Hoan-gêng lâi Tailingua!
Anyone who is interesting in learning the Taiwanese language, or in swapping information and suggestions about it, will be welcome along. I’ll be there, as will a couple of people who are currently taking classes, so they will be able to help out new learners with suggestions for schools and study materials.
A map of the venue:
Recently I had cause to look for a bibliography of Taiwanese dictionaries, and was frustrated by the lack of consistent and comprehensive information available online. Having had a look in print too, it seemed that what I was looking for simply didn’t exist. So, in a do-it-yourself spirit I’ve put together a list of 145 dictionaries, vocabularies and lexicons related to the Taiwanese language and its sister dialects in the Southern Min family, based initially on Henning Klöter’s general bibliography. I don’t claim this as a complete list, but it is more extensive than any other I have been able to find.
As will be evident from a cursory reading of the list, most of the entries were published after the end of the martial law period in Taiwan, beginning in the late 1980s. There is a tremendous diversity of sources out there, and many have been put together by individuals rather than large editorial teams, published at their own cost as labours of love.
If you spot any errors or omissions, please feel free to contact me and I’ll update the list. As usual with content from this site, it is available under a Creative Commons license, meaning you can reuse it as you see fit (though a hat-tip in this direction would be appreciated).
The Taiwanese Proficiency Test Center at the National Cheng Kung University in Tainan will be hosting a conference in March next year. The third Conference on Taiwanese Proficiency Test (sic) will take place on the 13th March at the Banyan Campus of NCKU (off Daxue Rd near the train station). There’s a call for papers related to Taiwanese language testing, with a submission deadline of 31st of December for abstracts.
The conference is coordinated by Wi-vun Chiung, and co-sponsored by the Li Kang-Khioh Taiwanese Foundation and the Taiwanese Romanization Association. For more information, check the conference website.
As a reminder, the legislature has blocked funding for government testing in Taiwanese for some time now, while authorising funding for testing of Mandarin, Hakka, and Aboriginal languages. The Taiwanese language remains a political football.
Times were that I was asking everyone who visited this site to download fonts in order to view the content properly. However, growing support for web fonts (in CSS3) means that many visitors with up-to-date web browsers are able to see the fonts I choose, even if those fonts are not installed on their computers. This is great for displaying Pe̍h-ōe-jī (the Taiwanese romanization used throughout the site) and Taiwanese Phonetic Symbols (Bopomofo for Taiwanese).
The following browsers are supported:
Support is also available in Google’s Chrome browser, but is disabled in the current version due to a security review. The developers are aiming to to reinstate support in time for version 4.0. To check how your browser works with Taiwanese text, visit the fonts page.
Together users of the browsers listed above made up 47% of visitors in the August to October period, so hopefully this update should make life a little bit easier for many visitors here. I would encourage users who don’t have one of the above browsers to either upgrade, or install one or more of the fonts listed on the fonts page.
For those of you interested in the technical details, this is how it works. Read the rest of this entry »
After a while without adding any new content, I’ve decided to update the design and add some features to the site. In addition to the updated look of the site, there are a couple of additions worth pointing out. The first is a sitemap to allow visitors to locate the information they are looking for. Shortly I’ll be bringing a site search online too. There’s a new image gallery with photos relevant to the language, which at the moment contains only a few images, but which will grow as time goes on.
The other notable addition will not be immediately obvious to many visitors, as it’s more of a “behind the scenes” change. Previously I asked visitors to install a special font in order to view the romanised Taiwanese used throughout the website, but advances in browser capabilities mean that users of the latest versions of Firefox, Opera, and Safari will not need to do this, as their browser will automatically download and display the correct font. I’ll be writing a full blog post on this aspect of the redesign in the near future, including the technical details.
Tailingua is now also on Twitter, which will be used for quick updates that don’t require a full blog post. At some point I’ll be integrating the Twitter feed into the sidebar on this site.
Hope you like the changes and I’ll be glad to hear any opinions you have on the redesign.
An enterprising programmer has developed an app for the iPhone to help English speakers with Taiwanese. The software, created by Gene Ko and called simply “Taiwanese“, includes a vocabulary training section and a self-test facility. It’s listed on my (British) iTunes at £3.99, but I don’t have exact prices in Taiwan or US dollars (£4 is just over NT$200 or about $6.60 American). Another thing I don’t have, unfortunately, is an iPhone, so I can’t offer a report on this application. If anyone out there has tried it, please feel free to leave a comment.
Almost whole year has passed by since I last posted anything here… oops. I’ve been busy getting my business off the ground, writing unpublishable books and various other frippery. Anyhow, this inexcusable situation cannot be allowed to continue – new stuff coming up, including a redevelopment of the website itself and new content.
That is… if there’s anyone still reading.
A major production of an opera five years in the making is happening this week in Taipei. The Black Bearded Bible Man is a bilingual English-Taiwanese production chronicling the life of the Reverend George Leslie Mackay (1844-1901), a Canadian missionary and one of the best-known foreigners in Taiwan’s history.
Mackay was responsible for founding Oxford College (now Aletheia University) in Tām-súi (Danshui), named after his home in Oxford County, modern-day Ontario. The Mackay Memorial Hospital, reputedly one of the best in Taipei, is the successor institution to one started by Mackay, who started his ministry by pulling teeth and preaching in towns in the north of Taiwan.
The Canadian of Scottish extraction was a fiery character, dedicated to his cause and seemingly caring little for what others thought of him – something exemplified by his marriage to a local woman, Tuiⁿ Chhang-miâ (known as Minnie), which shocked both the Taiwanese community and the folks back home in Canada.
The part of Mackay is being played by Thomas Meglioranza, who is writing about the preparations (and experiences singing in a new language – Taiwanese) on his blog. The opera is running from 27th-30th November at the National Chiang Kai-Shek Cultural Center in Taipei.
Ah, the joys of living in a multilingual country. Malaysian police in Penang (who are mostly ethnically Malay) are being trained in Hokkien swear words so they can recognise when the local Hokkien-lang are being less than courteous.
Story from MySinchew.com.
Reminds me of something I read about the arrival of Republic of China officials in the period immediately post-World War II. Various events had made the new arrivals unwelcome (carpet-bagging to feed the civil war in China and for personal gain, the February 28th massacre) and the longer-term residents were not shy about expressing their displeasure.
The standard term of abuse for the new arrivals (who generally could not understand Taiwanese) was ti-á (pig). However, the slandered Chinese soon caught on, forcing the locals to come up with new insults – eventually settling on kam-á (tangerine). Why? Because feast-day roast pigs in Taiwan had tangerines placed in their mouths.
Unfortunately no time to look into this in depth at the moment, but the Taipei Times today detailed the announcement by the Ministry of Education in Taiwan of a new web-based dictionary for Taiwanese (referred to in the report as Hoklo):
After seven years of development, the Ministry of Education has completed the first official online dictionary for Hoklo (also known as Taiwanese).
The Online Taiwan Common Hoklo Dictionary test version contains 16,000 commonly used Hoklo terms and words in transliteration.
Ministry officials said the dictionary was very user-friendly and that non-Hoklo speakers could look up Hoklo phrases by keying in their Mandarin equivalent.
[...]
Users of the Hoklo dictionary can look up words by keying in headwords (“catchwords”), transliteration of the words and the words’ Mandarin equivalents through “fuzzy searches” or “focus searches,” Chen said.
[...]
Phonological differences and regional variations, including the two major variants — Chuanchou (泉州) and Changchou (漳州) — are also recognized by the dictionary, she said.
Yao Rongsong (姚榮松), chief editor of the ministry’s editing committee and a professor of Taiwanese literature at National Taiwan Normal University, said creating the dictionary was very time consuming because editors had to switch from the Taiwan Language Phonetic Alphabet they had initially used to Taiwanese romanization.
Hmm, I can’t believe that the switch from TLPA to Tai-lo was responsible for the project taking a long time. It would only take a day for a competent programmer to write a conversion program for their existing data.
Still, it’s great that this has finally seen the light of day. I’ll be interested to see whether it’s better than the 台文/華文線上辭典 – I’ll report back once I have had time to give it a thorough look-through.
Report taken from the Taipei Times: MOE launches first Hoklo-language online dictionary
