Pinyin news

Actually, it’s a little hard to figure out exactly what this article is saying, other than that there is soon going to be a new dictionary of Taiwanese done in Tongyong Pinyin. It seems to have been made not by a scholar but by a retired businessman, who spent five years working on it. But then the article starts talking about software and Microsoft Word. Does anyone have any more information?

咱台語尚美！ 苦心完成新字典
民視 2005-01-15 16:14

一套目前台灣最有系統整理的通用台語字典,已經編纂完成,即將在春節過後正式出版,這是吳崑松老先生在退休之後, 投入五年心血,所完成的鉅著,他期望新一代在學台語的時候,不僅能和國際接軌,也能更輕鬆.現有台灣通用台語字典小小一本,連通用客語字典都比它厚得多, 不過吳崑松老先生所完成卻是更厚的上下兩冊九千字的通用台語字典,即將在春節過後正式出版,還獲得李前總統與陳水扁總統的簽名留念.以通用拼音來學台語, 將傳統台語八調簡化成六調.號稱百分之九十五的發音和英文相容不須要另加套裝軟體,直接就可以在電腦Word上面作業.這是吳崑松在從事國際貿易退休後, 全力投 注五年時間所完成的作品,只希望能完成一個心願,讓有更多的新一代,體會到台語之美.(民視新聞陳淑貞,陳君宜台北報導)

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香港新設英文路標 犯人製錯誤多
中廣新聞網 2005-02-16 12:30

不過，香港政府前不久才花了一筆錢，設置新的英文路標，結果錯誤百出，讓港府官員尷尬不已！

香港〔南華早報〕報導，不少新路標的英文拼音不是多一個字母、就是少一個字母，甚至應該小寫的字母弄錯變大寫。這些新路標花了港府上百萬元，但是錯誤百出，貽笑大方。一名政府官員說，這些英文路標都是監獄犯人製造，而典獄官沒有仔細檢查就出貨。

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This story is interesting on its own. But it might be worthwhile to consider how this might reflect on long-ingrained attitudes, such as those toward Chinese characters vs. romanization.

In a sunlit classroom, down a dusty hutong in Tianjin, China’s third largest city, a lively argument is raging. Eight-year-old Zhang Licheng and six-year-old Zhao Anrong are debating who would make the better teacher….

It’s a scene familiar in any school anywhere, except that both these children are deaf and are communicating entirely in Chinese sign language.

What makes this unique is that for the past 50 years, sign language has been actively discouraged, and in some cases banned, from classrooms in China. Despite evidence showing that deaf children are visual learners, and that those who learn sign language perform better in school, educators have insisted they learn to speak so they can blend in with their hearing classmates at public school.

Since the 1980s, nearly 1,500 pre-school “hearing rehabilitation” centers, run by the quasi-governmental China Disabled People’s Federation (CDPF), have fuelled many a parent’s dream that hours spent mimicking words will eventually unlock their child’s linguistic talent, and release the family from the shadow of disability.

Yet, according to statistics compiled by the CDPF, fewer than 10 percent of China’s 800,000 deaf preschoolers will reach the age of compulsory education - seven years old - with an adequate grasp of the spoken language to join a public school.

Those who do benefit from the oral-only approach, and there are some success stories, are usually children with residual hearing, or who lost their hearing after they learned how to speak, or who can afford cochlear operations and special language training.

“It’s so difficult for the children to learn to speak,” says Hu Aixin, who has been teaching deaf children at Tianjin Number One School for the Deaf for the past 20 years.

“They need 45 minutes just to learn one syllable. For vowel sounds, it is easier - they can see the shape of the mouth. But for the sounds they can’t see - each shape can have different meanings depending on the tone. It takes a lot of time.”

Hu says that up to 70 percent of lesson time is spent teaching children how to say basic words such as mother and father. Math, science, literature and even playtime all take a back seat to oral drills. It means, she says, that children are missing out, not only on a quality education, but also on crucial life and communication skills.

As a result, most deaf children are expected to leave school with an education level at least three grades below their hearing peers, and with few job prospects beyond factory work.

“It’s not that deaf children aren’t as smart as the hearing students, they’ve just never been given a chance,” Hu says.

That this oral-only policy has contributed to the creation of a poorly educated and marginalized community of some 22 million people seems to have escaped the attention of the government - until now.

Over the past few years, local authorities in Tianjin City, and Jiangsu, Yunnan and Anhui provinces, in cooperation with groups such as UNICEF, Save the Children UK and the Amity Foundation, have been charting a new course for deaf education.

Using what is called in the West the bilingual and bicultural - or bi-bi - method, children gain a language they can communicate fluently in while also being given lessons in deaf culture and an identity they can be proud of.

Four years ago, Tianjin Number One School for the Deaf eschewed the oral-only method and adopted sign language as the main method of communication, employing deaf teachers to teach the language and culture of the deaf - both radical departures from the norm.

At first, the new approach was limited to just two preschool classes, but in September 2004, Zhao and Zhang joined a handful of deaf children in the country’s first bi-bi primary school class….

News of the experimental class is spreading. Deaf schools across the country are asking for more information and training in the approach. Local TV and media have run stories about the children, and in January the Hong Kong education ministry paid a working visit.

Yet, with such tangible and notable results, why is it that only a handful - just 33 children - have enrolled in the bi-bi class at Tianjin Number One School for the Deaf in the past four years?

Parents are the program’s biggest resource, say school officials, but also its biggest obstacle.

“Parents’ attitudes are hard to change,” says Professor Zhao Mingzhi, an ear, nose and throat doctor and director of the Tianjin Rehabilitation Centre for Hearing Disability. “Many still believe that sign language is a bad influence. Their only hope is that their child will be able to speak.”

For the profoundly deaf, he says, the oral-only approach “is unfair.” They may be able to utter a few basic words, but this is not true communication. “It is just for the parents. They convince themselves that because their child can say a few lines of a Tsang Dynasty poem that they can communicate,” he says.

People also convince themselves that because children memorize some poems in Classical Chinese and are taught what they mean, the children can read Classical Chinese, which is not at all the case.

When I was in junior high, the members of a high school German club visited one of my classes and taught us a German song. We learned to pronounce the words (i.e. mimic our teachers) and were taught the song’s meaning. But no one would conclude from this that we knew German.

Many parents spend tens of thousands of yuan on Chinese medicine, acupuncture, rehabilitation centers and hearing aids. The upshot is that when all options are exhausted and their child still can’t hear or speak, they may finally turn to sign language; but at that stage, children are well past the optimum time for language development, professor Zhao says.

source: Seen and not heard. The Standard of Hong Kong, February 26-27, 2005.

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It’s not just Taiwan that has problems with this.

代表怒斥路牌门牌混乱
2005年01月16日03:01 重庆晨报

人大代表就路牌、门牌规范问题，对市民政局等启动问询案

　　昨日下午，针对主城区地名指示牌、街道路牌、居民楼门牌等地名标志的规范、制作、安装、管理等方面存在的诸多问题，渝中区代表团10余名市人大代表对市民政局等启动了问询案。

　　问询一荩荩“五大混乱”何时解决？

　　鲁磊代表首先怒斥了主城区路牌、门牌管理存在的“五大混乱”：

　　一、路牌规格大小不一；二、地名牌的地名排列方式不一致，制作粗糙，缺乏美感；三、地名牌汉语拼音、注音不规范，英文标示语法错误时有发生，贻笑大方；四、路牌指向不明，不少还存在指向错误，给市民特别是外地客人出行带来不便；五、门牌、路牌缺乏管理，很多地名因城市建设早已不存在了，但门牌竟然还存在。问询二荩荩路牌管理商业化行不行？

　　在问询中，市民政局提出通过商业化模式规范路牌管理，通过和广告公司合作，在路牌上标示道路的同时，还可刊登商业广告，而广告费用则可用于路牌的制作、管理和维护。

　　这一方案当即遭到了彭应吉等多名人大代表反对，彭代表说，路牌讲究简洁、一目了然，做商业广告后，不仅影响美观，还会给群众识记带来不便，“而且，现在主城的户外广告过多、过滥。”

　　彭代表强调说，路牌作为公益性事业，制作、管理的费用理应由政府买单。问询三荩荩门牌费该不该市民承担？

　　代表们还对居民门牌制作费由市民承担的规定提出质疑。“小小一块门牌，体现了有关部门是否真正做到了群众利益无小事。”代表们说，一块门牌制作成本不过几块钱，政府完全可以承担。

　　对于代表们的询问，在场各有关政府部门代表均一一做了纪录，表示一定给代表们一个满意的答复。

　　代表们建议，对凡没有名称的路、街、巷、住宅进行命名，对名实不符或寓意不佳的地名予以更名，对道路改建后名称不合适的予以调整；由公安部门统一编制门牌，调整跳号、缺号和编排不规范的门号，无门牌号的予以编制；无街巷牌、门牌的，要予以设置；统一规范街巷牌、门牌，路幅在10米以上的街巷设立立柱式街巷牌，路幅在10米以下的街巷设立壁挂式街巷牌；各街巷的起止点及其与主干道交汇处必须设立街巷牌，较长的街巷设街巷牌，保证平均每500米设有一块街巷牌。

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An article in the New York Times on the increasing popularity of English in Mongolia has the following interesting line:

Within a decade, Mongolia is expected to convert its written language to the Roman alphabet from Cyrillic characters.

another copy found here

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from the Guardian Weekly

Forced to learn a language of failure

As China’s planners roll out a bilingual education policy across their vast country, the damage it is doing in remote minority-language-speaking communities is being overlooked, says Anwei Feng

Friday February 11, 2005

In its long history of minority education, China has engaged its 50 or so minority groups in bilingual education with an officially proclaimed aim to produce bilinguals with a strong competence in Putonghua (standard Chinese) and their home languages. The stated outcome of this policy is for minority groups to be able to communicate with, and ideally assimilate into, mainstream society.

The concept of bilingualism has, therefore, a long association with minority groups and bilingual education for these groups has undergone its course of trials, disasters and hopes reflecting the political realities of the country. To the Han majority, which comprises about 92% of the total population, bilingualism has remained a remote notion and it has hardly, if ever, appeared in their education literature.

But over the past few years this has changed drastically. Bilingualism is now widely seen by the Han majority as a useful tool for improving foreign language skills, particularly English, and for developing a workforce that combines specialised knowledge with foreign language skills.

Across the country, particularly in major cities such as Shanghai and Beijing and the special economic zones, a school system is rapidly being developed in which English as well as standard Chinese are used as the languages of instruction. From kindergartens to tertiary institutions, bilingual education has become part of the everyday vocabulary not only of educationists but also ordinary people. Catalytic factors, such as China’s firm belief in its “open-door” policy, membership of the World Trade Organisation in 2001 and the successful bid for the 2008 Olympic Games, have played a key role in promoting English and Chinese bilingualism, which looks certain to reshape China’s education system as a whole. In what looks like a natural response to the English and Chinese bilingual movement, some educators have come up with the notion of trilingualism for minority groups.This is defined as the development of talents in mastering three languages (sanyu jiantong). To these educators, as long as there is the need, learning a third language (in this case a foreign language that is not in widespread use in minority regions) should be as simple as the sum: two (minority home language and standard Chinese) plus one (a foreign language) equals three (sanyu jiantong).
Trilingualism is by no means an unusual phenomenon and proves a useful concept in some countries in Europe, Africa and Asia. However, for any trilingual programme to be effective, it is important to examine the specific context and the implications for linguistic minority children and to create necessary conditions for its implementation. That process of examination and debate does not appear to be taking place in the literature on minority education in China.

Recent reports from minority areas reveal several hidden issues that need addressing. The first is the transition children go through from early schooling in their mother tongue to learning subjects in standard Chinese later in their school careers. This transition is often reported as being unsmooth, with some children dropping out of school.

A second issue is that a large percentage of minority pupils, many of whom live in remote areas, rarely or never have a chance to study a foreign language in primary or even secondary schools, usually because of lack of resources. Elsewhere in China, learning a foreign language starts at primary school and sometimes even earlier.

And where minority students do get access to foreign language teaching they have an additional hurdle to face. In most cases, the EFL textbooks they use are standardised nationwide. These textbooks carry explanations or translations in standard Chinese. This increases considerably the difficulty of learning the foreign language because the “intermediary language” they rely on is in fact a language of which they are not native speakers. Many of them have to mentally retranslate it into their mother tongue in the learning process.

These difficulties are compounded by other factors: a shortage of qualified standard Chinese and EFL teachers; the unfavourable economic conditions that keep minority children out of classrooms to help parents in busy seasons; the struggle of those pupils with two new languages, and thus two new cultures (the Han majority culture and a distant foreign culture); and inappropriate management and policies in minority education.

As many minority children find it difficult to follow the school curriculum it becomes harder for them to gain the grades necessary to get into tertiary education. They therefore rely on the government’s “favour policies” for university places. (Regional or provincial governments seek to ensure that quotas of minority students are enrolled into tertiary institutions, often by lowering the pass level in the nationwide entrance examinations.) Once in university, these students are placed in an exam system that includes compulsory English language testing and they perform less well than their majority counterparts. Many of them have to re-sit these exams repeatedly for certification.

This in turn affects their self-esteem, confidence and overall performance. It is often reported that some minority students consider themselves inferior to others (ziren buru) and undervalue their own cultures and languages. Some take great pains to hide their ethnic identities by not wearing their ethnic clothes and by changing their accents.

Loss of sense of worth and identity as observed by many educators is contrary to the aim of bilingual education. At the heart of minority education are the notions of equity, self-confidence and empowerment that help to develop in all students a secure sense of identity and self-esteem so as to enable them to participate competently in the education process. The outcome of minority education should be academically and personally empowered individuals who acquire control over their own lives and immediate environment and who can transform from a superior-inferior mentality to collaborative relationships where their identities are affirmed.

If these aims for minority education are to be achieved in trilingual education in China, the challenges being faced by minority students need to be debated from different perspectives with a view to the unique contexts of minority groups in the country.

However, the absence of discussions about the impact of the majority concept of bilingualism (expressed in the “two plus one equals three” formula) on minority groups may well be a product of the prevailing assimilation mentality. This portrays minority languages and cultures as primitive, inferior and thus dispensable. An open discussions of these issues will help shed light on the theory of trilingualism and the assimilation mentality. It will also allow stakeholders to develop minority education programmes that empower minority children.

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from Xinhua:

Survey shows locals still prefer their own dialect 11/2/2005 9:12

A recent survey has found residents in China’s largest city, Shanghai, prefer speaking their own dialect even though most speak fluent mandarin (putonghua).
Compared with people from other parts of China, Shanghaiers speak more often in their local dialect at home, office, supermarkets and doctor’s consulting rooms, according to the national survey on the popularity of mandarin, conducted by the State Language Commission of China.
Mandarin, known in China as “putonghua” or “common tongue,” was made the standard pronunciation of Chinese language more than 50 years ago.
The survey found only 35 percent of Shanghaiers speak mandarin in the office, while the national average use of mandarin at workplaces is 42 percent. About 12 percent of Shanghai’s residents speak mandarin at home, opposed to 18 percent nationwide.
Results of the survey have surprised many Chinese linguists because Shanghai has long been considered a “melting pot” and about 35 percent of its population have moved in Shanghai from other parts of the country.
“Drivers and conductors on Shanghai buses all speak the local dialect, though posters are seen everywhere reminding the residents to speak mandarin,” said He Xin, a public servant who’s been in Shanghai for seven years. “You’d be an outsider if you speak mandarin among a group of local Shanghaiers.”
But he said Shanghaiers are generally friendly and don’t discriminate against people from other parts of China.
In fact, some local newspapers have started to discuss how the Shanghaiers should make sure their future generation still speak their “mother tongue” now that schools have been told to teach mandarin only.
The unique Shanghai dialect is very different from mandarin and many other Chinese dialects. It was for a time a symbol of Shanghaiers’ localism and superiority over people from the rest of the country.

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If anyone in Singapore notices this, I’d love to receive some photos of this new signage.

SINGAPORE (dpa) - Signs and maps at subway stations are going multilingual in Singapore to help the elderly and others who might not read English, transport officials said Monday.

Work is expected to be completed by the end of this year on signboards and maps in Chinese and Tamil, according to the Land Transport Authority (LTA).

Station names in Malay are similar to English ones. “We are progressively changing the signs at all the stations,” The Straits Times quoted an LTA spokesman as saying.

The cost is S$600,000 Singapore dollars (US$368,000).

Twenty-five per cent of the 8,000 key signs at mass transit stations have been made bilingual so far.

Previously, only a handful of stations in the city had signs in more than one language.

Commuters who could not read English complained that they found it difficult to navigate the train system because the underground lines have no landmarks for orientation.

Singapore’s predominantly Chinese population includes 15 per cent Malays and 6 per cent Indians.

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