This seems as good an announcement as any to end my hiatus from posting. Sino-Platonic Papers has just rereleased a popular issue of likely interest to many readers of Pinyin News: Writing Taiwanese: The Development of Modern Written Taiwanese (2.2 MB PDF), by Alvin Lin.

The table of contents gives a pretty good picture of what’s inside:

Preface
Introduction
The Status Quo: Characters and Taiwanese writing

1. The Roots of Writing in Taiwanese: Wenyan, baihua and academic Taiwanese
2. The Missing 15 Percent: Developing a written vernacular
3. One Attempt at Finding the Missing 15 Percent: Yang Qingchu’s Mandarin-Taiwanese Dictionary

Writing Romanized Taiwanese

1. The Roots of Romanized Taiwanese: Church Romanization
2. Church Romanization Today: The Taigu listserver
3. An Indigenous System: Liim Keahioong and Modern Literal Taiwanese

Linguistic and Social Considerations

1. Some Linguistic Classifications
2. Dealing with Homonyms: Morphophonemic spelling
3. Tones in Taiwanese: Surface vs. Lexical tones
4. Representing Dialects: Picking a standard written form or representing all dialects
5. Summary of Linguistic Concerns: Deciding the degree of coding
6. Writing, Reading, Printing, Computing, Indexing and other Practical Concerns
7. Social Concerns: Tradition and Political Meaning
8. Conclusion: Future Orthography Policy on Taiwan

Bibliography
Appendices:

• Email Survey
• Pronunciation guide to church romanization

List of Tables and Illustrations:

• Table 1: Suggested Characters for Taiwanese Morphemes from Three Sources
• Figure 1: Yang Qingchu’s Taiwanese-Mandarin Dictionary
• Figure 2: Church romanization
• Figure 3: Modern Literal Taiwanese
• Figure 4: Sample e-mail from Taigu listserver

This was first published in 1999 as issue number 89 of Sino-Platonic Papers.