Did the letter arrive?

My main argument for Hanyu is that it is used and taught in schools throughout Mainland China, the United States and Canada, not to mention most European schools that teach Mandarin.

The Tongyong pinyin is regional, it is based on a hard-to-understand Wade-Giles system, its use is limited mainly to Taiwan, therefore it is not practical, and there is no hope that it will ever replace the far more wide-spread Hanyu pinyin.

Academia Sinica took a stand years ago and favored Tongyong, but their reasoning was political: “If it serves Communist China, we don’t want it”. Not exactly a scientific stand. I do hope that soon common sense will prevail even in the Taiwanese bureaucratic circles.

B., Andrew
Xinzhu City (a.k.a. Hsinzhu, Xinchu, Shinchu and Hsinchu)

Taipei has only one street I can recall that has a real English translation: Civic Boulevard (Shìmín Dàdào). “Roosevelt Road,” on the other hand, is an English name with a Mandarin translation.

I tried to locate “Park Street” in the postal system’s zip code finder, which offers both “Romanized Phonetic System (Tongyong Pin Yin)” and “The United National Mandarin Phonetic System (Han Yu Pin Yin).” No luck. But Yuanqu/Yuancyu Street is there.

Yours is a good idea: to test whether something addressed to someone on Park Street would arrive. Since I work in a building there, I’m going to give that a try.

The people working for the Chunghwa Taiwan Chunghwa Post have a lot of practice dealing with confusing addresses, since Taiwan’s SNAFU romanization situation has not yet resolved itself at the level of people’s Rolodexes, business cards, etc. So my letter to myself might have a chance of getting through, even without a postal code or other such useful information. I’ll let everyone know what happens.

Louis Janus, LCTL project / CARLA.

PS my project also sponsors a number of listservs for teachers of LCTLs: http://www.carla.umn.edu/lctl/resources/listservs.html

I agree the pedagogy needs a lot of improvement. In my classes there was way too much emphasis on writing characters. And I mean physically writing, not typing. They should teach how to use a pinyin IME (trivial) and be done with it. People who want to write characters because they look cool can take a calligraphy class.

2. Apostrophe has other uses such as representing a glottal stop or a schwa.

3. Hyphen for joining two elements cannot lead to incorrect syllable breaking, since it is already between syllables; therefore also using it for indicating a spelling is two syllables instead of one causes no harm.

If we really want to increase comprehensibility of abbreviations, we should introduce more and clearer punctuation conventions for them, e.g. [Su-Hua] Expressway or Su/Hua Expressway.

5. Agree with the other commenters. Is “Taroko” a Japanese simplification of the real name? Also, 5. is directly contradictory to 7.