Pinyin news

Language Documentation & Conservation, a refereed, open-access journal sponsored by the National Foreign Language Resource Center and published online by the University of Hawai‘i Press, has released its first online book: Documenting and Revitalizing Austronesian Languages, edited by D. Victoria Rau and Margaret Florey.

Half of the chapters in the new book (ISBN 978-0-8248-3309-1) focus specifically on Austronesian languages of Taiwan. I have indicated those with bold text below.

Contents:

Introduction: documenting and revitalizing Austronesian languages
I. International capacity building initiatives

• The language documentation and conservation initiative at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa
• Training for language documentation: Experiences at the School of Oriental and African Studies
• SIL International and endangered Austronesian languages

II. Documentation and revitalization activities

• Local autonomy, local capacity building and support for minority languages: Field experiences from Indonesia
• Documenting and revitalizing Kavalan
• E-learning in endangered language documentation and revitalization
• Indigenous language-informed participatory policy in Taiwan: A socio-political perspective
• Teaching and learning an endangered Austronesian language in Taiwan

III. Computational methods and tools for language documentation

• WeSay, a tool for engaging communities in dictionary building
• On designing the Formosan multimedia word dictionaries by a participatory process
• Annotating texts for language documentation with Discourse Profiler’s metatagging system

There have also been two issues of the journal issued to date, though neither of these has anything specific about languages spoken in Taiwan.

This is indeed a promising beginning. I look forward to more such titles from the journal.

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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.

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If the Chen Shui-bian administration had bothered to do much of anything really useful to promote Taiwanese, especially as a written language, then we probably wouldn’t be faced with crap like this.

President-elect Ma Ying-jeou met last week with Chen Fang-ming (陳芳明), the chairman of the Graduate Institute of Taiwanese Literature at National Chengchi University (Zhèng-Dà). Although Professor Chen is a former DPP official and supported Frank Hsieh in the recent election, the two reportedly found much to agree on, such as that the idea that Chinese characters are all that are needed for literature in Taiwanese; romanization and other such phonetic spellings, they agreed, aren’t necessary.

Zǒngtǒng dāngxuǎnrén Mǎ Yīngjiǔ jīntiān bàihuì Zhèng-Dà Táiwān wénxué yánjiūsuǒ suǒzhǎng Chén Fāngmíng, tā biǎoshì liǎng rén jīntiān tándào běntǔhuà, zhuǎnxíng zhèngyì, běntǔ wénxué, dàxué píng jiàn děng yìtí, lìng tā yǒu “kōnggǔzúyīn” zhī gǎn, liǎng rén hěn duō kànfǎ dōu bùmóu’érhé, lìrú Chén Fāngmíng rènwéi zhǐyòng Zhōngwén xiě, Héluòhuà niàn, jiùshì Táiyǔ wénxué, bùyīdìng kèyì yào yòng Luómǎzì, yīn lái pīn.

This is certainly discouraging though not unexpected news for romanization supporters — and for those whose idea of Taiwanese lit isn’t stuck in the Qing dynasty or even earlier. But there’s always hope that this is another of those times in which Ma is simply persuaded by or agreeing with whatever is in front of him; and he may change his mind later. Regardless, though, it doesn’t augur well for a modern Taiwanese literature or for government work on — much less promotion of — romanization over the next four years.

source and further reading:

• Mǎ qǐngyì／Táiyǔ wénxué bùbì fēi yòng Luómǎ pīnyīn; Mǎ: rèntóng Chén Fāngmíng kànfǎ (馬請益／台語文學不必非用羅馬拼音　馬：認同陳芳明看法), April 17, 2008
• Chen Fang-ming’s blog
• The Taipei Times article on the Ma Ying-jeou–Chen Fang-ming meeting did not mention this issue.

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Several months ago I wrote about the move by Taiwan’s Ministry of the Interior (MOI) to impose Tongyong Pinyin by instituting standards for the writing of place names. (See MOI and Tongyong Pinyin: update). I was told that my remarks had been translated into Mandarin and distributed to those involved. But I have never received any response, despite more than one follow-up call. Although I never much expected to receive a useful response anyway, I had hoped for at least something.

Keep in mind that these are remarks aimed at those in the central government, who, at least for the time being, are compelled to work within the framework of Tongyong Pinyin. Also, I tried to stick as much as possible to the examples in the government’s draft, thus my use of “Jhuzih Hu,” which is both Tongyong Pinyin and a name whose word parsing is more complicated than most.

I have amended a few details, deleted some sections with personal details, and removed the conclusion, which was mainly polite blah-blah-blah.

I would welcome comments and suggestions for revisions.

Response to Taiwan’s Proposed Guidelines for Place Names in Romanization and English

As you are surely aware, Taiwan’s government has a very poor record when it comes to romanization. So the government now has an important opportunity to show Taiwan’s foreign community and others here who care about standards and are pained by the nation’s sloppiness in this regard that it is finally giving the issue the care it deserves. Unfortunately, the proposed guidelines in their present state would do little to improve the situation and in some cases could make things worse. Specifically, the proposed guidelines have seven basic problems.

1. Failure to use Hanyu Pinyin
2. Failure to use apostrophes correctly
3. Failure to use hyphens correctly
4. Partial failure to indicate individual words correctly
5. Failure to handle non-Chinese names correctly
6. Failure to consider instances where tone marks might be useful or even necessary
7. Failure to fix old, misleading spellings

Before I give details about the problems listed above I would like to note that the guidelines are, however, correct in one important way: Place names should begin with a capital letter followed by lower-case letters. The Taipei City Government made an enormous mistake when it instituted the practice of adding extra capital letters where none are needed.

WRONG	RIGHT
NanJing East Road	Nanjing East Road
TianMu	Tianmu
TaiNan	Tainan

The Taipei City Government’s foolish policy of ExTra CaPiTal LettErs also helped bring about another major problem in Taipei: the omission of apostrophes before syllables beginning with a, e, and o. This will be addressed in my second point. But first comes the introductory one.

1. Failure to use Hanyu Pinyin

I know that the issue of Hanyu Pinyin vs. Tongyong Pinyin is not supposed to be on the table, so I do not expect any action to be taken on this for now. Nevertheless, I believe it necessary to remind the Ministry and those responsible for reviewing the guidelines that members of the international community — both within and outside of Taiwan — overwhelmingly support the adoption of Hanyu Pinyin for Mandarin and oppose the use of Tongyong Pinyin. There is simply no green/blue divide among foreigners on this issue; an overwhelming majority of “green” foreigners oppose Tongyong Pinyin and strongly support Hanyu Pinyin; and an overwhelming majority of “blue” foreigners feel the same way. For foreigners, this is a practical matter, not a political one.

The government’s insistence upon the use of Tongyong Pinyin has cost Taiwan respect and is having an impact on students’ choices of where to study Mandarin. Moreover, the lack of a consistent, correct, and internationalized romanization system considerably complicates Taiwan’s efforts to lure more tourists to the island. The government should abandon Tongyong Pinyin immediately, before it does any more harm. Too much time, money, and effort have been wasted already.

Nevertheless, some of the damage that has been done could be repaired if the government implements the best possible guidelines for the use of the romanization system it continues to insist upon. The proposed guidelines, however, are at best insufficient and thus are in need of significant revision.

This brings me to my main points.

2. Failure to use apostrophes correctly

The MOI guidelines correctly indicate that something is needed to distinguish syllables beginning with a, e, and o. But the MOI guidelines use the wrong method to indicate these breaks.

The MOI says that people should use a hyphen before syllables beginning with a, e, and o. This is a very bad idea. The correct way to do this is by using an apostrophe. Here is the rule Taiwan should adopt: “Put an apostrophe before any syllable that begins with a, e, or o, unless that syllable comes at the beginning of a word or immediately follows a hyphen or other dash.”

Table: Examples of how to write words that have inner syllables beginning with a, e, or o

WRONG	RIGHT
Da-an	Da’an
Su-ao	Su’ao
Ren-ai	Ren’ai

The main reason it is crucial not to use a hyphen in such places is that hyphens have other important uses, which I will discuss next.

3. Failure to use hyphens correctly

Hyphens are especially important when it comes to assigning names to places and things (especially things representing abbreviations and things that join two places).

WRONG	RIGHT	REASON
Suhua Expressway	Su-Hua Expressway	This road runs between Su‘ao and Hualian
Beiyi Expressway	Bei-Yi Expressway	This road runs between Taipei (Taibei) and Yilan. (And for heaven’s sake don’t make this “Pei-Yi.”)
Jianan dazun	Jia-Nan dazun	Jia-Nan refers to Jiayi and Tainan (嘉南大圳).
Huajiang Bridge	Hua-Jiang Bridge	The bridge joins Wanhua and Jiangzicui.
Sun Moon Lake	Sun-Moon Lake	These are joined elements.
Taida	Tai-Da	An abbreviation for Taiwan Daxue (台灣大學)

See http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/hyphens.html for details and additional ways that hyphens can help clarify Pinyin.

4. Partial failure to indicate individual words correctly

The guidelines are correct that there should be spaces between words (词) but not between mere syllables (字). But the guidelines are too vague — and sometimes incorrect! — about how to determine what a word is (and thus what should be written separately).

Taiwan should use the guidelines that have already been worked out for these principles and have been accepted internationally. I am referring, of course, to the guidelines for Hanyu Pinyin, which are covered in general here — http://www.pinyin.info/rules/pinyinrules.html — and in detail in two books: Chinese Romanization: Pronunciation and Orthography (漢語拼音和正詞法) (ISBN 7-80052-148-6) and 新華拼寫詞典 (ISBN 7-100-03414-0). The latter book is sometimes available at the main Eslite bookstore near Taipei City Hall. The best Mandarin-English dictionary following these principles is the ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive Dictionary, edited by John DeFrancis; you should also use it as a standard reference.

Supporters of Tongyong Pinyin have often touted that system’s supposed “compatibility” with Hanyu Pinyin. Having the two systems share the same basic guidelines would be a good way to demonstrate that this is something more than empty words.

Most of the examples in the guidelines are correct. A few need revision.

WRONG	RIGHT
Yangmingshan	Yangming Shan
Jhuzihhu	Jhuzih Hu [Zhuzi Hu]

5. Failure to handle non-Chinese names correctly

Just a few days ago President Chen Shui-bian (whose name, I note, is spelled in Hanyu Pinyin, not Tongyong Pinyin; but no one confuses him with the president of the People’s Republic of China!) was in Tainan County to mark the opening of some new roads around the Southern Taiwan Science Park. Each of the three roads has been given a name from an aboriginal language, something the president praised. Yet the government’s guidelines would force Mandarin upon the aboriginal names, changing them to something that would be incorrect.

Similarly, the administration has supported Aborigines regaining their original names and even villages reacquiring their original, non-Chinese names. (See, for example, http://news.yam.com/cna/garden/200708/20070801554267.html )

Ideally, no Chinese characters would be used with some of these names; but I don’t expect that to happen soon.

WRONG	RIGHT
Kedaigelan	Ketagalan
Tailuge	Taroko
Sihmakusih (司馬庫斯)	Smangus

Attention must also eventually be given to the issue of using Sinitic languages other than Mandarin (specifically Taiwanese and Hakka) in place names.

6. Failure to consider instances where tone marks might be useful or even necessary

Because Mandarin is a tonal language, a few names that are different may appear to be identical in romanization unless tone marks are included. In practice, only a very small percentage of names are subject to this ambiguity. Taipei, for example, has more than 600 different street names; but only the following would need attention there.

Chinese characters	Pinyin and English mix
景華街	Jǐnghuá St.
景化街	Jǐnghuà St.
同安街	Tóng’ān St.
通安街	Tōng’ān St.
萬慶街	Wànqìng St.
萬青街	Wànqīng St.
五常街	Wǔcháng St.
武昌街	Wǔchāng St.
向陽路	Xiàngyáng Rd.
襄陽路	Xiāngyáng Rd.

For the benefit of foreigners and to aid clarity, tone marks should follow the practice of Hanyu Pinyin, not of Zhuyin Fuhao, i.e. first tone should be indicated (ā, ē, ī, ō, ū, and ǖ; not a, e, i, o, u, and ü). This is especially important because most names are written without tone marks; we should not get these confused with words that have only first-tone syllables, such as Tōng’ān (通安).

One possibility would be to tone marks on only the less common name(s). For example, we would write 五常街 as “Wǔcháng Street” but 武昌街 simply as “Wuchang Street” (rather than as “Wǔchāng Street“).

Some would advocate using tone marks on most if not all signage with Pinyin. This deserves study.

7. Failure to fix old, misleading spellings

Several years ago when the central government promulgated Tongyong Pinyin it kept the old spellings for some cities and all counties (other than Yilan, which changed from “Ilan”). This was a mistake. The old spellings are inherently ambiguous in pronunciation and are often quite simply misleading.

The government should end the policy of retaining most old spellings. Quite simply, there is nothing useful to foreigners or anyone else about retaining, for example, “Taitung” for what should be spelled “Taidong.” A limited, practical approach for the time being would be to immediately change all names that are spelled the same way in Tongyong Pinyin and Hanyu Pinyin, with the possible exception of retaining “Taipei” instead of switching to “Taibei.”

WRONG	RIGHT
Taitung	Taidong
Matsu	Mazu
Kinmen	Jinmen
Hualien	Hualian
Chiayi	Jiayi
Pingtung	Pingdong
Keelung	Jilong

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I’m so far behind on posts that when Taffy of Tailingua sent this to me people in Taipei probably really were wearing short sleeves. They’re certainly not wearing so little now, with the cold, damp, miserable weather we’ve been having lately. Oh well, at least it’s better than what so many people have been having to endure in China. I hope Pinyin News readers there are keeping warm and didn’t get stuck in some transportation-related hell.

This poster on the back of a bus is for Taiwan’s presidential campaign.

It reads:

Táiwān ei lìliang
Shìjiè dǎ tōngguān

Mǎ Yīngjiǔ — Xiāo Wàncháng

.

台灣ㄟ力量
世界打通關

馬英九 蕭萬長

It’s hard to put this into English that makes sense. Perhaps “Taiwan shows its power to the world.” The idea is something like “Taiwan can overcome all obstacles.” It doesn’t strike me as a good slogan. But maybe I’m missing something.

The interesting part is that it has Taiwanese written with zhuyin (bopomofo): ㄟ (ei). But the ㄟ is basically just for show, since it doesn’t serve any linguistic purpose that the expected Chinese character — 的 (de), indicating the possessive — wouldn’t provide. The sign is still in Mandarin. (Dǎ tōngguān, for example, is not a Taiwanese expression, according to several native speakers I questioned about this.)

For those who don’t know, Mǎ Yīngjiǔ and Xiāo Wàncháng comprise the KMT’s ticket for next month’s presidential election.

Both Ma and Xiao use unusual spellings for the way they write their names in the Roman alphabet: Ma Ying-jeou and Vincent Siew, respectively.

The “Ying-jeou” of Ma’s name gives the appearance of Gwoyeu Romatzyh. But in that system his name would be “Maa Ing-jeou.”

“Siew” for Hanyu Pinyin’s Xiāo indicates that the source is likely a language other than Mandarin. But Taiwanese isn’t it, though Siew, unlike Ma, was born here. Because of that spelling, many foreigners in Taiwan pronounce his family name like the English word “shoe.” “Vincent” is of course an “English name” rather than a romanization of his birth name.

As I’m fond of pointing out, perhaps the only prominent Taiwan politician whose name is recognizably Hanyu Pinyin and only Hanyu Pinyin is President Chen Shui-bian, the man most responsible for seeing that Taiwan did not adopt Hanyu Pinyin during his tenure.

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Stories about the official approval last September of the name of “Chiayi” for an asteroid/planetoid/minor planet (not to be confused with Pluto, the “dwarf planet“) discovered by astronomers with Taiwan’s National Central University drew my attention to the fact that another minor planet already bears the name of the university — and that they named it using Tongyong Pinyin: “Jhongda” (i.e., Zhōng-Dà, the short form of the school’s name in Mandarin, Guólì Zhōngyāng Dàxué).

There are plenty of planetoids bearing names in Hanyu Pinyin, e.g. Chongqing, Guangzhou, Guizhou, Beijingdaxue [i.e., Beijing Daxue], Beishida [i.e., Bei-Shi-Da], and Zirankexuejijin [i.e., Ziran Kexue Jijin].

Omitting spaces is common in the names as a whole, though some of them have spaces. And some have hyphens.

Although the statistics of diacritical characters in minor planets’ names (a list after my own heart) shows that, as of June 1997, 667 (4.83%) of the 13,805 named minor planets had diacritical characters in their names, I didn’t spot any Hanyu Pinyin names with tone marks. The mark for first tone doesn’t appear on the list even once.

I wish they’d followed Tongyong when naming asteroid Chiayi, because that way they would have ended up with the same spelling that Hanyu Pinyin uses: Jiayi. But I guess the solar system’s big enough for Wade-Giles as well.

Here are some Google search figures from Taiwan government domains.

• 532 from gov.tw domains for “chia-i”
• 1,380 from gov.tw domains for “jiayi”
• 2,660 from gov.tw domains for “chia-yi”
• 997,000 from gov.tw domains for “chiayi”

Should Ma Ying-jeou win next month’s presidential election in Taiwan, both the executive and legislative branches of government would be in the hands of the no-longer-opposed-to-Hanyu-Pinyin Kuomintang, and the national folly of Tongyong Pinyin could soon cease to exist as an official system not just in Taiwan but everywhere throughout the known universe … except on planetoid no. 145534 (”Jhongda”), a big chunk of rock in orbit somewhere past Mars.

sources:

• Minor planet officially named ‘Chiayi’, Taipei Times, October 17, 2007
• Lulin Observatory names newly-found planet after Chiayi, China Post, October 16, 2007
• Minor Planet Names: Alphabetical List
• International Astronomical Union Minor Planet Center
• Statistics of Diacritical Characters in Minor Planets Names, Laboratory of Small Bodies of the Solar System

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This week’s free rerelease from Sino-Platonic Papers is Covert Sexism in Mandarin Chinese (1.9 MB PDF), by David Moser (of Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard fame).

Here’s part of the introduction:

Like other cultures, China has a long history of sexist social conventions, and the Chinese language is pervaded with evidence of these. Research in this area has usually sought to identify and catalog aspects of Chinese that embody these sexist cultural traditions, such as sexist idioms, demeaning words for wife, derogatory terms of address for women, or the large number of characters containing the female radical (女) with negative connotations. Such elements tend to be rather easily identifiable and have been some of the earliest aspects to be targeted for linguistic reform. (The Chinese Communist Party, for example, in their attempts to elevate the status of women and eradicate vestiges of feudalism, has from time to time officially discouraged use of pejorative terms of address for women and wives.) Notable contributions have already been made in such research, but there are certain kinds of sexism in the Chinese language that are more subtly embedded in the grammar in such a way that they often escape conscious attention. This article attempts to shed light on some of these phenomena, since it is often in these hidden patterns of linguistic usage that sexist assumptions and notions are most powerfully present.

This is issue no. 74 of Sino-Platonic Papers. It was first published in January 1997.

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Putting English words in Mandarin sentences is of course extremely common in Taiwan and elsewhere in Asia, generally because this is thought to look cool and modern. But last month I was surprised to see Mandarin sentences with just English’s -ing added — and not one but two examples of this.

The image here is from a poster for the DPP’s presidential candidate, Frank Hsieh, that came out in March but which I didn’t see until a few days ago. It reads 台灣維新ing (”Táiwān wéixīn-ing“): “Taiwan is modernizing.” (Click the image to see the whole poster.)

The other example I noticed was in a newspaper headline about the Hong Kong pop diva Faye Wong: 明年拚老三 天后暫不復出 李亞鵬王菲 積極做人ING (Míngnián pīn lǎosān — tiān hòu zàn bù fùchū — Lǐ Yàpéng, Wáng Fěi jījí zuòrén-ing. “Next year work hard to produce third child — superstar temporarily not appearing — Li Yapeng and Faye Wong are energetically working on making a baby.”)

There are several other interesting things about the Faye Wong headline, such as the way in most other contexts zuòrén (lit. “be/make a person”) means something like “be a mensch.” But I don’t want to digress too much lest I never finish this post.

In both of these examples, -ing is used to emphasize the currentness of the actions. But it is of course possible in Mandarin to stress that something is going on now — and to do so without borrowing forms from English. For example, with zài:

• Lǐ Yàpéng, Wáng Fěi jījí zài zuòrén
• Táiwān zài wéixīn

Has anyone seen or heard other examples of this -ing grafting?

sources:

• 明年拚老三 天后暫不復出 李亞鵬王菲 積極做人ING, China Times, November 30, 2007
• “Táiwān wéixīn-ing” — Xiè Chángtíng quánguó xiàoyuán xúnhuí yǎnjiǎng (「台灣維新ing」謝長廷全國校園巡迴演講), Frank Hsieh’s blog, March 27, 2007

For lagniappe: lyrics to the Faye Wong song “Bù liú” in Pinyin, which has lots of examples of Mandarin’s bǎ.

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