Introduction to Modern Taiwanese Language

Modern Taiwanese Language (MTL) is a system that coalesced out of the efforts of many people devoted to promoting MTL as an official writing system of the Taiwanese Language (i.e. Holo, or HQxlQr in MTL). In 1989, Mrs. Margie Lee (Paang Ciaukhefng), one of the primary contributors to Washington D.C. Taiwanese Language School (WDCTS), led the switch to MTL after realizing some of the difficulties in teaching children (whose primary language is English) using the more popular POJ Romanization.

Koklioong who is interested in utilizing the Internet as a media for education purpose, organized the notes into web based pages to share MTL with those who are interested in learning modern Taiwanese. Note: Some basic understanding of HQxlQr and 'Harnji' is required for this introduction. Harnji characters in these home pages are represented either in Big5 or UTF-8 encoding.

Modern Literal Taiwanese (MLT) was created by Dr. Liim Keahioong, a professor at Cheng-Kung University in Tainan, Taiwan; Dr. Liim has been practicing MLT for more than 40 years (1943). MLT adopts the letters of the English alphabet plus two special characters: the Greek letter ν (nu, U+03BD) and an 'o' superimposed with a back slash '\' (similar to Q). In these web pages, in order to avoid creating new characters and to facilitate MLT use on the standard word processors, the following steps have been taken: (1) v is used in place of the Greek letter nu (there is no 'vee' sound in the Taiwanese language) and, (2) either a font-reduced Q (U+0051) or Q (U+00F8) or 0 (zero, U+0030) is used in place of the backslashed o.

Dr. Liim published an MS-DOS based software package called "THE WP Data System" (a product of EduTech) for MTL. With Dr. Liim's approval, Koklioong converted Dr. Liim's MTL dictionary entries into "quail" format using Mule (Multi-lingual Enhancement to GNU Emacs which is a powerful display editor) as the input methods. Mule is currently running under many Unix and Linux systems (e.g., SunOS, Solaris, Digital Unix, ULTRIX and Linux). Like Emacs, Mule is able to switch different set of dictionary for spelling checks performed by aspell and ispell. They both are powerful internaltional spell-checking programs, which also have been ported to MS-Windows. Of course, there is plenty of room for improvements in using MTL for "spell-checks". Currently, MTL input methods have been added to UnionWay's Asian97 which is a try and buy version for Win95/98 and NT. For those of you who are interested in MTL input methods, please contact Koklioong at kloa@netzero.net for details.