I’ve recently got around to redoing the Bookshelf section of the website, borrowing an idea and some code from John Oxton to create a smoother gallery with a nice little pop-up effect for the title and author.

Seven new books are included on the improved bookshelf, including Campbell’s great Amoy Dictionary and a collection of children’s poetry which is great for struggling learners of the language (like me). One job I need to get around to still is that of writing short reviews for all the books featured, although given the speed at which I have been updating the site recently, that might take a while…

The New York Times recently had an article entitled “Taiwan’s Independence Movement Likely To Wane” on the forthcoming presidential elections in Taiwan. Leaving aside the political assertions made by the writer, which are more than capably dealt with by other writers (see the end of this post) – one sentence right at the end is troubling from a linguistic point of view:

In Mr. Chen’s tenure, the government, besides pushing for controversial foreign policies, also carried out domestic policies centered on Taiwanese nationalism, such as promoting a Taiwanese dialect.

Quite apart from the misrepresentation of the language, demoting it to a “dialect” (a common misdemeanour among non-linguists), there is the worrying association of the Taiwanese language with Taiwanese nationalism. While I would not seek to deny the obvious links in the past and present of language/independence activism, but to many people the promotion of Taiwanese (and other native languages, like Hakka and the aboriginal tongues, which Chen’s administration has also supported) is something completely separate from any goals of Taiwanese independence. Mandarin, like Japanese before it, is an imposed language, enforced by the Kuomintang after the flight to Taiwan at the end of the Chinese Civil War. Is promoting the native languages which many on the island speak tantamount to promoting independence?

Michael Turton (possibly Taiwan’s most prolific English-language blogger) has a piece, focused on the political, which tears apart the NYT article, as does A-gu of “That’s Impossible…”, who also mentions the linguistic issues involved.

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.

I’ve been meaning for a while to create a theme for the News section of Tailingua to make it fit with the rest of the site – today it’s just about finished and you can see it surrounding this very post. In fact, most of the work was done in January, but the thought of making it display properly in Internet Explorer 6 (the bane of website designers everywhere) made me stick my head in the sand about it until today. After a couple of hours wrestling with the “quirks” of IE6 it seems to be working OK.

I also have lots of stuff to post and I really have no excuses beyond the usual (work etc.) as to why I haven’t written in a month. Definitely more news coming your way, soon.

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.