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-mîa (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

Last month the Taiwanese Ministry of Education (MoE) announced plans to create a system of standardised testing for Taiwanese.  The examinations, which will be outsourced to “competent organisations” are intended to be open to all, and will be divided into six grades: beginner, advanced beginner, intermediate, advanced intermediate, advanced, and professional.

Successful examinees will be awarded a certificate to proudly display their Taiwanese chops. No word on the form the written exam will take; President Ma Ying-jeou has previously expressed a preference for character-based study of Taiwanese, but it would be good if the candidates had a choice of writing in romanisation only (probably using the MoE-approved Tai-lo system).

Information is scant at the moment, with the MoE’s press release (Mandarin characters, Microsoft Word file) being more a statement of intent rather than a detailed run-down of how it’s going to work. Thanks to Mark of Pinyin.info for the heads-up.

With recent depressing stories concerning the trouble that Southern Min is in, both in Taiwan and China, it’s no surprise to discover an article documenting the same issue in Malaysia.

Malaysian newspaper The Star published a story today entitled Penang Hokkien in Peril:

Penang Hokkien may become extinct if no effort is made to preserve and encourage the young to speak the dialect. This is the observation of author Tan Choon Hoe who has written two books Learn to Speak PHD-Penang Hokkien Dialect and Penang Hokkien Dialect (PHD) for Penangites and Tourists to promote the dialect.

Tan, 47, who teaches English and Hokkien here, described the dialect as the essence of George Town and a part of its heritage.

He lamented the fact that Chinese children here spoke very little Hokkien nowadays.

“Parents would usually speak to their children in English or Mandarin and the only chance for the kids to learn Hokkien is from their grandparents, if they are still around,” Tan added.

With the apathy of both the people and the governments in all areas where Southern Min is spoken, the future is looking less than rosy for the language.  Indeed Singapore actively discourages the use of “dialects” with its Speak Mandarin campaign, leading to a decline there in the usage of not only Hokkien, but also Cantonese and Teochew (潮州話; Tiô-chiu-oē) - a dialect which is usually classed as part of the Southern Min language but is in fact almost completely unintelligible to speakers of Amoy Hokkien or Taiwanese.

An enterprising NTU medical student has decided that his medical Taiwanese was so lacking that he has put together a book to help himself and others like him talk to patients in the language.

A Formosa Television piece on Chu Chú-hông highlights the difference between medical vocabulary in Mandarin and Taiwanese:

醫用台語，很多不能直接翻譯，除了氧氣是酸素之外，海洛因叫做四號仔，疝氣呢，要用形容的就是墜腸，而電腦斷層，就形容儀器的模樣，鑽山洞。

The examples given include “oxygen”, which many Taiwanese know as sng-sò͘ (which is a loan word from Japanese) rather than ióng-khì, which is a direct transliteration of the Mandarin yǎng-qì (氧氣). The article also mentions “heroin”, which in Mandarin is a sound-loan from English (hǎiluòyīn), and states that the Taiwanese is sì-hō-á, literally Number Four Stuff. However, my dictionary has sì-hō-á as “amphetamine”, not “heroin” (which it gives as either hái-lo̍k-eng or hái-lo̍k-in, loaned from English, as the Mandarin is). I’ve no idea who is correct, but I’m inclined to trust the dictionary first.

The article also mentions Chu’s handbook as “the first in Taiwan”, whereas in fact medical manuals in Taiwanese romanization can be found dating back to the Japanese era.

There are a multitude of romanization systems out there for Taiwanese which do the job they are designed for, so you might think that there is no reason to go around inventing new systems when others accomplish the work perfectly well. Well, some people would disagree with you, specifically in this case one Mr Tân (the gentleman pictured on the right).

Recently I was given a series of Mr Tân’s books by Mark of Pinyin.info which outline a new approach in to the “problem” of finding an effective written system for Taiwanese (I say new, but I think the books were published in the late nineties, so we’re talking relatively here). The system is interesting in that it combines two different approaches from the tradition of Taiwanese writing, although it has to be said that the attempt leaves a lot to be desired.

One of the issues always mentioned in connection with writing any Chinese language in romanization is that of information loss - the pro-character types assert that characters contain more information, more succinctly expressed, than any romanized system can. They would say that Chinese languages have such a high level of homogenity that no alphabetic system can convey the layers of meaning necessary. As an example, the Chinese character input system on my computer brings up a total of 247 possibilities for the Mandarin syllable “shi“, and even if we narrow it down by tone to “shì” there are still 36 possibilities for that one sound.

To combat this perceived defect in romanizations of Chinese languages, the inventor of this system has combined romanized writing with a system of “radicals” which indicate the category to which the sound belongs. To this end he has created a total of 40 categories into which words can fall, such as the “woman” category, the “vital” category, the “electricity” category, and so on. The category of the syllable is indicated by a letter or symbol after the sound. It’s as if the English word “boy” was written “boy♂” and “lightning” was rendered “lightning↯”.

Examples of words given in his books include “bòΛ” (cloth; written as pò͘ in the standard POJ romanization), “dwā%” (big; toā), “cuib” (open; khui), “cỳ→” (go; khì) and “kàᚑ” (to teach; kà).

The main problem with the whole system, besides the sometimes arbitrary assignation of words to categories, is the assumption that the greater number of homophones at the character level renders Taiwanese incomprehensible if written in romanization. This would be true if Taiwanese were a monosyllabic language, but in fact it is far away from being so, with the majority of both nouns and verbs in the language being either di- or trisyllabic. The system therefore does not address a need, or a lack in the existing romanization systems - meanwhile it does introduce another layer of complexity in to an already complex system. For a comprehensive dismantling of the “monosyllabic myth”, see the chapter of the same name in John DeFrancis’ book “The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy“.

For those who might doubt that written Taiwanese can be understood without the need for characters or the symbols which Mr Tân employs, it suffices not only to see the relatively large amount of material printed in the Pe̍h-ōe-jī (POJ) romanization over the past 100 years, but also to note that Taiwanese speakers have no problems with verbal communication - so why would they struggle with a system (POJ) which represents the spoken language very accurately?

Other commitments and full weekends have kept me away from spending much time on the site recently, but there have been a fair few Taiwanese stories in the news while I’ve been gone. I’m sure you haven’t missed me, as others have been keeping the Taiwanese news stories coming:

My hó pêng-iú Mark at Pinyin.info commented on reports that President-elect Ma favors Hanzi-only writing of Taiwanese - as a traditionalist and the leader of the most prominent pro-China party in Taiwan this is hardly a surprise, but it is news that will sit uneasily with the majority of the Taiwanese Literature community, who seem to largely favour Hàn-lô, a mix of characters and romanization.

Over at That’s Impossible: Politics from Taiwan, blogger A-gu has an update on the next installment of official characters for Taiwanese, as released by the Ministry of Education. It’s another list of 400, bringing the official total now to 700 characters. The pdf is available for download from the Ministry. The url for the original list has changed again, so until I can find it on the MoE website I’ll host it for download here.

A consequence of this updated list is that the characters for the lyrics accompanying karaoke videos are to be changed, predictably provoking the ire of the good singing public and various daft stories in the press (most along the lines of “I can’t read it!”). For press links, see A-gu’s post linked above.

Another list of characters is due before the end of the year, followed by a dictionary. I wonder if these new characters will catch on…

A-gu has the latest on anti-Taiwanese editorials in the local media. He makes the excellent point that “people are allowing Holo Taiwanese to die”. There is no longer the deliberate oppression of the language from the martial law era, but it’s no longer necessary - the ambivalence of the general population towards native-language education will ensure the eventual demise of the language, unless something is done to reverse this trend.

If the aboriginal languages, Hakka, and Taiwanese do die (and it will likely be in that order) I believe it will inevitably and irrevocably impoverish the cultural landscape of this country.

Taiwan has three English language newspapers; The China Post, The Taipei Times and the Taiwan News. The first, as you can probably tell from its name, is very pro-China, considers Taiwan to be an inalienable part of China, and despises the DPP (the outgoing ruling party). The other two are ideologically opposite to the China Post, and have their own numerous failings, but it’s an article in the China Post which caught my eye this week.

The article concerns a plan to “enforce” learning of Tâi-lô up to ninth grade in Taiwanese schools. It is so riddled with inaccuracy and ideologically motivated clap-trap that it’s hard to see any merit in it at all. Worse, rubbish like this just spreads misinformation about the language.

TAIPEI, Taiwan — All students in Taiwan, from ninth graders on down, may be required to learn what the Ministry of Education (MOE) defines as the “Taiwan Minnan language,” a Hoklo dialect popularly spoken on the island.

It is mandatory now that schoolchildren have to learn how to write Hoklo in Chinese logograms. Hoklo is a Min dialect of Chinese which used to be called Amoy.

Hmm, children have to do a couple of hours a week of native language education (which might be Hoklo (Taiwanese), Hakka or one of the aboriginal languages). There is no requirement to learn to write in Chinese “logograms” (characters).

Chinese nationalists often refer to Chinese as one language and the constituent parts like Mandarin, Wu, Hakka, Cantonese, Min and so on as “dialects”. From a linguistic point of view, however, it makes more sense to look on these parts as languages in their own right.

One dialect (here using the term in a linguistically more acceptable way) of Southern Min is Taiwanese. Taiwanese can be further split in to different regional variations. Amoy is related to Taiwanese, but is not the same thing. Both Amoy and Taiwanese are derived from a mix of Zhangzhou and Quanzhou dialects, but this happened at different periods in time and independently from one another.

All first through ninth graders would be compelled to learn how to Romanize the Taiwan Minnan language, if a new MOE program were implemented as from 2011.

The education ministry called a meeting to finalize the program yesterday.

Min is a nationally accepted moniker for Fujian, a province in southern China. Nan means “south.” The new term the education ministry has coined means literally the South Fujian language in use in Taiwan.

This is strange, because Minnan is the name used both by nationalists in Taiwan, usually in the form of Mǐnnányǔ 閩南語, and the government and media of China, who usually render it as Mǐnnánhuà 闽南话. It’s not a new coinage, nor is it something one would expect the China Post to be opposed to.

Amoy, the old name of Xiamen today, used to be the name given the Hoklo dialect.

Half right, it was referred to by some westerners as “The Amoy Dialect” as spoken in Taiwan. Even they made note of the difficulties in going between the two, with differences in pronunciation and meaning.

But the new syllabus for the teaching of the Taiwan Minnan language requires the use of a romanization invented in Taiwan, which differs from the Church Romanization in use around the world for more than a century.

True. I believe the ministry should probably have stuck with the “Church Romanization” (POJ, which incidentally the China Post has criticised in the past). Tâi-lô is a variation (some would say “improvement”) of POJ, with some small adjustments and the replacement of the tricky letter o͘ (an “o” with a dot above right, pronounced something like the “aw” in “thaw”) with oo.

As a matter of fact, the Tai-Lo pinyin or Taiwan’s Romanization spelling the education ministry mandates is more complicated than the Church Romanization and a little more difficult to learn.

Pure nonsense. There is no appreciable difference in difficulty between the two systems.

According to the syllabus, a third grader will be able to write e-mail with the new spelling method. Fifth graders have to be able to converse via MSN (Microsoft Network). Junior high students should acquire ability to blog by romanizing Hoklo words.

Sounds pretty good to me. It would be fantastic if this level was achieved, but I doubt it will be due to many factors, including political opposition and lack of adequately trained teachers. Hold on, here comes the generalising editor…

All this is highly unlikely to come true, however.

For one thing, parents are up in arms against the new method of writing.

Professors of linguistics taking part in yesterday’s meeting opposed the new teaching on grounds that students would be “much overburdened.”

No specifics - parents are up in arms, professors rebelling. I’m quite sure there are some professors and parents who think learning any of the languages of Taiwan except Mandarin is a waste of time. I’m also certain that many support native language teaching.

No parents want their offspring to suffer, if required to learn the difficult Taiwan-Romanization spelling.

The difficult Tâi-lô? Would that be difficult when contrasted with Chinese characters, which require years of study to Tâi-lô’s few weeks? Are these offspring not suffering through the degradation and decline of the native tongue of their parents?

People on Quemoy or Kinmen consider the MOE decision a demonstration of Taiwan’s Hoklo chauvinism. They speak the Zhangzhou version of Hoklo, sometimes quite different from the Zhuanzhou version which is popular in Taiwan.

Again, this is half right. “Zhuanzhou” here should read “Quanzhou”. Many people in Taiwan speak the Zhangzhou flavour of Taiwanese, not just those in Jinmen. However, the Jinmen version is closer to “pure” Zhangzhou than the Zhangzhou versions spoken on Taiwan island.

In fact, the Taiwan Minnan language is a mixture of the two versions.

Hurray! No faulting this sentence. Note how the editor has used the same term “Taiwan Minnan” which was obliquely criticised above.

Moreover, the new government, which will be installed on May 20, is unlikely to enforce the controversial eleventh hour program MOE Tu Cheng-sheng approved.

Tu has to resign before the Kuomintang takes over the government.

He has made another much ado about nothing to demonstrate his now incorrect political correctness.

I hate the way that language is such a politicised issue in Taiwan. I hate the way that due to ideological slants the media has to spout such rubbish about a topic I care about. I hate being identified with one political party because I choose to learn a particular language. I support the implementation of Hanyu Pinyin as the nationwide standard for Mandarin, which is a KMT policy. I support the teaching of native languages (not just Taiwanese) in schools, which is a DPP policy.

Apologies for the long-ish rant - articles like this are guaranteed to get my back up.