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Taiwan's Zhuyin is 90+% the same as Pinyin except the input is composed with Chinese script radicals (like hiragana) rather than Latin script. > Both generally
by xster 5y ago
Taiwan's Zhuyin is 90+% the same as Pinyin except the input is composed with Chinese script radicals (like hiragana) rather than Latin script.
> Both generally use Traditional instead of Simplified
That doesn't impact the human side of the IME. It's just different output for the same input. And the input (Mandarin pronunciation) is the same for mainland and Taiwan.
- eloisius 5y agoZhuyin aren’t Chinese radicals. They are derived from characters. For example the “b” sounds ㄅ comes from the character 包 bāo.
- seanmcdirmid 5y agoI thought Zhuyin was like kana because it was designed during the Japanese occupation?
- eloisius 5y agoZhuyin was created on the Mainland during the ROC era, and brought to Taiwan after the Japanese surrender, where it is now the most prominent phonetic system. Prior to the KMT retreat to Taiwan, Mandarin was not widely spoken here. Before Japan colonized Taiwan, Taiwanese language (Minnan) was usually written using Latin characters with diacritics. During the Japanese colonial era, they attempted to introduce Taiwanese kana. I don't think usage has survived to present day, but I have met a few old people who can only speak Japanese and Taiwanese, but not Mandarin. Today Taiwanese is mostly a spoken language, but you can find it written. Sometimes it's a mixture of hanzi and Latin characters to supplement missing characters. I've heard that there is also an adapted Zhuyin used to write Taiwanese, but I've never seen an example of it. tl;dr Zhuyin and and Taiwanese kana were developed during approximately the same time, but separately, and for separate languages.
- seanmcdirmid 5y agoAh, ya, that was a dumb thought on my part then. Of course if it was initiated by the ROC, they wouldn't have been in Taiwan in the 1920s.
- yorwba 5y agoThere are differences in the Mandarin pronunciations standardized on the Mainland and Taiwan. Most of them involve using the fifth tone or not, but there are a few more noticeable exceptions, like 和 hé ㄏㄢˋ (which would correspond to pinyin hàn) and 崖 yá ㄧㄞˊ (which would correspond to pinyin yái). Stuff like that occasionally trips me up when switching between pinyin and zhuyin.
- eloisius 5y ago和 is also hé/ㄏㄜˊ in Taiwan sometimes, as in 永和. Those differences aren’t intrinsic to Zhuyin or Pinyin.
- frogulis 5y ago> Taiwan's Zhuyin is 90+% the same as Pinyin except the input is composed with Chinese script radicals I wouldn't say that's true. It's phonetic, sure, but it relates much more closely to the syllable structure than Pinyin does. Simple example: 南, Pinyin: nán, Zhuyin: ㄋㄢˊ In Pinyin, we use the same letter "n" in initial and final position. In Zhuyin, the word is composed of two letters, ㄋ （initial n), and ㄢ (final an). The only time that ㄢ begins a syllable is when it's the whole syllable, e.g. 安, ㄢ, "ān"
- eloisius 5y agoIt’s also far more consistent. The ü of Pinyin only has umlauts with l because lü and lu are both valid syllables. That the u of qu and ju is actually ü, and the u of chu and zhu is u is confusing, to say nothing of yong/-iong. In Zhuyin you have discrete ㄨ u and ㄩ ü, and yong doesn’t masquerade is a rare vowel, it’s just ㄩㄥ。