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…

Taiwan’s Ministry of Education some time ago published a standardised list of 300 characters used for writing Taiwanese (those that differ from the obvious equivalents in Mandarin, that is), which I have linked to on this site. However, the Ministry then published a follow-up list of 100 characters but neglected to put on their website in a convenient form for interested people to download (unlike the first list). A helpful reader passed the pdf document on to me and I will now host it on the site for anyone to download:

> Ministry of Education’s Combined List of 400 Characters for Taiwanese (PDF)

I believe that doing so does not violate any copyrights and that it was not the Ministry’s intention to keep this list off the internet. When the MoE corrects their oversight and puts the list up I will change the link to point to their version.

EDIT: As SJCMA points out in the comments below, this is a draft version not yet formally approved, hence the reason why it had not been released officially.

During the time I lived in Tâi-lâm (2002-2004) I’m sorry to say I never quite got around to visiting the National Museum of Taiwanese Literature in that city. Now with the excellent High Speed Rail in operation a trip from Pang-kiô (Banqiao) to Tâi-lâm takes just 94 minutes, instead of the four to five hours it used to take by road or rail, and so a trip down south for a period of only a day or two is suddenly a realistic proposition. Among the many places I visited in a hectic weekend recently was the Tâi Bûn Kóan, as the museum is usually known in Taiwanese.

The title of the institution can create a little confusion; in fact it is a museum for all the languages of Taiwan, including Taiwanese but also featuring (in order of arrival on the island) Aboriginal languages, Old Dutch, Hakka, Japanese and Mandarin. The bulk of the literature written in Taiwan has been in either Japanese or Mandarin, although there is also a selection of Classical Chinese literature from before the Japanese period.

Based in the red-brick former City Hall of Tâi-lâm, which dates back to Japanese colonial times, the museum provides an impressive setting for the exhibits within. Yet it was not always this way. After the city government moved to the more spacious surroundings of An-pêng the building fell into disrepair with little effort being made to preserve the crumbling superstructure of this imposing reminder of times gone by. Happily the decision was made to renovate the place and put it to work for a new purpose - displaying the convoluted linguistic past of this island.

Before you even enter the museum you’ll find a series of short texts on the low walls which surround it, in various languages including Mandarin, one of the aboriginal languages (I was unable to find out which) and Taiwanese, written in Hàn-lô, which you can see above and to the left.

The exhibits inside range from original texts to spoken word installations to recreations of the living conditions of some of Taiwan’s most famous writers. A good effort is made to cover all the languages spoken today or previously in Taiwan, while also not forgetting writers outside Taiwan who had a great influence on the literature here, such as Lu Xun. The example exhibit above is written in Old Dutch.

In the basement of the building is the library, which houses an impressive collection of texts related to Taiwanese literature, despite the fact that there are rows of shelves still left to fill. During my hour or so browsing the shelves and dipping in to the odd book here and there on a Saturday afternoon, I saw exactly seven people who ventured past the entrance to the library, although there were a fair few students taking advantage of the quiet in the study area just outside the library.

If you happen to be in the former capital one day with an hour or two on your hands, you could do worse than wander around soaking up the treasures of Taiwan’s linguistic past and present. The museum is found on the roundabout (traffic circle) at the confluence of seven major roads: Zhongzheng (or Jhongjheng in the Tongyong system which the Tainan City Government insists on using), Nanmen, Kaishan, Qingnian (Cingnian), Zhongshan (Jhongshan), Gongyuan and Minsheng, a very short walk from the Confucian Temple.

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.