Monthly Archives: April 2006

Zhou Youguang in the news again

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Guangming Ribao has a long piece this week on Zhou Youguang, one of the main people behind the creation of Hanyu Pinyin: Zhōu Yǒuguāng: bǎisuì xīngchén, wénhuá cànrán (周有光：百岁星辰　文华灿然, Guāngmíng Rìbào, April 23, 2006). This also has lots of photos.

For autobiographical material by him in English, see A devotion that goes beyond words, from the South China Morning Post in the late 1990s.

For a selection of writings by him, see The Historical Evolution of Chinese Languages and Scripts (中国语文的时代演进 Zhōngguó yǔwén de shídài yǎnjìn).

tribe says its dialect needs official recognition for exam

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Aborigines from Kangke (寒溪) Village, who are a branch of northern Taiwan’s Atayal tribe, protested last week against the Council of Indigenous People’s tribal language examination policy, requesting that the Kangke dialect be included.

The Kangke dialect has long been different from other Atayal languages because it was influenced by the Japanese language during the period of Japanese occupation.

The council plans to begin tribal language examinations next year, yet the Kangke dialect is not listed as one of the official dialects of the Atayal tribe, said Fang Hsi-en (方喜恩), an indigenous rights activist. In the examination policy, the Kangke dialect is incorporated into the Squliq and the C’uli’ dialects.

Fang said that to pass the tribal language exams, students in Kangke Village must now study either the Squliq or the C’uli’ dialects using a romanized spelling system because the Kangke dialect is nothing like them.

The scores on the language exam (which has no writing, by the way) can have a real effect on people’s lives. Under an affirmative action program set up by the Ministry of Education, members of Taiwan’s tribes are entitled to have their high school and college entrance exam scores raised by 25 percent. Under a policy expected to be made effective next year, those who pass a tribal language exam would have an additional 10 percent added to their scores.

Fang said that the system was unfair for Kangke students because the council did not classify their dialect as an official one. He said the tribal language examination should not be linked with entrance exams scores in any way.

Lee Su-min (李淑敏), the head of the Parent-Teacher Association at Kangke Elementary School, said that such a classification also stunted the preservation of the dialect and the Kangke culture….

In response to the protests, Wang Chiui (汪秋一), the director of the Department of Education and Culture at the council, said that the tribal language examination policy is still being discussed with the education ministry.

But the goal of the language examination was to promote tribal language education, Wang said.

Wang reminded the protestors that the language exam was in fact oral and that he would request that the council include the Kangke dialect in the exam.

If included, a representative from the village will also be invited to be an oral examiner, he said.

I wish someone had asked some of the linguists at Academia Sinica about this. Just how different is Kangke from what is currently officially recognized as Atayal? What’s the extent of the influence of Japanese on the language? Is it just a matter of some loan words? How many?

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many Taipei sixth graders can’t use traditional dictionaries

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The Taipei City Government has released the results of a Mandarin proficiency exam administered to 31,145 sixth-grade students.

According to the results, more than 40 percent of those tested are unable to use so-called radicals (bùshǒu, 部首) to find Chinese characters in dictionaries. This, of course, comes as no great surprise to me. Ah, for the wisdom of the alphabetical arrangement of the ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive Dictionary!

Furthermore, the Taipei Times reports that the person in charge of the testing, Datong Elementary School Principal Chen Qin-yin, said that although most students received good grades, the essay test revealed weaknesses in writing ability, including a limited use of adjectives.

Reading that sort of thing sets off all sorts of alarms in my head. First, adjectives are the junk food of writing. Even worse, though, I suspect that Chen is talking not about any ol’ adjectives but rather stock phrases either in or reminiscent of Literary Sinitic (Classical Chinese). Larding a text with clichés is the sort of thing that passes for good writing here. And if, for example, students don’t throw in a zhi in the place of a de often enough their grades will suffer.

The language reforms springing from the May 4 movement have been tremendously important. But more than eighty years later the job still isn’t finished!

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Ma on preserving the languages of Taiwan’s tribes

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More from the colorful-superficiality school of education:

On March 30, Taipei City Mayor Ma Ying-jeou attended a teaching demonstration. The event features an indigenous language class for elementary school students.

The Mayor appeared at the occasion dressed in indigenous attire. He greeted the audience in Hakka, Taiwanese, and indigenous languages.

Mayor Ma noted that the variety in Taiwan’s indigenous culture is a blessing given by God. It has a positive effect upon the development of local society by making us more aware of the importance of diversity. However, it is not an easy task to preserve all of the indigenous languages. The Indigenous Peoples Commission promised to continue its effort in preserving these valuable treasures by committing more resources in the field of education.

Ma hopes that indigenous students will be able to learn simple greetings in their mother tongue, and even sing a song or two in that language. This will be a great help to preservation efforts.

(emphasis added)

Ahem.

And this is from Ma’s own Taipei City Hall, not a source with an axe to grind against him.

source: Mayor Speaks on Indigenous Language Education, Taipei City Government Web site, April 3, 2006, accessed April 21, 2006

early ‘universal’ romanization system

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No-Sword brings up Karl Richard Lepsius’s early, IPA-like system, with Matt linking to Google Print’s online edition of Standard Alphabet for Reducing Unwritten Languages and Foreign Graphic Systems to a Uniform Orthography in European Letters.

The book groups Taiwanese, Hakka, and Mandarin — or Hok-lo, Hak-ka, and Mandarinic (my favorite), as it refers to them — under “monosyllabic languages” (grr). OTOH, Tibetan is given as an “isolated language.” Interestingly, Mandarin pronunciation is given following the practice of Nanjing, not Beijing; a similar choice made a couple of hundred years ealier is also part of what’s behind the “Peking” spelling for what is now referred to as Beijing (1 MB PDF).

Taiwanese and alphabetical abbreviations

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I’d been working on a post about the cards and miniature magnets given away at Family Mart (Quánjiā / 全家) convenience stores with purchases of at least NT$75 (about US$2). But Jason at Wandering to Tamshui beat me to it yesterday with a post showing all of the cards, so I’ll keep this short.

These are particularly interesting because of the use of Taiwanese as well as several other languages, though everything here is labeled “Yingwen” (English). As Jason wrote, “That faint sound you hear is a thousand foreign English teachers slapping their foreheads in despair.”

The series, labeled Quánmín pīn Yīngwén (全民拼英文), is probably meant to counter rival 7-Eleven’s popular Hello Kitty button series. Although few take on Hello Kitty and live to tell the tale, I think the alphabet cards are doing fairly well.

Below is an example. On the left is the wrapper (pun not intended). Top right shows the front and back of the magnet that comes with this particular card. And at bottom right is the card itself. (I say card; but it’s really just glossy paper.)

Here MG is meant to stand for mai3 ke2 sian1 (as always, help with my spelling would be appreciated), which, despite the use of Chinese characters (嘜假仙), is Taiwanese, not Mandarin. Reading 嘜假仙 as Mandarin yields only nonsense. (So much for the “universality” and “ideographic” myths of Chinese characters.)

photo of promotional item from a convenience store; it uses the Roman alphabet to indicate abbreviations of phrases in Taiwanese

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Ma Ying-jeou speaks of Taipei County adopting Hanyu Pinyin

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In another sign that Tongyong Pinyin’s days in Taipei County are numbered (not that Tongyong was ever used here much in the first place), Taipei Mayor (and KMT Chairman) Ma Ying-jeou said this on Tuesday:

mùqián Táiběi Shì yǔ Táiběi Xiàn lù míngzi de pīnfǎ bùyī, Táiběi Shì cǎi Hànyǔ Pīnyīn, Táiběi Xiàn cǎi Tōngyòng Pīnyīn, wèilái kěyǐ tǒngyī yòng Hànyǔ Pīnyīn (目前台北市與台北縣路名的拼法不一，北市採「漢語拼音」，北縣採「通用拼音」，未來可以統一用「漢語拼音」)

Although he didn’t state specifically that Taipei County most definitely will use Hanyu Pinyin (which wouldn’t be his announcement to make), he certainly seems to back that happening. Of course, that’s no big surprise; but I like to chronicle such things anyway.

source: Mǎ Yīngjiǔ: Táiběi Xiàn-Shì hézuò; Yīngwén lù míngzi kěyǐ cǎi Hànyǔ Pīnyīn (馬英九:台北縣市合作 英文路名可採漢語拼音), CNA, April 18, 2006

Chinese companies adopting more ‘English’ names: report

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Langchao (浪潮), an IT company in China, has adopted the “English” name of “Inspur” (a marketing-speak portmanteau of “inspire” and “spur”). The switch is apparently part of a trend, with some Chinese marketing departments coming to prefer even invented English to real Mandarin. Such are the demands of the international market, it seems.

Sun Peishu, Inspur’s president and chief executive officer, said when he met foreign customers, he found it was often difficult and inconvenient for them to pronounce the names of his company and brand.

“That is a big handicap for us, if our customers can not even pronounce our name,” said Sun.

So the company decided to scrap the name Langchao, which had been in use for 23 years, since its foundation.

In the past years, more and more Chinese companies are changing their names from Chinese pinyin to English as the first step towards the global expansion.

Compare the earlier logo with the new one.

old logo -- with Chinese characters written with a brush; white on blue logo with 'inspur' and then Chinese characters for 'langchao'; blue on white

original logo

  • Chinese characters written in a calligraphic style
  • no Pinyin
  • I think that’s supposed to be a wave in the triangle. (“Làngcháo” is the Mandarin word for (1) tide; wave (2) tendency (3) major social movement.)

new logo

  • “English” name comes first
  • Chinese characters written in a non-calligraphic style

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