspiration.

Finals

Vowel A vowel is a syllabic speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness and also in quantity (len ...

s: a, i, u, e, or, o *

Diphthong A diphthong ( ; , ), also known as a gliding vowel, is a combination of two adjacent vowel sounds within the same syllable. Technically, a diphthong is a vowel with two different targets: that is, the tongue (and/or other parts of the speech ...

s: ai, au, ia, iu, io, ui, ua, ue * Triphthongs: iau, uai * Nasals: m, n, ng The nasals ''m, n,'' and ''ng'' can be appended to any of the vowels and some of the diphthongs. In addition, ''m'' and ''ng'' can function as independent syllables by themselves. The stops ''h'', ''g'', ''b'' and ''d'' can appear as the last letter in a syllable, in which case they are pronounced with no audible release. (The final ''h'' in DT stands for a glottal stop.)

Delimiting symbols

All syllables in each word are normally separated by the

dash The dash is a punctuation mark consisting of a long horizontal line. It is similar in appearance to the hyphen but is longer and sometimes higher from the baseline. The most common versions are the endash , generally longer than the hyphen ...