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Phonetically similar sounds are considered as members of one
phoneme, when they do not occur in the same sou d sequence, i.
e., in complementary distribution -- or, if they do, the
replacement of one with the other does not change the meaning.
This a found its application in many transcriptional systems;
the sequence of decision can be demonstrated as follows: if
sounds are in complementary distribution, it would not be
necessary to transcribe them as different phonemes. However,
the strict adherence to the complementary distribution rule
would cause certain kinds of orthographic problems in the stops
of the Southern Min of Taiwan. This thesis tries some other
viewpoints as the aforementioned phonemic reasoning to present
six problem areas; they are (1) the phonological simplicity
metric, (2) phonetic plausibility and allophony, (3) CLA vs.
synchronic description, (4) native intuition, (5) language
universals, (6) the idea of replacing Chinese logography with
alphabetic systems, and (7) a viewpoint of historical
linguistics. During the process of analyzing more than
twelvesystems and identifying problems, we are led to delve
deeper into the problems of representing Taiwanese nasal
stops. Thus, following the concepts of syllable structure of
Crystal (1969) and Gimson (1970), the alpha notation of Hyman
(1975) and the distinctiveory of Chomsky-Halle (1968), we
propose the utmost generalization phonological rule. We
assume: applying this rule one can account for all the possible
syllables in Taiwanese (including those that are non-existent).
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