After seven years of development, the Ministry of Education has completed the first official online dictionkary for Hoklo (also known as Taiwanese).
The Online Taiwan Common Hoklo Dictionary test version contains 16,000 commonly used Hoklo terms and words in transliteration.
Ministry officials said the dictionary was very user-friendly and that non-Hoklo speakers could look up Hoklo phrases by keying in their Mandarin equivalent.
DEVELOPMENT
Chen Hsuch-yu (陳雪玉), the executive-secretary and senior inspector of the ministry’s National Languages Committee, said the ministry had begun work on Hoklo, Hakka and Aboriginal online dictionaries in July 2001 to facilitate local language sessions in elementary and junior high schools.
The endeavor is now complete, with the three dictionaries finished in March, June and this month respectively, she said.
Users of the Hoklo dictionary can look up words by keying in headwords (“catchwords”), transliteration of the words and the words’ Mandarin equivalents through “fuzzy searches” or “focus searches,” Chen said.
TOOLS
They can also look up slang, place names, kinship terms, loanwords (words borrowed from another language), terms of human organs and the 24 solar terms by keying in the number of strokes of the term’s headword, she said.
Phonological differences and regional variations, including the two major variants — Chuanchou (泉州) and Changchou (漳州) — are also recognized by the dictionary, she said.
Yao Rongsong (姚榮松), chief editor of the ministry’s editing committee and a professor of Taiwanese literature at National Taiwan Normal University, said creating the dictionary was very time consuming because editors had to switch from the Taiwan Language Phonetic Alphabet they had initially used to Taiwanese romanization.
TRIAL
Yao said the committee would amend the dictionary in accordance with feedback after a six-month trial period.
Minister of Education Cheng Jei-cheng (鄭瑞城) said completion of the dictionary showed that the nation’s Hoklo education had now entered a new age of professionalism.
The Web site is available at http://twblg.dict.edu.tw/tw/index.htm.
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) yesterday reported the first case of a new COVID-19 subvariant — BA.3.2 — in a 10-year-old Singaporean girl who had a fever upon arrival in Taiwan and tested positive for the disease. The girl left Taiwan on March 20 and the case did not have a direct impact on the local community, it said. The WHO added the BA.3.2 strain to its list of Variants Under Monitoring in December last year, but this was the first imported case of the COVID-19 variant in Taiwan, CDC Deputy Director-General Lin Ming-cheng (林明誠) said. The girl arrived in Taiwan on
South Korea is planning to revise its controversial electronic arrival card, a step Taiwanese officials said prompted them to hold off on planned retaliatory measures, a South Korean media report said yesterday. A Yonhap News Agency report said that the South Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs is planning to remove the “previous departure place” and “next destination” fields from its e-arrival card system. The plan, reached after interagency consultations, is under review and aims to simplify entry procedures and align the electronic form with the paper version, a South Korean ministry official said. The fields — which appeared only on the electronic form
A bipartisan group of US senators has introduced a bill to enhance cooperation with Taiwan on drone development and to reduce reliance on supply chains linked to China. The proposed Blue Skies for Taiwan Act of 2026 was introduced by Republican US senators Ted Cruz and John Curtis, and Democratic US senators Jeff Merkley and Andy Kim. The legislation seeks to ease constraints on Taiwan-US cooperation in uncrewed aerial systems (UAS), including dependence on China-sourced components, limited access to capital and regulatory barriers under US export controls, a news release issued by Cruz on Wednesday said. The bill would establish a "Blue UAS
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) is suspending retaliation measures against South Korea that were set to take effect tomorrow, after Seoul said it is updating its e-arrival system, MOFA said today. The measures were to be a new round of retaliation after Taiwan on March 1 changed South Korea's designation on government-issued alien resident certificates held by South Korean nationals to "South Korea” from the "Republic of Korea," the country’s official name. The move came after months of protests to Seoul over its listing of Taiwan as "China (Taiwan)" in dropdown menus on its new online immigration entry system. MOFA last week
RSS