Unlike Mandarin and Cantonese, Hokkien Chinese characters has not been standardized nor taught in school at most Hokkien area. Even though Ministry of Education (Taiwan) published recommended Hokkien characters at 2007, there are still many Taiwanese or Hokkien singers uses different characters or Mandarin equivalent for its meaning that will cause problem when comes to romanisation.
Let me give some examples for variant form problem:
Aside from variant form problem, there are also dialectial problem too. Although Ministry of Education (Taiwan) published the dictionary, it generally just cover dialects in Taiwan and mostly used 高雄音 and 台北音 as main entry, it means songs might sing in other dialect that we need to find many sources (For me, wiktionary is the best website) to find for actual pronunciation/romanisation.
Let me give some examples for variant form problem:
- The song 天黑黑 (Tian Hei Hei in Mandarin) is one of the popular Taiwanese/Hokkien folk songs, but it often written as 天黑黑 (Thian Hek Hek) because of Mandarin influences while the actual Chinese characters for it should be 天乌乌 (Thinn Oo-oo) (Ministry of Education recommend it too). Now the problem arise, should we use the pronunciation of Chinese characters from title (Thian Hek Hek) or should we use actual pronunciation from the song (Thinn Oo-Oo)?
Just a quick reminder: Chinese characters in Hokkien contains two, or sometimes more types of readings. It mostly categories in two types: vernacular and literary. For example the character 天, Thinn is the vernacular readings and Thian is literary readings. This is one of the reason that makes Hokkien complicated. - There is a qualified map recently that also have this problem too. The word 塊 in 風塊哭 is one of the popular variant form to write the sound “leh” (its meaning is “in the process of; currently”). But, because of Ministry of Education (Taiwan) recommend 咧 instead of 塊, so if you search 塊 in the dictionary, it only shows tè pronunciation which is mapper used. This is incorrect because:
- The pronunction tè for 塊 It is 代替字 (Borrowed character) because they don’t know actual Chinese character for it, so they used Mandarin equivalent.
- The 塊 (tè) meaning is “piece; chunk; lump; part”, which did not give meaning for 塊 in song title 風塊哭. But 塊 (leh, variant form of 咧) does.
While if you search 咧 in dictionary and look inside the description, it shows 塊 as one of the variant form. I also want to point out that 塊 (tè) and 塊 (leh) don’t share same origin at all.
Aside from variant form problem, there are also dialectial problem too. Although Ministry of Education (Taiwan) published the dictionary, it generally just cover dialects in Taiwan and mostly used 高雄音 and 台北音 as main entry, it means songs might sing in other dialect that we need to find many sources (For me, wiktionary is the best website) to find for actual pronunciation/romanisation.
- For example, there is a lyric 人生短短 in song 欢喜就好 (Huann Hi Tio Ho) by Chen Lei. The singer sings “lîn-sing tér-tér” instead of “lîn-sing té-té” but Ministry of Education (Taiwan) only include té when search 短 on dictionary (yes, they have list in dialectial lists but generally people will ignore it). So, what should we use then?
but you can see most are recently maps and most recent is wrongly romanised, that's why I want to mention it