Taiwanese Minnan interlinear gloss

What this example shows

Taiwanese Minnan is written here in POJ romanization, the system that marks tone with diacritics. The sentence means “I have not yet decided when I shall return”, and the layout pairs each Minnan word with a short gloss and a free English line below. The free translation does not run word for word, which is exactly what the alignment makes clear.

Tone-marked compounds

Two compounds carry the core meaning, with tone written into the spelling:

iáu-boē not.yet

A compound meaning “not yet”. The accents mark tone, and the hyphen holds the two syllables together as one word.

koat-tēng decide

The verb “decide”, again a two-syllable compound with tone diacritics.

When the translation reorders

English wraps the idea in “when I shall return”, a clause that sits in a different place from the Minnan words it translates. So the gloss line stays close to the source order while the free translation reads naturally, and the two do not line up token for token. Aligning them shows which English words answer to which Minnan words despite the reordering.

Glossing conventions used here

Each gloss sits left-aligned under its word, and a period inside a gloss such as not.yet joins two English words that translate one Minnan unit. The hyphen keeps a tone-marked compound together as a single token.

For the gloss labels:

• glossing abbreviations cheat sheet

Recreate it in the editor

Open the example, keep hyphen out of the split characters under Settings → Tokens so the compounds stay whole, and add an IPA line if you want a phonetic row alongside the romanization. Export the result as PNG, SVG, or PDF.

See also

Related examples:

• Japanese, Chinese, and English word order compares East Asian word order in three rows.
• Tagalog compounds keeps hyphenated words together with the tokenizer.