A major production of an opera five years in the making is happening this week in Taipei.  The Black Bearded Bible Man is a bilingual English-Taiwanese production chronicling the life of the Reverend George Leslie Mackay (1844-1901), a Canadian missionary and one of the best-known foreigners in Taiwan’s history.

Mackay was responsible for founding Oxford College (now Aletheia University) in Tām-súi (Danshui), named after his home in Oxford County, modern-day Ontario.  The Mackay Memorial Hospital, reputedly one of the best in Taipei, is the successor institution to one started by Mackay, who started his ministry by pulling teeth and preaching in towns in the north of Taiwan.

The Canadian of Scottish extraction was a fiery character, dedicated to his cause and seemingly caring little for what others thought of him - something exemplified by his marriage to a local woman, Tuiⁿ Chhang-mîa (known as Minnie), which shocked both the Taiwanese community and the folks back home in Canada.

The part of Mackay is being played by Thomas Meglioranza, who is writing about the preparations (and experiences singing in a new language - Taiwanese) on his blog. The opera is running from 27th-30th November at the National Chiang Kai-Shek Cultural Center in Taipei.

Ah, the joys of living in a multilingual country. Malaysian police in Penang (who are mostly ethnically Malay) are being trained in Hokkien swear words so they can recognise when the local Hokkien-lang are being less than courteous.

Story from MySinchew.com.

Reminds me of something I read about the arrival of Republic of China officials in the period immediately post-World War II. Various events had made the new arrivals unwelcome (carpet-bagging to feed the civil war in China and for personal gain, the February 28th massacre) and the longer-term residents were not shy about expressing their displeasure.

The standard term of abuse for the new arrivals (who generally could not understand Taiwanese) was ti-á (pig). However, the slandered Chinese soon caught on, forcing the locals to come up with new insults - eventually settling on kam-á (tangerine). Why? Because feast-day roast pigs in Taiwan had tangerines placed in their mouths.

Unfortunately no time to look into this in depth at the moment, but the Taipei Times today detailed the announcement by the Ministry of Education in Taiwan of a new web-based dictionary for Taiwanese (referred to in the report as Hoklo):

After seven years of development, the Ministry of Education has completed the first official online dictionary for Hoklo (also known as Taiwanese).

The Online Taiwan Common Hoklo Dictionary test version contains 16,000 commonly used Hoklo terms and words in transliteration.

Ministry officials said the dictionary was very user-friendly and that non-Hoklo speakers could look up Hoklo phrases by keying in their Mandarin equivalent.

[...]

Users of the Hoklo dictionary can look up words by keying in headwords (“catchwords”), transliteration of the words and the words’ Mandarin equivalents through “fuzzy searches” or “focus searches,” Chen said.

[...]

Phonological differences and regional variations, including the two major variants — Chuanchou (泉州) and Changchou (漳州) — are also recognized by the dictionary, she said.

Yao Rongsong (姚榮松), chief editor of the ministry’s editing committee and a professor of Taiwanese literature at National Taiwan Normal University, said creating the dictionary was very time consuming because editors had to switch from the Taiwan Language Phonetic Alphabet they had initially used to Taiwanese romanization.

Hmm, I can’t believe that the switch from TLPA to Tai-lo was responsible for the project taking a long time. It would only take a day for a competent programmer to write a conversion program for their existing data.

Still, it’s great that this has finally seen the light of day. I’ll be interested to see whether it’s better than the 台文/華文線上辭典 - I’ll report back once I have had time to give it a thorough look-through.

Report taken from the Taipei Times: MOE launches first Hoklo-language online dictionary

Last month the Taiwanese Ministry of Education (MoE) announced plans to create a system of standardised testing for Taiwanese.  The examinations, which will be outsourced to “competent organisations” are intended to be open to all, and will be divided into six grades: beginner, advanced beginner, intermediate, advanced intermediate, advanced, and professional.

Successful examinees will be awarded a certificate to proudly display their Taiwanese chops. No word on the form the written exam will take; President Ma Ying-jeou has previously expressed a preference for character-based study of Taiwanese, but it would be good if the candidates had a choice of writing in romanisation only (probably using the MoE-approved Tai-lo system).

Information is scant at the moment, with the MoE’s press release (Mandarin characters, Microsoft Word file) being more a statement of intent rather than a detailed run-down of how it’s going to work. Thanks to Mark of Pinyin.info for the heads-up.

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.

In Ho̍k-kiàn (Fujian Province), the ancestral home of Southern Min (of which Taiwanese is one form), the local language is under pressure from the growth of Mandarin. In the past few decades the People’s Republic of China has pursued an aggressive campaign of Mandarinization, resulting in many areas which were formerly bastions of other Chinese languages (Min, Wu, Gan, Cantonese and more) becoming progressively stronger in Putonghua (Mandarin) and weaker in the local language.

A recent China News article raises some points which will seem very familiar to those who follow the demographics and trends of the Southern Min-speaking population in Taiwan.

在厦门市语言文字委员会办公室日前召开“闽南方言与闽南文化学术研讨会”上，专家们建议以“考级”的形式来保护闽南话。

In Xiamen City in the past few days a committee named the “Southern Min Language and Literature Academic Discussion Forum” has been convened by the Xiamen City Language Committee; the experts suggest a “tiered exam” system to help preserve Southern Min.

据香港大公报报 道，闽南话历史悠久，文化底蕴深厚，是东南部最早的汉语方言之一，被称为“古汉语活化石”，广泛的分布在闽南、台湾、潮汕、海南等地区。

According to Hong Kong’s Ta Kung Pao newspaper Southern Min has a long established history, bringing together a profound culture and South-Eastern China’s oldest Chinese topolect, which has been dubbed a “living fossil of Ancient Chinese” and is spoken in Southern Fujian, Taiwan, Chaoshan and Hainan, amongst other places.

随着普通话的推广 普及，越来越多的家庭关注新一代青少年的普通话教育，作为本土语言的闽南话逐渐被普通话所替代。

As a consequence of the proliferation of Putonghua more and more families are emphasising Putonghua education for youngsters, meaning that the language is gradually replacing Southern Min in the Min heartlands.

(My English translation is rough and ready, as always)

China’s record in protecting minority Chinese languages is just as poor as Taiwan’s and it remains to be seen whether this initiative will bear any fruit (and what exactly is a tiered system of testing supposed to do anyway?). It is both heartening that the problem is being recognised and worrying that Southern Min is under threat on both sides of the Taiwan Strait.

Photo: Xiamen University at night, by Miaobz.

Most Taiwanese are surprised when a non-local speaks in decent Mandarin, so the shock when a foreigner opens their mouth and Taiwanese comes out is palpable. The United Daily News yesterday featured an article about a Costa Rican woman who married a Taiwanese man from Lâm-tâu (Nantou) and learned to speak the language.

10年前從哥斯大黎加嫁到鹿谷的梅麗莎，不僅融入當地民情，以一口順溜的台語賣茶，更常讓買茶遊客驚訝：「哪裡來的外國人，台語怎麼說得比我還好！」

Ten years ago Melissa came from Costa Rica with her husband to Lo̍k-kok [a town in Lâm-tâu County]. Now she has not only integrated in to local life, but also sells tea in fluent Taiwanese, confounding visitors who often remark, “How come this foreigner speaks better Taiwanese than me?”

The article also mentions that she has “little opportunity” to practice Mandarin, but that her ability in that language is improving too. In many small towns and villages in the countryside Taiwanese remains the language of preference, with most inhabitants being able to speak Mandarin to some degree as a result of formal education, but preferring to speak their native tongue.

Actually Taiwanese-speaking foreigners are not all that unusual, but the majority are South-East Asian spouses (particularly from Vietnam) who live outside the major cities and are therefore less visible both by virtue of their ethnicity and their location. In general they are expected to integrate, whereas “Westerners” are not. Most of the Westerners I have met who have a command of the language are current or former missionaries - an occupation in which speaking to people in the “language of their heart” is very important.

Incidentally Costa Rica was until this year one of Taiwan’s few diplomatic allies, a fact which helped citizens of that country with regards to visas and immigration in to Taiwan.

Work commitments mean I’m a bit behind on the news - one example being the recent Classic Taiwanese Film Festivals held in Tâi-pak (Taipei), Tâi-lâm (Tainan), Sin-tek (Xinzhu) and Phêⁿ-ô͘ (Penghu). The history of Taiwanese-language film is one marked by a long hiatus during the latter half of the martial law period (1945-1987) when the authorities decided to crack down on native language media (in favour of the National Language of the Republic of China, i.e. Mandarin).

When people talk of “classic” Taiwanese films, generally what is meant is the early part of Chinese Nationalist (KMT) rule in Taiwan, before the restrictive measures came in to place. Films produced towards the end of military rule are generally regarded as “modern”, possibly starting with Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s 1989 masterpiece “City of Sadness“, which was also the first major film to challenge the KMT’s version of history and openly discuss the events surrounding the 2-28 Incident.

Films on display at the recent festivals included 王哥柳哥遊台灣 (Wang and Liu Wander Taiwan), 舊情綿綿 (Neverending Memory) and 再見台北 (Goodbye Taipei), all from the late fifties or early sixties. Southern residents can still pick up DVDs of some of these classics at the National Taiwan Literature Museum (台文館) in Môa-tāu (Madou), Tâi-lâm (Tainan) County.

For those interested in finding out more about the impact of literature and moving pictures on Taiwan’s post-war cultural and political experience, June Yip’s Envisioning Taiwan: Fiction, Cinema, and the Nation in the Cultural Imaginary is highly recommended.

Sources: United Daily News and ETToday.

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.

The Taipei Times has an article today on a competition organised by a Taiwanese chapter of the Rotary Club:

For Tokuya Kumagai, learning Hoklo (commonly known as Taiwanese) is the best way for him to show his passion for the country.

“I want to learn Hoklo because I love Taiwan,” he said yesterday in faultless Hoklo after only studying for three months.

Kumagai was one of the 45 contestants from 14 countries, including Slovenia, Poland, Japan, South Korea, Macedonia, the UK, Vietnam and the US, to compete yesterday in the 12th annual Mandarin and Taiwanese Speech Contest for Foreign Students held by Rotary Club district 3250.

“I believe speaking Hoklo is the most direct way for me to really understand the country and its people,” he said, adding he would also recommend that his friends in Japan come to Taiwan to learn Mandarin.

Faultless Taiwanese after three months? I need to find out who his teacher is…

The full article is available via the Taipei Times Web site.