The Tâi-lâm (Tainan) City government has just completed renovations of the Lian Yatang Memorial Park (連雅堂紀念公園地) which have added a little “local language” colour in to the mix, reports the United Daily News. The park had formerly fallen in to disrepair and acquired a reputation in the area for being unsafe after dark.

Along with improvements to the structure and layout of the park in order to improve safety for visitors, the government has designated the area a “Taiwanese Literature Plaza”, which contains engraved idioms and slang in Taiwanese (written in Chinese characters). The beginning of the Taiwanese phrases are written at the top of the plaque, right side up, while the second half of the phrase and the explanation in Mandarin follow written upside-down in the manner of a quiz book.

The example above right is chhit go̍eh pòaⁿah-á, which literally means “mid-July duck”. The July, in fact, is actually the seventh month of the lunar calendar, which is “ghost month” in Chinese tradition - a time of spiritual danger. To ward off this danger, various devotions are made during the month, with the fifteenth day being the time when ducks are slaughtered to offer up to the hungry ghosts (thereafter being consumed by the hungry living). So to be a mid-July duck is by association to be one unaware of impending doom. In English we might allude to a “sword of Damocles” or a “time-bomb”, but I’m struggling to think of something with the same connotations of being ignorant of fate. Written underneath is the completion of the phrase “m̄ chai sí” (”doesn’t know it’s dead”), although the resident native speaker here (my wife) knows the phrase as “chhit go̍eh pòaⁿ ah-á, m̄ chai-iáⁿ sí o̍ah” which has pretty much the same meaning, although I think it scans better.

The park is named for Lián Yǎtáng (連雅堂), better known by his pen name Lián Héng (連橫), who was both a poet and a historian. Lian wrote The General History of Taiwan (台灣通史), one of the first comprehensive studies of the island’s past, in 1920 during the Japanese colonial period. Incidentally, Lian Heng is also the paternal grandfather of Lien Chan (Liân Chiàn, 連戰, Lián Zhàn in Mandarin), former Chairman of the Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang or KMT).

I popped down to Tâi-lâm recently and grabbed a few pictures of the park - it’s really a rather sad corner sandwiched in between two busy roads. If you’d like to check it out for yourself, it’s centred in this Google Maps link. During the few minutes it took me to walk around the paths on an overcast Sunday morning, I met a group of old gents playing Chinese chess and a very cheerful homeless man who seemed to have taken possession of one of the gazebos.

Unfortunately, adding a few phrases to the walls does not turn the place in to a “Literature Park” by any stretch, and I’d love to see more concrete steps (oops, bad pun considering the relative lack of grass in the park) taken to promote the language of the majority on the island. Coming up in the next couple of days - a post about the Taiwanese Literature Museum, a place with a more direct contribution to native language consciousness.

The National Taiwanese Literature Museum in Tâi-lâm (Tainan) announced on Monday that it had granted 11 prizes totalling almost NT$2 million (around US$60,000) to PhD and Masters students for research in the area of Taiwanese literature.

Titles of the studies involved included “Language, Literature and Symbolic Violence; The Relations of Postwar Taiwanese Philology with Chinese Literature Research”, “Differing Culture and Memory: After the Lifting of Martial Law in Taiwanese Film and Song” and “The Continuation of the Classical Chinese Novel in Taiwan”.

For any readers who happen to be visiting Tâi-lâm, I recommend a trip to the museum, which includes literature in Mandarin Chinese, Taiwanese and Japanese, as well as Classical Chinese. The museum itself is housed in the former Tainan City Hall and is worth seeing for the interesting colonial architecture alone.

Taiwan’s second-highest ranked university, the National Cheng Kung University in Tâi-lâm (Tainan), is currently accepting applications for their 2008 Taiwanese Creative Literature Program. Two parallel classes will be run in Tâi-lâm and Ko-hiông (Kaohsiung) to offer applicants a choice of study locations.

The one requirement is a minimum of 36 hours or two credits worth of documented study in the field of Taiwanese language or literature - other than this restriction, the course is open to anyone, be they academics, writers or interested amateurs. The number of places is limited to 100 and the application deadline is January 20th.

The program will run from 21st-25th January in Tâi-lâm and 28th January to 1st February in Ko-hiông, covering topics including the Taiwanese novel, popular music and modern poetry. Anyone interested in taking part should see the course page on the NCKU website for more details.

Being a both a Mac user and someone who is learning Taiwanese I find OpenVanilla indispensable as an Input Method for entering the Peh-oe-ji (POJ) romanization. Version 0.7, which I was using before, had a number of small issues which made everyday use a little frustrating. Most serious of these was the failure of certain accented characters to display correctly in some applications, such as TextEdit and Address Book.

Happily these problems have been addressed with the next-generation version of OpenVanilla (0.8). I have been using the new version for a couple of weeks and am very happy to see that the POJ functions work smoothly and resulting characters display correctly. I realise that by only using OpenVanilla for Taiwanese input I’m probably missing a trick, as it offers a broad range of input options for Chinese characters, Japanese, Tibetan and Unicode characters. However, my choice for entering Chinese characters (not POJ) is still the wonderful Quickcore Input Method (US$20) - it has a very large lead over OpenVanilla and this is something which is not likely to change soon.

For Taiwanese POJ input OpenVanilla offers an excellent solution - and best of all, it’s available for absolutely nothing under the new BSD license (although I know donations are greatly appreciated!). OpenVanilla runs on OS X, Windows XP/Vista and Linux distributions, although I haven’t had time yet to test it out with the latter. It’s now the best input method available on any operating system for Peh-oe-ji.