One thing has helped is having the entire set of special Cantonese characters be accepted within the Unicode character set so they can be typed. Once this barrier was overcome, their use becomes significantly easier.

Obviously, such an exercise does have a political component to it as this is a result of a deliberate language policy.

However, seeing how both Minnan speaking sides have a vested interest in seeing the Southern Min language survive and thrive, I see that as strong basis for close cooperation.

However, there are a number of links with the University of Xiamen, for example, which could serve as the basis for greater co-operation. There are also a number of quasi-official bodies in Fujian which promote Southern Min.

Your HK example sounds great. I do wonder how they did it though: how do you make newspapers and KTV places and all the rest change their habits, short of forcing them? However they did it, the MOE should learn from that.

“O-ló” (to praise) should be 謳咾 rather than 呵咾.

There may be others. Despite this shortcoming, I think it’s a good first effort.

This is interesting to me as someone who is trying to learn Taiwanese, but does not yet have access to that many materials.

I think it’s possible to submit characters to the Hong Kong government if you have a specific character you want in their HKSCS (Hong Kong Supplementary Character Set) that includes most of the Cantonese-exclusive characters, as well as random rare characters needed here and there for proper names. I haven’t had time to look into this yet though, so don’t take my word for it.

It’s like teaching “lite” instead of “light” because everyone understands “lite” anyway and it’s easier to spell and teach. Not an exact analogy, but close enough.

If the MoE is serious about Taiwanese characters, it should collaborate with its mainland Minnan counterparts to flush out any potential errors. Then, it should jointly publish this list on both sides of the strait that uses original characters as much as possible, including as much major regional variants as practical(i.e. Quanzhou, Zhangzhou). The remaining ones should either use phonetic loans or better yet, be created anew, keeping in mind the semantic/phonetic structure of many Chinese characters.

Again, I’ll point to Hong Kong as a good example. Before an official list was published, many Cantonese words were created by the media and their use became widespread. After the HK gov’t published an official list of characters based on research, some of these widely used characters fell by the wayside in favour of the original characters on the list. Change is possible and it all depends on the competencies of the bureaucrats running the show. But given MoE’s stellar *cough* record on the issue, I’m not holding out much hope.

Tongyong for Taiwanese is dead (and not really mourned). The MoE killed it when they selected Tâi-lô as their standard, as previously they were pretty much the only ones supporting Tongyong. POJ still has a community of users (both inside and outside the church), but as you say it’s nowhere near the mainstream.

Realistically the only way any form of romanization is going to come into widespread use is with the help of massive assistance from government to mandate proper bilingual teaching (not this couple-of-hours-a-week cop-out we currently have), with Tâi-lô or POJ as the only method of writing. In other words, it’s very unlikely indeed.

Hong Kong can serve as an example of how to get these characters into common use because as everyone is well aware, POJ (or gasp, Tongyong) will never go mainstream in Taiwan.

The MoE has no power to mandate their use, but it is trying to act as a standardising body in this debate.

As for fonts, you’ve hit upon the central problem of making up new characters for Taiwanese (or indeed resurrecting archaic ones) - the lack of support. The best bet is probably Mojikyo as it contains the largest amount of characters, but realistically the difficulties of inputting these unusual characters presents a big hurdle to the easy use of a completely character-based system.

Lô-má-jī bān sòe! (Long live romanization!)