It’s great to receive correspondence from people who share an interest in the Taiwanese language and it also helps me understand that there are actually people out there who find this site useful in some small way. I received a question yesterday from a graduate student in Australia regarding family names in Taiwanese and I thought that rather than provide a response to her exclusively I’d put the information up for everyone to see.

> List of Common Family Names in Taiwan

If any other readers out there have any other suggestions for content you would like to see on the site, I’ll be very happy to hear from you.

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…

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.

More goodness in the Scripts section of Tailingua. There are basic details on four more romanization schemes, plus a preliminary comparison chart for some of the better known systems. The picture on the right is of the extended range of Chu-im characters, including those designated specially for use with Taiwanese and Hakka. The last four characters at the bottom are for the Taiwanese stops, represented in most romanizations as “p”, “t”, “k” and “h”.

I’m currently working on ways to incorporate sound files smoothly in to pages, something which would allow me to build a useful phonics section. Also coming up in the next few weeks: more books and more detail in many of the existing areas of the site.

In response to some email I have received about the problems of rendering the romanization on the site properly, I have decided to use a version that requires no extra fonts to display correctly. I hope to develop an option for those computers with the capability to display fully-featured POJ, but for the meantime all visitors will see POJ with tone numbers instead of diacritics (accent marks).

I have updated a few pages throughout the site, but the main change is in the Bookshelf section, where I have added basic details on five more items - three textbooks for learning the language (one in German, but hey - when it comes to Taiwanese manuals, beggars can’t be choosers), one on linguistics and a series of POJ texts for children/beginners. I hope to add reviews of all the books mentioned on the site in the future.

The next task is tackling the romanizations section - details on four more systems and a conversion chart hopefully coming up this weekend. Feel free to let me know of any features or information you would like to see.