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A great majority of people in Taiwan can speak both Mandarin and Hokkien, but the degree of fluency varies widely. [34] There are, however, small but significant numbers of people in Taiwan, mainly but not exclusively Hakka and Mainlanders, who cannot speak Taiwanese fluently. A shrinking percentage of the population, mainly people born before ...
Phonetic borrowing characters (借音字): If the root character is uncertain and there are no close equivalent morphemes in Standard Mandarin, characters with similar sounds that have gained widespread acceptance in literature can be used, for example 嘛 (mā, "also"), 佳哉 (ka-tsài, "fortunately"), 磅空 (pōng-khang, "tunnel").
In other cases, Mandarin creates new words to imitate Hokkien ones, as in the case of "哇靠," ("damn") from the Hokkien "goák-hàu", but pronounced in Mandarin as "wā-kào". While most Taiwanese people understand Hokkien, far fewer understand or speak Hakka, and Taiwanese Mandarin therefore contains fewer Hakka loanwords.
As compared to Mandarin, Hokkien dialects prefer to use the monosyllabic form of words, without suffixes. For instance, the Mandarin noun suffix 子; zi is not found in Hokkien words, while another noun suffix, 仔; á is used in many nouns. Examples are below: 'duck' – 鴨; ah or 鴨仔; ah-á (cf. Mandarin 鴨子; yāzi)
New Xiang is orange, Old Xiang yellow, and Chen-Xu Xiang red. Non-Xiang languages are (clockwise from top right) Gan (purple), Hakka (pink along the right), Xiangnan Tuhua (dark green), Waxianghua (dark blue on the left), and Southwestern Mandarin (light blue, medium blue, light green on the left; part of dark green).
Pe̍h-ōe-jī (白話字) is a Latin alphabet developed by Western missionaries working in Southeast Asia in the 19th century to write Hokkien. Pe̍h-ōe-jī allows Hokkien to be written phonetically in Latin script, meaning that phrases specific to Hokkien can be written without having to deal with the issue of non-existent Chinese characters.
Contrary to popular belief, a vernacular written in this fashion is not in general comprehensible to a Mandarin speaker, due to significant changes in grammar and vocabulary and the necessary use of a large number of non-Mandarin characters. For most Min varieties, a similar process has not taken place. For Hokkien, competing systems exist. [53]
Hokkien did not experience a great phonological change throughout the transition period from Old Chinese to Middle Chinese. Min dialects, including Hokkien, preserved a unique feature of Old Chinese: it does not have labiodental consonants. For instance, the word "分" is pronounced as fen in Mandarin, but as pun in Hokkien.