Today’s featured article on Wikipedia is the one on the Gwoyeu Romatzyh romanization system for Mandarin. Congratulations, Nigel and all the other contributors!
Author Archives: Pinyin Info
kanji’ll cost you extra
Hmm.
Memorabilia producer and trading card maker Upper Deck has signed Boston Red Sox pitcher Daisuke Matsuzaka to an exclusive memorabilia and autograph deal….
[T]he price for a Matsuzaka signed baseball in English will be $449.99, while his signature with a Kanji inscription will cost $100 more.
source: Dice-K Signs With Upper Deck, CNBC, August 14, 2007
Taike — trademarking a partially reclaimed pejorative
The term taike (táikè, 台客 — with “tai” as in “Taiwan” and “ke” as in “guest”) has historically been used predominantly by mainlanders in Taiwan as a pejorative for ethnic Taiwanese they view as unsophisticated and crude.
In recent years some Taiwanese have attempted to reclaim the word for themselves as “an expression of strong national consciousness and Taiwanese cultural elements,” as the Taipei Times puts it. Whether they’ve been particularly successful in this could be debated. For example, more than a few of the giggling, empty-headed entertainment figures on Taiwan television will often jokingly accuse someone on their show of being “hǎo tái,” where tai is a short form for taike and meant as synonymous with dījí (低級, vulgar). It makes me want to slap those media celebrities upside their damn-fool heads. But watching TV here often brings out such feelings in me. Anyway, I digress.
Neuron Innovations (Zhōngzǐ Chuàngxīn / 中子創新), organizers of the TK Rock Concert, has been granted a trademark here in Taiwan for 台客 (taike). It’s a bit as if a company in the States running a gay-rights-themed rock festival named “Fag Fest” had been given the trademark on not just “Fag Fest” but the word “fag” itself.
The illustration in this post is the submitted trademark. As is obvious, there’s nothing whatsoever special about the design; it’s just the plain characters.
Some politicians and academic figures have called for the trademark to be repealed, including Legislator Lin Shu-fen of the ruling Democratic Progressive Party.
Lin said that taike should be regarded as a kind of “public good” or “cultural good” and no one should be allowed to monopolize the usage of the term.
“Making taike a registered trademark is detrimental to popular culture,” Lin said.
She said that members of the public might face an infringement lawsuit if they used the term in symposiums, music competitions, or film festivals or in the names of their published books or magazines, among other things.
Hung Shu-ming (洪淑敏 [Hóng Shūmǐn), the head of the trademark division at the Intellectual Property Office (IPO), did not think it improper that the bureau had granted Neuron Innovations the trademark.
“The application for taike registration was approved because Neuron Innovations has a leading position in hosting taike Rock concerts in recent years,” Hung said.
Lin responded by saying that “first come, first served” was not a good reason for Neuron Innovations to get the trademark, as LTK (濁水溪公社 [Zhuóshuǐ Xī Gōngshè), a local band which released an album titled Revenge of the Taike ten years ago, would have owned the trademark.
Lee Ming-tsung (李明聰 [Lǐ Míngcōng), an associate professor of sociology at National Taiwan University, urged the IPO to repeal the taike trademark as it is integral to the popular culture.
sources and further reading:
- Intellectual property officials asked to keep ‘taike‘ public, Taipei Times, August 8, 2007
- trademark information for taike (in Mandarin). Note: You may need to manually set your browser to Big5 in order to view the characters here correctly. Also, why is a government office using a Hinet site instead of its own?
- taike thread on the Taiwan Intellectual Property Rights Office’s Web forum, accessed August 11, 2007
- Taiwanese have changed ‘Taike‘ for the better: Chen, Taipei Times, September 2, 2005
bilingualism among immigrant families in Southern California
Rubén G. Rumbaut of the University of California, Irvine, has written an interesting study titled The Evolution of Language Competencies, Preferences and Use Among Immigrants and their Children in the United States Today (PDF). It was prepared for the U.S. House Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship, Refugees, Border Security, and International Law for a hearing in May on immigration reform and U.S. immigrant integration.
Rumbaut’s findings back up the reputation of the United States as a graveyard for languages. The study has much of interest; but for this post I’ll focus just on Asian languages, which Rumbaut said “can be expected to die out at or near the second generation.”
Of special interest to readers of this site are the figures for foreign language fluency among longitudinal samples of young adult children of immigrants, as surveyed in 1992 (age 14), 1995, and 2002 (age 24).
The groups in the longitudinal study are Mexican, Cuban, Nicaraguan, Colombian, Dominican, Haitian, Filipino, Vietnamese, Laotian & Cambodian, and Chinese. Between 1992 and 2002, the percentages of those who said they could speak their foreign language “very well” increased — often substantially — for every group but two: Vietnamese (dropping from 33.8 percent to 29.7 percent) and Chinese (falling much more sharply, from 29.4 percent to 17.6 percent).
The figures for reading and writing also follow a downward trend among Chinese — and only among Chinese. Moreover, Chinese had the lowest rates among the tracked groups for those who can read very well or write very well. In 2002 a mere 2 percent of the Chinese group reported they could write Chinese very well.
Shanghai metro told to end language service
This week’s news provides a good example of how petty China’s language police can be.
Workers in Shanghai’s metro service must often deal with Chinese who do not speak either Shanghainese or standard Mandarin, so they began to collect useful phrases so staff members could better understand and answer some questions. They focused on Cantonese, Hoklo (a.k.a. Minnan, Southern Fujianese, Taiwanese, etc.), Wenzhouhua (although this is generally classified as part of the same language that contains Shanghainese, it is largely incomprehensible to most people in Shanghai), Wuhanhua (although classified as a Mandarin dialect, it is far removed from standard Mandarin), and Changsha (a dialect of Hunanese). More than fifty metro employees are to study the phrases.
This caught the attention of Shanghai’s Spoken and Written Language Work Committee (Yǔyán Wénzì Gōngzuò Wěiyuánhuì). On Tuesday, Zhu Lei (朱蕾), a committee official, reported that her office had “contacted the Metro management …, stating that the program could violate the country’s language policy to promote the use of Putonghua [i.e., Mandarin].”
“The right way to solve communication barrier is to speak Putonghua,” she is quoted as saying.
sources:
- Metro service snubs language watchdog, Shanghai Daily, August 8, 2007
- Shànghǎi Guǐ Jiāo yù yòng fāngyán fúwù yǐn zhēngyì — yǔ wěi jiānchí tuī-pǔ[tōnghuà] (上海轨交欲用方言服务引争议 — 语委坚持推普), August 6, 2007 (This is just one source. This story has been widely reprinted in China.)
Low rate of registration of aborigines’ ‘original names’ prompts gov’t to ease process
As of January 2007, only 6,613 of Taiwan’s 470,000 Aborigines had officially registered to use their original names (i.e., those in the languages of their tribes, rather than the Sinicized forms that were forced upon Taiwan’s aboriginal population until relatively recently). This low rate, combined with the realization that the procedure was inconvenient for those who had moved away from their home towns, prompted the government to simplify the registration procedure by allowing people to register their names at any household registration office, not just the one for their officially listed household. This has been effect since April 1.
Names may be registered in a variety of forms: with Chinese characters, romanization, or a combination of both.
Yuánzhùmín shēnqǐng huífù chuántǒng míngzi de shǒuxù, jírì qǐ kěyǐ gèng fāngbiàn, cóng jīnnián 4 yuè 1 rì qǐ, bùzài yìngxìng guīdìng zhǐnéng huídào hùjí de bànlǐ gēngmíng shǒuxù, chūwài qiúxué jiùyè de yuánzhùmín zài rènhé yī ge hùzhèng shìwùsuǒ dōu kěyǐ bànlǐ gēngmíng.
Gēnjù Yuánmínhuì [Yuánzhùmín Zú Wěiyuánhuì] de tǒngjì: zhì 96 [i.e., 2007] nián 1 yuè zhǐ, yǐjing huífù chuántǒng míngzi de yuánzhùmín jǐnyǒu 6,613 rén, yǔ yuánzhùmín zǒngrénkǒu shù 47 wàn duō rén xiāngjiào, bùdào bǎi fēnzhī yīdiǎn wǔ, bǐlì fēicháng dī. Hěn yǒu kěnéng shì wèile jiùyè, jiùxué huò qítā yuányīn, líxiāngbèijǐng dào dūhuìqū dǎ pīn de yuánzhùmín yùláiyù duō, ér jiù guīdìng shēnqǐng huífù chuántǒng míngzi, yīdìng yào huídào hùjí suǒzàidì de hùzhèng shìwùsuǒ bànlǐ, ràng bùshǎo yuánzhùmín dǎ tuìtánggǔ. Xīn guīdìng xiūzhèng hòu, yuánzhùmín shēnqǐng gēngmíng zài gèng de dōu kěyǐ bànlǐ.
Gēnjù xiūzhèng xìngmíng tiáolì guīdìng, mùqián yuánzhùmín de chuántǒng míngzi yě kěyǐ yǒu sān zhǒng dēngjì fāngshì:
- chuántǒng míngzi yǐ Hànzì dēngjì, lìrú Xíngzhèngyuàn Yuánmínhuì zhǔrèn wěiyuán de míngzi: 瓦歷斯‧貝林 [Wǎlìsī Bèilín]
- chuántǒng míngzi yǐ Hànzì dēngjì, bìngliè chuántǒng míngzi zhī Luómǎ pīnyīn, lìrú Xíngzhèngyuàn Yuánmínhuì zhèngwù fùzhǔrèn wěiyuán de míngzi: 夷將‧拔路兒 Icyang Parod [Webmaster’s note: 夷將‧拔路兒 = Yíjiāng Bálùr in Hanyu Pinyin]
- Hànrén xìngmíng bìngliè chuántǒng míngzi zhī Luómǎ pīnyīn, lìrú Xíngzhèngyuàn Yuánmínhuì chángwù fùzhǔrèn wěiyuán de míngzi: 鄭天財 [Zhèng Tiāncái] Sra Kacaw
source: Yuánzhùmín shēnqǐng huífù chuántǒng míngzi jírì qǐ gè dì kěyǐ shēnbàn (原住民申請回復傳統名字即日起各地可申辦), Chinatimes, April 5, 2007
Taiwan president backs restoration of aborigine place name
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 now, predominantly members of the Bunun tribe — were likely not in favor of this change, Taiwan was then under an authoritarian regime with an assimilationist policy, so there’s little to nothing they could have done.
During KMT rule, when the change to Sanmin was made, a major point of government policy was stressing the Chineseness of Taiwan — even if, such as in this case, the links had to be manufactured. The Kuomintang (Guómíndǎng), after all, was and still officially is the Chinese Nationalist Party, as the Taipei Times likes to remind its readers.
Fortunately, Taiwan no longer has the same political situation as 50 years ago. Some activists are now trying to get the name of the town changed back to Maya. President Chen Shui-bian recently expressed his support for this, which is not surprising considering that the current administration prefers to stress Taiwan’s historical links with just about anyplace but China. In recent years Taiwan’s ties with Austronesia have been receiving increasing attention.
I’m still trying to find out if “Maya” represents the proper spelling or if it’s merely a romanization of a Mandarinized form of the Bunun name. In Chinese characters this place is written 瑪雅鄉 (Mǎyǎ Xiāng / Maya Township). The characters 瑪雅 are also used for the Maya people of southern Mexico and northern Central America.
sources:
- Tribal names hold key to preserving Aboriginal cultures, Taipei Times, August 5, 2007
- Zǒngtǒng gǔlì yuánzhùmín xiāng-zhèn huífù chuántǒng míngchēng (總統鼓勵原住民鄉鎮回復傳統名稱), CNA, August 1, 2007
- President encourages indigenous townships to restore names, CNA via Taiwan Headlines, August 2, 2007
further reading: Pinyin News on aborigine names
Taiwan aborigines: education and media
The most recent issue of Taiwan Review has a number of articles about Taiwan’s aborigines. I found two of them particularly interesting: Giving Indigenous People a Voice, which discusses Taiwan Indigenous TV, a television station established in July 2005 for Taiwan’s aboriginal population, and Whither Aboriginal Education?, which consists of excerpts from a panel discussion.
From “Giving Indigenous People a Voice”:
[T]he station is struggling with how to broadcast to people from 13 tribes, each of which speak a different language and have widely different customs.
“It’s very difficult to be fair,” says station director Masao, himself from the Atayal tribe. “Out of 13 tribes, which tribe’s language do you choose to broadcast in? So we have no choice but to use Mandarin” (the language of the majority Han Chinese population). “Some Atayal viewers complain there’s too little Atayal news. Of course it would be best if every tribe had its own channel, but that’s impossible.”
Another problem the station faces is finding skilled aboriginal staff, especially reporters and technicians, and those who can speak their own tribal language, even if not fluently….
Kolas, who grew up in the city with no aboriginal friends, recalls realizing the importance of being able to speak her own language when she first switched from being a mainstream reporter to being a reporter covering aboriginal issues for TITV.
“I realized that, just because I was an aborigine, it didn’t mean I could get interviews with aborigines. Without speaking their language, it was very hard for me to win their trust and interview them,” she says. She is now studying the Amis language.
Less than 5 percent of aboriginal children can speak their own language, Masao estimates, but like many things concerning aborigines, no solid statistics are available. To encourage the learning of one’s own language, the station has now made it an employment requirement….
The desuetude of aboriginal languages is such a problem that the TV station is trying to devote more airtime to tribal language broadcasting. Throughout the day, tribal folk tales are told in tribal languages, although the programs are generally short, resembling commercial breaks. Once a week, there are news programs in a select number of tribal tongues. The main programs, however, including news and cooking shows, are mostly broadcast in Mandarin, unlike another Taiwanese minority channel, Hakka TV, which broadcasts almost entirely in the Hakka language.
From “Whither Aboriginal Education?”:
Sun Ta-chuan: The truth is that many of the tribes have been integrated into modern society and traditional skills such as building a slate house or building a canoe no longer exist. Children of indigenous families that have moved to the cities no longer speak their mother tongues and nor do many of those who still live in the tribal areas. The thing is that we cannot force aboriginal children to shoulder the responsibility of keeping their cultures alive. The question is, should all aboriginal children receive education about the indigenous peoples from preschool to college, or are a couple of hours a week enough? I think the way to go is a “limited two-track” system, where students are free to change track between a complete aboriginal education and regular education.
Teachers are another problem. When the College of Indigenous Studies was set up, we were hoping that it could be equipped with aboriginal faculty members but in reality most of them are not. The standard for recruiting faculty members was the same as any other university [i.e., Ph.D.s are required for most faculty positions]. But where can you find someone with a doctorate to teach an indigenous language? We complained, but to no avail. In fact, we did not know what to teach the students, because there were no textbooks about aboriginal cultures and we had to compile our own teaching materials. Currently in tribal primary and high schools, people who have completed regular normal education and receive some hours of extra courses can teach indigenous culture. That is way too easy to qualify a teacher.
The problem is that we have been making a lot of effort in education for indigenous people, but there has been little done in the way of education about them. If we are determined to work on the latter, we need to invest a lot more. The government has actually invested a lot in local education, but it is mostly about Taiwanese and Hakka cultures. From my point of view, aboriginal languages and cultures are in much greater danger than these two, but are not receiving the same level of investment. There are millions who speak Taiwanese and Hakka, but each and every one of Taiwan’s indigenous languages is in immediate danger of disappearing. Take my people, the Pinuyumayans, there are only 10,000 of us and fewer than 2,000 speak our mother tongue.
Take the preservation of languages. The government has spent considerable time and money on this. Normally, you need to have a romanization system for the languages to be able to compile the teaching materials and then you establish the tribal language certification system. But the government started to issue certificates before the romanization system came out in 2006. The same goes for the teaching materials. The fundamental reason for this waste of money and time is the lack of a policy goal, and consequently that of a blueprint and efficient process for its execution. Facing these problems, I think we had better slow down and rethink carefully our goals and priorities.
Wang Ming-huey: The key problem, I think, is that the education provided for aborigines diverges from the work of cultural transmission. Though the Indigenous Peoples Basic Act and the Education Act for Indigenous Peoples are made to promote indigenous ethnic cultures, neither the goal nor the nature of the education to be given the indigenous peoples is clearly stated therein. We hope to change the past experience of being assimilated into the rulers’ cultures–first the Japanese and then the Kuomintang, but we find no way.
Establishing a university for ethnic communities is indicative of what the new law attempts to achieve. But the curriculum taught at the College of Indigenous Studies covers such subjects as anthropology, sociology, ethnology, or political science, and Mandarin is still the language used to teach, which is no different from teaching at regular colleges. Intrinsically, we are still implementing the assimilation policy. The indigenous people have to master Mandarin, in order to learn about their tribes, whereas the knowledge still alive in the tribe is ignored.
source: Taiwan Review, Vol. 57 No. 8, August 2007
additional resources:
- 24-hour TV station devoted to aborigines in Taiwan, International Herald Tribune, July 3, 2007
- Taiwan Indigenous TV (English)
- Taiwan Indigenous TV (Mandarin)
- Hakka TV