Teochew Pêng'im (5) - Comparison of Phonetic Spelling Systems

“E tah simmy way?”

What language is this? Given that this is the Learn Teochew blog, it should not be a surprise to learn that it is supposed to be Teochew.

This was how Teochew was spelled in a book titled “Handbook of the Swatow Dialect” by Herbert A Giles (the Giles in Wade-Giles romanization for Mandarin), which you can read online here.

In our modern Teochew Pêng’im and Chinese characters, this would be written:

i1 dan3 si6mih4 uê7?

伊 呾 是乜 話？

There are several different romanization schemes for Teochew that have been proposed, even though Teochew does not have as many speakers compared to its bigger neighbors Hokkien and Cantonese.

In our posts and website, we use the standard Teochew Pêng’im proposed by the Guangdong Department of Education in 1960, with some light modifications: using word spacings and hyphenation for certain particles. This is the type of phonetic spelling you will encounter in most Teochew books published in PR China.

There are a few other romanization systems still in use today. In our special bonus video for the Teochew Pêng’im series, we give a short introduction to the topic and compare some of these systems to each other.

We have also hidden a few Easter Eggs in the video: if you spot them, leave a comment! First to spot them all will win kudos.

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Posted on 2021-05-06 00:00:00 +0000