Twenty years ago a few young aboriginal men established Taiwan’s first organization dedicated to the rights of the aboriginal people…. Launched in the early 1980s, the movement aimed to empower aborigines and to heighten their awareness of self-identity. In the … Continue reading
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 … Continue reading
In 1957, Maya, a small town in Taiwan’s Gaoxiong (Kaohsiung) County, was assigned a new name: Sanmin Township (Sānmín Xiāng, 三民鄉), after Sun Yat-sen’s Sānmínzhǔyì (三民主義 / Three Principles of the People). Although the residents of Maya — then, as … Continue reading
Joel at Far Outliers has an interesting post on how Koreans chose Japanese names during the Japanese colonial period. (Spotted on Language Hat.) Regarding name frequency in Taiwan, I once did some checking of an old version of Chih-Hao Tsai’s … Continue reading
Reader Jens Finke recently came across a newspaper clipping from about twenty years ago, the dark ages of Taipei’s street signs. Back then most roads in the city were identified in bastardized Wade-Giles and wildly misspelled variations thereof. Two or … Continue reading
The addition of some Aborigine’s original names to their new national ID cards has been encountering a few problems. I didn’t think twenty characters would be enough space for some names, and I was right. The letters that won’t fit … Continue reading
The new type of Taiwan’s national ID card (shēnfènzhèng/身分證) will be coming out soon. For the first time, this card will allow the use of romanization — albeit in very limited ways. The use of romanization is being allowed because … Continue reading
For many years, the Presbyterian Church in Taiwan has been an important voice for human rights in Taiwan, including the right of people to speak and worship in their native language. Probably the best-established romanization system for writing Taiwanese (Hoklo, … Continue reading