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monday, april 20^th, 2026

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preface: the problem with teochew orthography

the tale of sou la̍k-niôⁿ (蘇六娘傳說 sou la̍k-niôⁿ thuâng-sueh) is a teochew tragic love story in the form of a balled. it was passed down for hundreds of years from generation to generation in the teochew region of china, and one of the ways that it was remembered was by writing it down in the form of songbooks (歌冊 kua-tsheh), which were then used as a mnemonic device. the orthographic conventions that were innovated within the pages of these songbooks eventually developed into a semi-standardised, teochew-centric functional orthography.

there were two types of orthographical innovations present in teochew songbooks:

• semantic loans are characters which were used for the meanings that they represent, with their sounds being disregarded. for instance, 乾 kang, "dry" in classical chinese, was used to represent the morpheme ta "dry".
• phonetic loans on the other hand, are characters which were used for the sounds that they make, with their meanings being disregarded. for instance, 那 ná "that", was used to represent the morpheme ná "if".

nowadays, with the suppression of teochew and other sinitic languages in favour of standard mandarin, this long tradition of writing teochew has been lost. modern academics now prescribe supposedly "etymological" mandarin-centric characters in place of these historical innovations in a bid to bring these divergent "dialects" closer to the mandarin standard. ta is now written 焦, "burned" in mandarin, and ná is now written 若, "if" in mandarin. in my opinion, this practice cuts the teochew language off from centuries of rich orthographical history for little practical gain.

the following is my attempt at uncovering some of the semantic and phonetic loans in the tale of sou la̍k-niôⁿ by attempting a full transcription of the text in pe̍h-ūe-jī. i chose this specific songbook because both a full audio recording and a transcription into chinese characters were available online. to my knowledge, i don't think that there's any other teochew songbooks out there which fulfill this criteria; feel free to correct me if i'm wrong!

relevant links

• transcription of the text on wikisource
• original scans of the songbook on wikisource
• recording of the songbook by 楊佩華 (ioⁿ puẽ-huâ), on youtube

• transcription and translation of the first few stanzas on github
• teochew pronunciation annotator on learnteochew.com, which i relied on heavily
• teochew romanisation converter on learnteochew.com
• list of teochew songbooks on github
• partial list of songbook characters from various songbooks on wikisource

songbook characters found (so far)

my teochew is nowhere near fluent, and i definitely struggled with picking out the phonetic loans. as a result, the table below is mostly semantic loans, which were easier for me to spot. if you find any more phonetic loans in the passage below, please do let me know!

note: unfortunately, my teochew isn't nearly fluent enough for me to pick out the morpheme boundaries, so the pe̍h-ūe-jī transcription lacks morpheme-connecting hyphens. there are many different versions of the songbook, and in certain cases a different character was read on the recording than was printed; in these cases, the transcription reflects that of the recording. when faced with dialectal differences in pronunciation, i went with the version closest to 楊佩華's accent.

happy reading!

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