Taiwanese pronunciation of ë

In traditional romanized orthographies for Taiwanese, it’s common to see the letter “o” in words like “hó (好)”. The correct pronunciation is not like the “o” we have in most European languages, instead it’s much closer to an English schwa (ə).

In the Campbell Universal Pinyin romanization system, I use instead an umlaut over an “e” to indicate the middle of the mouth pronunciation of ”eh”. An umlaut normally centralizes a vowel and this gets pretty close to the Taiwanese pronunciation.

But not close enough.

The ë in Taiwanese is somewhere halfway between ‘ö’ and ‘ë’. In order to pronounce a good ‘ë’ in Taiwanese, it’s going to take some practice. Try to copy the recordings as best you can.