我的母語 - 台灣話 * My Mother Tongue - Taiwanese
張東瀛
2021-01-18
Mother tongue is the language we heard and learned for the first time when we were born. Hometown is where we were born and raised. Regardless of whether the hometown is beautiful or ordinary, most people will be particularly attached to their hometown. I have the same feeling for Taiwanese language. Taiwanese is my mother tongue. Before I was six, I could only listen to Taiwanese. After primary school, I learned Chinese, English, Japanese and Spanish. However, I always feel that Taiwanese is the best, and speaking Taiwanese also suits me best.
More than 50 years ago, Tainan Wu Temple held Lantern Guessing on the night of Lantern Festival, and there was a riddle "Chang'e Flies to the Moon". When I was watching a book of riddles, I found out that "stealing pill" literally means stealing elixir, which seems to fit the topic. However, at the time I didn't know how to pronounce the ancient Chinese word of "stealing" in Taiwanese, so I had to use "que" to confuse it. The host didn't care about my young age, and played the drum three times first before giving me the prize. Then he told me the correct pronunciation of the word privately. I'm a Taiwanese, and I can't even say correctly a bird's name in the public. I feel very disgraceful.
In 1968, I went to the Taipei Institute of Technology to study. My classmates all spoke Chinese. Taiwanese was only used when asking for directions on a rural outing. Later, when I came to Matsu island for military service, most of the soldiers in the mechanical maintenance platoon were so-called "black hands", and they only spoke Taiwanese when repairing vehicles. At that time, I learned that Taiwanese have various accents. In 1984, when I went to Chenggong University to study linguistics, I naturally regarded Taiwanese as a research object. After reading relevant literature and doing some examples of field research, I understood gradually that Taiwanese originated from ancient Chinese language and southern Fujian colloquial speech, and later incorporated into native and foreign vocabulary. It took hundreds of years of evolution to form this beautiful and elegant language. The tone of Taiwanese is like the pentatonic scale of a musical score. The third tone is "Do", the seventh tone is "mi", and the first tone is "so". Check tones and tone sandhi make Taiwanese more musical. I often told my friends abroad that Taiwanese is a language of music and poetry. If they don't believe me, I sang the song "Antong Brother Buys Vegetables" to make them listen intently and keep saying "That is great".
In 1970, I learned computer programming skills at school. In 1991, I went to the United States to pursue a master degree. While I watched the IBM's display of "multimedia" on a personal computers, I felt that this technology was very useful and began to have the idea of computerizing Taiwanese text-to-speech system. After returning home, I tried to design multimedia applications. In 1998, I made a CD for musician Jong-Teh Lin that combined text, photos, music and video. After the CD was released, I knew that the same method and technology could be used to develop a Taiwanese text-to-speech system.
In 2001, I sent the first Taiwanese text-to-speech software to the Congress library in the US to apply for copyright. The Romaji version made at that time had no Unicode tone symbols for Taiwanese, so it could only use numbers or words to express tones. In addition to Taiwanese romaji, there were Chinese and English dictionaries. In the second version, the speech synthesizer was improved to be able to make continuous tone sandhi in a sentences. In 2008, I used Unicode for the Taiwanese Romaji version issued by the Ministry of Education. I used English letters and digital tones as input, but digital tones form and symbolic tones form can be converted to each other. Later, I added some Japanese dictionaries, and finally completed a computer software that can be used as a tool for learning Taiwanese. The user can type the word and listen to the speech immediately. Now the functions and uses of this software have reached my goals and expectations back then.
There have been many difficulties in developing this software. Fortunately, I got encouragement and help from many people. Because the morphology and writing of Taiwanese is still in its infancy, the dictionaries have not yet been standardized. It takes more time to edit the dictionary. The schedule of building corpus has also been extended. The recording of more than 70,000 words is also a time-consuming task. I started recording when I was in my 40s, and continued to record until I was in my 60s. During the period, my voice changed a lot.
In the past, there was no written language in Taiwanese. It is not easy to spread it only by word of mouth. However, this tonal language has been circulated for thousands of years. In the past of one hundred years, Taiwanese has been suppressed by the ruling authorities. It is a miracle that this language has not disappeared. The tone sandhi and tone group structure of Taiwanese are unique among more than 6,000 existing languages in the world. Every sentence of Taiwanese is a collection of tone groups. The tone group derived from the Taiwanese tone sandhi is not only a unique prosodic unit, but also a natural syntactic structure, which can be said to be a gem of human language (An Introduction to the Taiwanese Tone Group Parser, Yu-Chu Chang, 2013). The linguist Dr. Iok-tik Wang encouraged scholars to conduct research on Taiwanese tone groups many years ago. I believe that the study of Taiwanese may be the key to unlocking the door to artificial intelligence. I hope that one day, more people will come to learn Taiwanese and more scholars will come to study Taiwanese. More writers and authors can use Taiwanese to write their works, so that Taiwan will become a country with a unique civilization.
母語是咱們出生時第一次聽到並學到的語言。故鄉是咱們出生和成長的地方。不管故鄉是美麗或是平凡，一般人對自己的故鄉都會特別眷戀。我對自己的母語也有同樣的情感。臺灣話是我的母語。六歲以前，我只能聽講臺灣話。上小學以後，我學過中文，英文，日文和西班牙文。然而我總覺得臺灣話最好聽，說起台語來也最合我的心意。
五十多年前，台南武廟舉辦元宵燈猜，我適逢其會。當晚有個謎面「嫦娥奔月」，射鳥名一。，從鳥書查得「竊丹」從字面上解讀就是偷拿靈藥的意思，看來頗合題義。不過當時不知「竊」字台語如何發音，只好用「ㄎㄨㄟ」矇混過去。主持人看我小小年紀，也不計較，先擊三通鼓，再送獎品。私下告訴我「竊」字的正確讀法。我是台灣人，大庭廣眾之下連一隻鳥名都說不好，覺得很不光彩。
公元一九六八年，我到台北工專讀書，班上同學都講中文，台灣話只在鄉間郊遊問路時才得派上用場。後來到馬祖服兵役，機械排裡的弟兄，一大半是「黑手」出身，修車就講台語，那時方知台語也有各種腔調。公元1984年，我到成功大學修習語言學，很自然地把台語當成研究對象。讀過相關文獻，做過田野調查，慢慢的才知道臺灣話源自古老的漢語和閩南方音，後來又融入本土和外來語的詞彙。經過數百年的演化才形成這種既美麗又典雅的語言。臺灣話的聲調就如同樂譜的五聲音階。第三聲是"Do"，第七聲是"mi"，第一聲是"so"。促音和變調又讓臺語的音樂性更加豐富。我經常跟國外的朋友說臺語是一種音樂和詩歌的語言。他們若不信，我就唱那首「安童哥買菜」讓他們聽得入神，一直說「讚」。
公元一九七零年我在學校習得電腦程式設計技術。公元一九九一年去美國留學，看IBM在個人電腦展示"多媒體(multimedia)"，覺得這種技術很有用，開始有將台語語音電腦化的構想。回國後，我就嚐試設計多媒體的應用軟體。一九九八年完成音樂家林榮德音樂藝術專輯，將文字，語音，照片，音樂和動態影像結合在一起的CD。這張CD出版之後，我就確定可以用相同的方法和技術開發台語語音輸出系統。
公元二零零一年我將第一版台語語音輸出軟體寄到美國申請著作權。當時做的羅馬字版本因為沒有Unicode的台語聲調符號，所以只能用數字或文字表示聲調。裏面除了台語羅馬字以外，還有中文和英文的字典。第二版將語音合成器改良為可以做句內連續變調的功能。公元二零零八年我用Unicode做教育部推廣的台灣羅馬字版本，用英文字母和數字聲調做輸入，數字聲調和符號聲調可以相互轉換。後來又加上部分日文字典，終於完成一個能夠一面打字，一面聽語音，應用電腦做為學習臺語的工具。現在這個軟體的功能和用途已經超出我當年的想像和期望。
開發這個軟體也曾遭遇許多困難。好在得到許多人的鼓勵和幫忙。由於台語構詞法和文書寫作仍處於起步階段，因此字典尚未標準化。編輯字典的時候就要花較多時間。語料庫建置一延再延。七萬多語詞的錄音時間也拉得很長。我從四十多歲開始錄音，一直錄到六十多歲，聲音變化很多。
過去台語一直都沒有書面語，這種聲調語言能夠流傳數千年，只靠口耳相傳，實在不容易。近百年來台灣話受到統治當局打壓，沒有消失，真是奇蹟。臺語的變調和聲調群結構在世界上六千多種現存語言中可以說是獨一無二。每一句臺灣話都是聲調群的集合。從台語變調衍生的的聲調群不只是獨特的韻律單位，也是渾然天成的句法結構，可以說是人類語言的瑰寶(台語聲調群剖析器簡介，張佑竹，2013)。語言學家王育德博士說臺語的聲調群最值得我們用心探討。我相信臺語的研究說不定就是揭開人工智慧大門的鑰匙。希望有一天，有更多人來學臺灣話，有更多學者來做臺語的研究。更多文學家和作家用臺語來寫他們的作品，這樣咱臺灣就會成為具有獨特文明的國家。
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