Missionaries gave Taiwanese speech a Latin alphabet and Taiwan its first newspaper
Chinese characters take years to master, so nineteenth-century missionaries tried a shortcut: write Hokkien in Latin letters with tone marks. The result, Pe̍h-ōe-jī, meaning vernacular writing, once had hundreds of thousands of readers and printed Taiwan's first newspaper, before two regimes in a row tried to push it aside.
Early in the nineteenth century China was closed to Christian preachers, so they worked among Chinese emigrants in Southeast Asia instead. In Malacca, Walter Henry Medhurst printed a small vocabulary in 1820 and a full Hokkien dictionary in 1832. His key insight was tone. Borrowing ideas from Western studies of Sanskrit, he marked tones consistently, insisting that nobody could make himself understood in Hokkien without them. Elihu Doty's manual of 1853 fixed a tone system that survives unchanged today, and Ernest Tipson's 1934 pocket dictionary finally captured the modern spelling.
After the 1842 Treaty of Nanking opened Xiamen, then called Amoy, to missionaries, they based the system on local speech, itself a blend of the Quanzhou and Zhangzhou varieties. Taiwan's mix of settlers from those same two places made the Amoy materials usable there almost unchanged, so preachers arriving after 1858 could start work at once with ready-made dictionaries and tracts.
Missionaries argued over the script's purpose. William Campbell saw it merely as a stepping stone to characters and feared promoting it would offend Chinese national feeling. Thomas Barclay disagreed, convinced after fifty years in Taiwan that ordinary believers would only read scripture for themselves in an alphabet. A printing press donated by the medical missionary James Laidlaw Maxwell let Barclay found a church press, and in 1885 it produced the island's first printed newspaper.
Japanese rule from 1895 favoured a kana system instead, and the script was suppressed again under martial law from 1947 to 1987. On the mainland it faded after 1949. Still, full computer support arrived with Unicode 4.1.0 in 2004, and Taiwan's government-backed Tâi-lô system of 2006 is built directly on it. Hokkien learners, enthusiasts and Taiwanese Christians keep using it.
Source: Pe̍h-ōe-jī
