Pha̍k-fa-sṳ

Pha̍k-fa-sṳ (白話字) is an orthography used to write Hakka language, a Chinese language. It was invented by the Presbyterian church in the 19th century. The Hakka New Testament published in 1924 is written in this system.

Writing system

Phak-fa-sṳ uses a modified Latin alphabet (an additional trema ṳ for the close central unrounded vowel /ɨ/) and some diacritics for tones. A single hyphen is added to indicate a compound.

History

Shortly after the missionaries of the Basel Missionary Society, Reverend Theodore Hamberg and Rudolf Lechler arrived in China in 1847, Hamberg and his colleagues began compiling the Hakka to English to Hakka to German dictionaries. Lechler was initially allocated the evangelizing work amongst the Shantou population, however due to opposition from the local authorities there, the Shantou mission was abandoned and he joined Hamberg in the mission work amongst the Hakka in 1852. After Hamberg passed away unexpectedly in 1854, Lechler continued with the dictionary work together with fellow missionary colleagues for over fifty years. During this time, Reverend Charles Piton also made several revisions to the dictionary.^[1]

The first publication of Romanized Hakka in Pha̍k-fa-sṳ was done by Donald MacIver ^[2] in 1905 at Shantou titled "A Chinese-English Dictionary: Hakka Dialect as Spoken in Guangdong Province" and he noted that some of the content was based on the dictionaries compiled by the previous Basel missionaries. However the basel missionaries had been using the Lepsius Romanization system which was different from Pha̍k-fa-sṳ.^[3] Whilst MacIver was making the amendments to the dictionary, he realised that Hakka vocabulary written by the Basel missionaries belonged to the Hakka dialects of the south-western parts of Guangdong Province - namely the Haifeng County, Lufeng County, Jiexi County and Wuhua County. Whereas MacIver's Hakka vocabulary was extracted from the north-eastern part of Guangdong Province such as Jiaying Prefecture (modern day Meizhou).

Current system

Consonants

Semivowel

Vowels

Tone markings

• All words are written in their original tones instead of tones with tone sandhi.

See also

• Pe̍h-ōe-jī
• Hagfa Pinyim
• Hakka Bible: Today's Taiwan Hakka Version

References

1. ↑ An Insight into the Composition of the Hakka-English Dictionary (《客英大辭典》海陸成份初探)
2. ↑ Donald MacIver (1852-1910) The Chinese name he adopted was 紀多納
3. ↑ A Hakka index to the Chinese-English dictionary

External links

• Chinese to Hakka Dictionary Online (in the Siyen dialect)
• English to Hakka Dictionary Online