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.

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.

As any intrepid Taiwanese reporter knows, on a slow news day it’s worth sticking a microphone in the face of the Minister for Education, Tu Cheng-sheng, to see what he might blurt out. The plainspoken Tu has gained a reputation for his gaffes, such as getting CNN and the NCC (National Communications Council) mixed up and losing his temper over press questions about his son, while he has also made the headlines for wanting to turn the map of Taiwan sideways in official textbooks and assaulting a cameraman. He also gets more than his fair share of abuse from the opposing parties, for whom he is the person in government they most love to hate (after the president, of course).

This time, however, he hasn’t said anything daft or hit anyone. The reason he is in the news currently is a rebuke he gave to Kuo Su-chun, a female legislator from the opposition KMT (Chinese Nationalist Party) in the Legislative Yuan. The exchange went as follows:

杜正勝：今天身為……。

郭素春：你說什麼碗糕？

杜正勝：不要說碗糕很難聽，你不知道台灣話，我跟你說女人不要說這話，女人說這種話很難聽。

Tu: Today you are representing…

Kuo: What the oaⁿ²-ko¹ are you talking about?

Tu: You shouldn’t say oaⁿ²-ko¹ - it’s unpleasant. You don’t know Taiwanese - I’m telling you, ladies shouldn’t say that - for a woman to use this word sounds very unpleasant.

Now, ignoring for a moment both the fact that chauvinism is alive and well in Taiwan (certain words aren’t “ladylike”) and that interrupting speeches is par for the course here - this characterisation of oaⁿ²-ko¹ as vulgar caused some controversy. The standard meaning of the word is a kind of small steamed rice cake, but local station TVBS wheeled out a Taiwanese writer, Iuⁿ Chheⁿ-chhak, who attested that the word is indeed coarse - he explained the secondary meaning as “semen”. TVBS however took this question to the streets, comparing oaⁿ²-ko¹ with another (reasonably mild) Taiwanese obscenity, khau³ iau¹ (”crying over your empty belly”), to see which the general public found more offensive - khau³ iau¹ won hands down.

Not only did most people not think oaⁿ²-ko¹ was all that bad according to TVBS, but the network (no friend of the ruling DPP) also dug out a recording of President Chen Shui-bian using the same phrase in a speech about the status of the Republic of China:

Tiong¹-hoa⁵ Bin⁵-kok⁴ si⁷ sahⁿ¹-mih⁴ oaⁿ²-ko¹?

Taking the side of the writer mentioned above, who deems the phrase most offensive, this would be translated as “What the fuck is the Republic of China?”, but the view of the average Taiwanese speaker (including a quick straw poll of my colleagues) seems to be that it is in fact rather mild, if a bit low-class - something akin to “What the heck is the Republic of China?” In as much as a language is defined by its users, the opinion of the people beats out the opinion of the experts here, to my mind. Although perhaps it just shows that Minister Tu is more educated than the rest of us after all.

In English too, a term with rather offensive origins can end up as an imprecation mild enough that it’s no longer considered vulgar - a good example being “poppycock”, which is apparently derived from a 19th century Dutch dialect term meaning “soft shit”.