Pe̍h-ōe-jī
' ( ; , , ; POJ), also known as Church Romanization', is an orthography used to write variants of Hokkien Southern Min, particularly Taiwanese and Amoy Hokkien. It is widely employed as one of the writing systems for Southern Min. During its peak, it had hundreds of thousands of readers.
Key facts
- Writing system.altname
- Church Romanization
- Writing system.sample
- POJ text sample corrected.svg
- Writing system.alt
- A sample of POJ text
- Writing system.caption
- A sample of text
- Writing system.imagesize
- 250px
- Writing system.type
- Alphabet
- Writing system.time
- since the 1830s
- Writing system.languages
- Southern Min
- Writing system.fam1
- Egyptian hieroglyphs
- Writing system.fam2
- Proto-Sinaitic
- Writing system.fam3
- Phoenician alphabet
- Writing system.fam4
- Greek alphabet
Article
22 sectionsContents
- Name
- History
- Early development
- Maturity
- After World War II
- Current system
- Tone markings
- Hyphens
- Audio examples
- Regional differences
- Texts
- Computing
- Unicode codepoints
- Font support
- Han-Romanization mixed script
- Adaptations for other Chinese varieties
- Current status
- Notes
- References
- Citations
- Works cited
- External links
' ( ; , , ; POJ), also known as Church Romanization', is an orthography used to write variants of Hokkien Southern Min, particularly Taiwanese and Amoy Hokkien. It is widely employed as one of the writing systems for Southern Min. During its peak, it had hundreds of thousands of readers.
Developed by Western missionaries working among the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia in the 19th century and refined by missionaries working in Xiamen and Tainan, it uses a modified Latin alphabet and some diacritics to represent the spoken language. After initial success in Fujian, POJ became most widespread in Taiwan and, in the mid-20th century, there were over 100,000 people literate in POJ. A large amount of printed material, religious and secular, has been produced in the script, including Taiwan's first newspaper, the Taiwan Church News.