Hanyu Pinyin backer to return to Taiwan’s Cabinet
Posted by site admin on 29 Apr 2008 at 12:49 pm | Tagged as: Taiwan, Tongyong, pinyin, psycholinguistics, romanization
Dr. Ovid Tzeng (Zēng Zhìlǎng / 曾志朗 ) will be returning to government as a minister without portfolio in the Cabinet of the incoming administration of Ma Ying-jeou.
Tzeng has done important work in psycholinguistics and is known to support Taiwan’s adoption of Hanyu Pinyin. Indeed, this support was one of the reasons he was pushed out of office the last time he was in government service, as minister of education at the beginning of President Chen Shui-bian’s first term.
Tasked with choosing a romanization system for Taiwan, Tzeng recommended Hanyu Pinyin. He was promptly replaced by someone who backed the adoption of the newly minted Tongyong Pinyin.
Tzeng’s name is often misspelled “”Ovid Tseng” in news reports.
I always find it a little ironic that those who support Hanyu Pinyin don’t use it to spell their own names. While those that oppose it do. I think you can guess who I am talking about.
Is it more or less ironic that they have no inkling of it? Ignorance is bliss…
Speaking of misspellings, Dr. Tzeng’s surname in pinyin should be Zēng, not céng. In fact the character 曾 as a surname is always Zēng. (Another common mispronuncation is rèn for 任 Rén.)
Dominic’s right - I can’t believe I missed that.
How embarrassing. You’re quite right, Dominic. Thanks for the correction. (I’ve now fixed the original post.)
What makes things even worse is that I initially wrote Zeng but then double checked — not carefully enough, obviously — and so “corrected” it. D’oh!
Friggin’ Chinese characters with multiple pronunciations….
@site admin
You shoulda put the title in the link — I almost guffawed. But then — I’ve got a bias towards Pinyin, which is, as the linked article mentions, vastly superior to English orthography.
He went from diametrically opposed to Hanyu Pinyin if you asked him in
the 90s, to opposed to just X and Q etc. if I recall correctly, to
finally apparently accepting Hanyu Pinyin, hopefully still up till
today.
His students needed strong arguments to slowly bang it into his head.
It just dawned on me that we wanting Hanyu Pinyin is indeed the same
as the recent “single textbook version for a single curriculum”
issue. One Pinyin worldwide, to reduce everybody’s burden.
拼音問題正如「一綱一本」，應採漢語拼音，以減輕大家負擔，國內外。