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Pe̍h-ōe-jī
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Pe̍h-ōe-jī

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Also known as Church Romanization

' ( ; , , ; 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
Writing system.fam5
Latin script
Writing system.iso15924 note
BCP 47 variant subtag:
Chinese.collapse
no
Chinese.l
Vernacular writing
Chinese.showflag
poj
Chinese.poj
Pe̍h-ōe-jī, Pe̍h-ōe-lī, Pe̍͘h-ōa-jī

via Wikipedia infobox

Wikidata facts

Instance of
writing system
Image
POJ text sample.svg
Show 5 more facts
Commons category
Pe̍h-ōe-jī
inception
1830-00-00
language of work or name
Southern Min
writing system
Latin script
Sources (2)

via Wikidata · CC0

~45 min read

Encyclopedic overview

22 sections
Contents
  • 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.

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Pe̍h-ōe-jī” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.

Gallery (20)