Taiwan’s Ministry of Education has put online its new Taiwanese (Hoklo) dictionary, the Táiwān Mǐnnányǔ chángyòngcí cídiǎn (giving the Mandarin name) (臺灣閩南語常用詞辭典). The preliminary version, which is to be amended in six months, contains 16,000 entries.
I especially welcome the section on Taiwan place-names.
further reading: MOE launches first Hoklo-language online dictionary, Taipei Times, October 20, 2008 [Note: The headline’s use of “first” is almost certainly incorrect.]
Under the new administration of President Ma Ying-jeou, Taiwan’s Ministry of Education has worked out its plan for teaching pretty much everything … except for Hoklo (the language better known in these parts as “Taiwanese”). There have been a lot of arguments. How early to start teaching the language? How much should be taught? Use romanization? Use zhuyin? May teachers use any kind of soap or only special kinds when washing out the mouths of students speaking the language? (OK, they don’t do that last one anymore.)
So the ministry has decided to appoint a new committee to review such questions. Decisions on these issues are expected in six months or so.
My guess would be that the ministry is going to pack the new committee with conservatives who will see to it that romanization is avoided or at least belittled, that little of the language will actually be taught, and that students will not be tested seriously on the subject. But I’ll be happy if I’m wrong.
sources:
From the way the U.S. media talk about the boom in Mandarin classes, it’s easy to get the impression that Mandarin is about to become the most studied language in the United States. So I offer the following overdue reality check.
The data come from the results of a large survey of foreign-language enrollments in U.S. post-secondary schools. The survey was conducted by the Modern Language Association. I started work on this post when the results were released in November 2007; but, well, I got distracted.
This post has lots of tables and figures, so for those who don’t want to scan through everything I offer some basic points up front.
A few summary remarks of my own:
OK, now on to some details.
Look below at the growth for American Sign Language since 1990. If Mandarin had had that sort of growth (4,820 percent!) the pundits would no doubt be telling us that the Chinese had already taken over the planet and were going to rule the entire galaxy within the next decade. (And don’t get me started about the supposed Mandarin in Serenity/Firefly.) But American Sign Language just doesn’t seem to get the same sort of respect, despite the fact that it still has more than 50 percent more enrollments than Mandarin. Arabic, which has also had a much faster growth rate than that of Mandarin, hasn’t received the same level of hype either.
| Enrollments | 1990 | 2006 | % Growth 2002-06 | % Growth 1990-2006 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| American Sign Language | 1,602 | 78,829 | 29.7 | 4820.7 |
| Arabic | 3,475 | 23,974 | 126.5 | 589.9 |
| Korean | 2,286 | 7,145 | 37.1 | 212.6 |
| Mandarin | 19,490 | 51,582 | 51.0 | 164.7 |
| Hebrew | 12,995 | 23,752 | 4.2 | 82.8 |
| Portuguese | 6,211 | 10,267 | 22.4 | 65.3 |
| Italian | 49,699 | 78,368 | 22.6 | 57.7 |
| Spanish | 533,944 | 822,985 | 10.3 | 54.1 |
| Japanese | 45,717 | 66,605 | 27.5 | 45.7 |
| French | 272,472 | 206,426 | 2.2 | -24.2 |
| German | 133,348 | 94,264 | 3.5 | -29.3 |
| Russian | 44,626 | 24,845 | 3.9 | -44.3 |
| Total | 1,125,865 | 1,489,042 | 12.7 | 32.3 |
| Change between Surveys | 1995-98 | 1998-2002 | 2002-06 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Spanish | 8.3% | 13.7% | 10.3% |
| French | -3.1% | 1.5% | 2.2% |
| German | -7.5% | 2.3% | 3.5% |
| American Sign Language | 165.3% | 432.2% | 29.7% |
| Italian | 12.6% | 29.6% | 22.6% |
| Japanese | -3.5% | 21.1% | 27.5% |
| Mandarin | 7.5% | 20.0% | 51.0% |
| Russian | -3.8% | 0.5% | 3.9% |
| Arabic | 23.9% | 92.3% | 126.5% |
| Hebrew * | 20.6% | 44.0% | 4.2% |
| Portuguese | 6.0% | 21.1% | 22.4% |
| Korean | 34.0% | 16.3% | 37.1% |
| Total | 5.0% | 16.6% | 12.7% |
* Modern and Biblical Hebrew combined
Below: Russian may not have the top number of enrollments, but it certainly has some motivated students, given the high numbers of them in advanced courses.
| Intro Enr. | Advanced Enr. | Total Enrollment | Ratio of Intro Enr. to Advanced Enr. | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Russian | 17,527 | 6,569 | 24,096 | 2.67:1 |
| Portuguese | 7,387 | 2,422 | 9,809 | 3.05:1 |
| German | 72,434 | 18,758 | 91,192 | 3.86:1 |
| French | 160,736 | 40,927 | 201,663 | 3.93:1 |
| Korean | 5,511 | 1,397 | 6,908 | 3.94:1 |
| Greek, Ancient | 13,250 | 3,176 | 16,426 | 4.17:1 |
| Mandarin | 41,193 | 9,262 | 50,455 | 4.45:1 |
| Spanish | 669,432 | 142,602 | 812,034 | 4.69:1 |
| Japanese | 55,161 | 10,585 | 65,746 | 5.21:1 |
| Latin | 26,787 | 4,383 | 31,170 | 6.11:1 |
| Hebrew, Modern | 7,665 | 1,250 | 8,915 | 6.13:1 |
| Arabic | 20,571 | 2,463 | 23,034 | 8.35:1 |
| Italian | 69,757 | 7,593 | 77,350 | 9.19:1 |
| Hebrew, Biblical | 7,854 | 705 | 8,559 | 11.14:1 |
| American Sign Language | 72,694 | 5,249 | 77,943 | 13.85:1 |
| Other languages | 27,836 | 3,478 | 31,314 | 8.00:1 |
| Total | 1,275,795 | 260,819 | 1,536,614 | 4.89:1 |
One thing I find particularly troubling is that the number of graduate students studying Mandarin has fallen. (Please click on the link in the previous sentence, since the relevant table is too wide to fit on this page.) The much-ballyhooed but also much-deserved increase in students studying Mandarin has all been at the undergraduate level. Given that the grad enrollment as a percentage of total enrollment for Mandarin is about the same as that for French (2.63 percent and 2.73 percent, respectively) it might appear that Mandarin has simply reached a “normal” ratio in this regard. But native speakers of English generally need much more time to master Mandarin than to master French. Simply put, four years, say, of post-secondary study of French provides students with a much greater level of fluency than four years of post-secondary study of Mandarin.
Also, there is a great deal more work that needs to be done in terms of translations from Mandarin. I do not at all mean to belittle the work being done in French — or in any other language. In fact it pains me that the MLA’s list of languages being studied included neither Old French nor Provençal, both of which I have studied and love dearly. I just mean that Mandarin has historically been underrepresented in U.S. universities given the number of speakers it has and its body of texts that have not yet been translated into English. U.S. universities need to be producing many more qualified grad students who can handle this specialized work. And right now, unfortunately, that’s not happening.
| Two-Year Colleges | Undergrad Programs | Grad Programs | Total | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Language | 2002 | 2006 | 2002 | 2006 | 2002 | 2006 | 2002 | 2006 |
| Cantonese | 47 | 96 | 128 | 82 | 5 | 0 | 180 | 178 |
| Literary Sinitic | 0 | 0 | 56 | 101 | 18 | 12 | 74 | 113 |
| Japanese, Classical | 0 | 0 | 8 | 23 | 11 | 7 | 19 | 30 |
| Taiwanese | 0 | 0 | 34 | 21 | 13 | 0 | 47 | 21 |
| Tibetan | 0 | 0 | 43 | 56 | 35 | 64 | 78 | 120 |
| Tibetan, Classical | 0 | 0 | 8 | 11 | 20 | 33 | 28 | 44 |
The figures in the table above are probably too low. Literary Sinitic (“classical Chinese”) is probably especially underrepresented because often too little differentiation is given between it and modern standard Mandarin. But at least the numbers can provide minimum figures.
| Language | Ratio of Intro Enr. in 2-Year Schools to Intro Enr. in 4-Year Schools |
|---|---|
| Greek, Ancient | 0.00:1 |
| Hebrew, Biblical | 0.01:1 |
| Latin | 0.04:1 |
| Hebrew, Modern | 0.07:1 |
| Portuguese | 0.11:1 |
| Russian | 0.15:1 |
| German | 0.20:1 |
| Italian | 0.23:1 |
| French | 0.24:1 |
| Arabic | 0.26:1 |
| Mandarin | 0.26:1 |
| Korean | 0.28:1 |
| Japanese | 0.39:1 |
| Spanish | 0.49:1 |
| American Sign Language | 1.47:1 |
| Other languages | 0.24:1 |
American Sign Language sticks out here as the only language that more people take at the introductory level at junior colleges than at universities. Roughly twice as many people take introductory Spanish in universities as at junior colleges. Introductory Japanese classes are surprisingly popular at the two-year college level, well above the level for introductory Mandarin, though Mandarin is not unpopular itself.
| Language | 1998 | 2002 | 2006 | % Change 2002–06 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hindi/Urdu | 1314 | 2009 | 2683 | 33.55 |
| Vietnamese | 899 | 2236 | 2485 | 11.14 |
| Tagalog/Filipino | 794 | 1142 | 1569 | 37.39 |
| Sanskrit | 363 | 487 | 607 | 24.64 |
| Hmong | 15 | 283 | 402 | 42.05 |
| Thai | 272 | 330 | 307 | -6.97 |
| Indonesian | 223 | 225 | 301 | 33.78 |
| Samoan | 207 | 201 | 280 | 39.30 |
| Cantonese | 39 | 180 | 178 | -1.11 |
| Tibetan | 80 | 78 | 120 | 53.85 |
| Literary Sinitic | 32 | 74 | 113 | 52.70 |
| Pashto | – | 14 | 103 | 635.71 |
| Punjabi | 32 | 99 | 103 | 4.04 |
| Total | 4270 | 7358 | 9251 | 25.73 |
Although more U.S. postsecondary students are studying languages other than English than ever before, that’s unfortunately not because U.S. students as a whole have finally embraced the study of languages. Rather, there are simply more students now. Relatively speaking, enrollments in foreign languages are much lower than they were 30 years ago.
If “ancient” foreign languages such as Latin and Ancient Greek were included in the graph, the imbalance between the 1960s and the present in foreign-language enrollments would be even greater.
source: Enrollments in Languages Other Than English in United States Institutions of Higher Education, Fall 2006 (PDF), MLA, November 13, 2007
Imagine taking everyone in the United States with the family name of Johnson, Williams, Jones, Brown, Davis, Miller, Wilson, Moore, Taylor, or Anderson … and giving them all the new family name of “Smith.” Then add to the Smiths everyone surnamed Thomas, Jackson, White, Harris, Martin, Thompson, Garcia, Martinez, Robinson, Clark, Rodriguez, Lewis, Lee, Walker, Hall, Allen, Young, Hernandez, King, Wright, and Lopez. Those are, in descending order beginning with Smith, the 32 most common family names in the United States. It takes all of those names together to reach the same frequency that the name “Chen” (Hoklo: Tân) has in Taiwan.
Chen covers 10.93 percent of the population here, according to figures released by Chih-Hao Tsai based on the recent release of the names of the 81,422 people who took Taiwan’s college entrance exam this year.
By way of additional contrast, Smith, the most common family name in the United States, covers just 1.00 percent of the population there.
In Taiwan, the 10 most common family names cover half (50.22 percent) of the population. Covering the same percentage in the United States requires the top 1,742 names there. And covering the same percentage as Taiwan’s top 25 names (74.17 percent) requires America’s top 13,425 surnames.
So if you’re just getting started in Mandarin, consider that you’ll get a lot of mileage out of memorizing the tones for the top ten names.
| family name (Mandarin form) | spelling usually seen in Taiwan | percent of total | cumulative percentage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Chén | Chen | 10.93% | 10.93% |
| Lín | Lin | 8.36% | 19.29% |
| Huáng | Huang | 6.06% | 25.35% |
| Zhāng | Chang | 5.39% | 30.74% |
| Lǐ | Li, Lee | 5.20% | 35.94% |
| Wáng | Wang | 4.20% | 40.14% |
| Wú | Wu | 4.03% | 44.17% |
| Liú | Liu | 3.18% | 47.36% |
| Cài | Tsai | 2.86% | 50.22% |
| Yáng | Yang | 2.64% | 52.86% |
| Xǔ | Hsu | 2.32% | 55.18% |
| Zhèng | Cheng | 1.86% | 57.05% |
| Xiè | Hsieh | 1.77% | 58.82% |
| Qiū | Chiu | 1.50% | 60.32% |
| Guō | Kuo | 1.48% | 61.79% |
| Zēng | Tseng | 1.45% | 63.24% |
| Hóng | Hung | 1.40% | 64.64% |
| Liào | Liao | 1.38% | 66.02% |
| Xú | Hsu | 1.33% | 67.35% |
| Lài | Lai | 1.32% | 68.66% |
| Zhōu | Chou | 1.24% | 69.90% |
| Yè | Yeh | 1.18% | 71.08% |
| Sū | Su | 1.17% | 72.25% |
| Jiāng | Chiang | 0.97% | 73.22% |
| Lǚ | Lu | 0.94% | 74.17% |
For those wanting the Taiwanese (Hoklo) forms of these names, see Tailingua’s list of Common Family Names in Taiwan.
On the other hand, common given names have much greater variety in Taiwan than in America, especially in the case of males. In the United States the top 10 names for males cover 23.185 percent of the male population, and the top 10 names for females cover 10.703 percent of the population. In Taiwan, however, the top 10 given names (male and female together) cover just 1.49 percent of the population.
sources:
further reading:
If the Chen Shui-bian administration had bothered to do much of anything really useful to promote Taiwanese, especially as a written language, then we probably wouldn’t be faced with crap like this.
President-elect Ma Ying-jeou met last week with Chen Fang-ming (陳芳明), the chairman of the Graduate Institute of Taiwanese Literature at National Chengchi University (Zhèng-Dà). Although Professor Chen is a former DPP official and supported Frank Hsieh in the recent election, the two reportedly found much to agree on, such as that the idea that Chinese characters are all that are needed for literature in Taiwanese; romanization and other such phonetic spellings, they agreed, aren’t necessary.
Zǒngtǒng dāngxuǎnrén Mǎ Yīngjiǔ jīntiān bàihuì Zhèng-Dà Táiwān wénxué yánjiūsuǒ suǒzhǎng Chén Fāngmíng, tā biǎoshì liǎng rén jīntiān tándào běntǔhuà, zhuǎnxíng zhèngyì, běntǔ wénxué, dàxué píng jiàn děng yìtí, lìng tā yǒu “kōnggǔzúyīn” zhī gǎn, liǎng rén hěn duō kànfǎ dōu bùmóu’érhé, lìrú Chén Fāngmíng rènwéi zhǐyòng Zhōngwén xiě, Héluòhuà niàn, jiùshì Táiyǔ wénxué, bùyīdìng kèyì yào yòng Luómǎzì, yīn lái pīn.
This is certainly discouraging though not unexpected news for romanization supporters — and for those whose idea of Taiwanese lit isn’t stuck in the Qing dynasty or even earlier. But there’s always hope that this is another of those times in which Ma is simply persuaded by or agreeing with whatever is in front of him; and he may change his mind later. Regardless, though, it doesn’t augur well for a modern Taiwanese literature or for government work on — much less promotion of — romanization over the next four years.
source and further reading:
The latest new release from Sino-Platonic Papers is one that I think will be of particular interest to readers of Pinyin News. It’s an extensive study of not only the attitudes of speakers of Cantonese and Mandarin toward the status of Cantonese but also their beliefs about its future, especially in Hong Kong: Language or Dialect–or Topolect? A Comparison of the Attitudes of Hong Kongers and Mainland Chinese towards the Status of Cantonese (650 KB PDF), by Julie M. Groves.
This study reports on a comparative survey of three groups of Chinese: 53 Hong Kong Cantonese speakers, 18 Mainland Chinese Cantonese speakers, and 72 Mainland Chinese Putonghua speakers. It was found that the Putonghua speakers held more ‘classic’ views, the majority seeing Cantonese as a dialect. In contrast, only just over half the Hong Kongers and two-fifths the Mainland Cantonese speakers considered it clearly a dialect, while one-third of all respondents favoured a mid-point classification. The differing perspectives held by the groups can be traced to their different political and linguistic situations, which touch issues of identity.
The author notes, “The uncertainties in classification also reflect a problem with terminology. The Chinese word usually translated dialect, fangyan (方言), does not accurately match the English word dialect.” Groves recommends the adoption of Victor Mair’s proposed English word for fangyan: topolect.
Although this focuses on the dialect vs. language debate, it covers much more than that. Those being surveyed were also asked questions such as:
The results of the study may also prove useful for those interested in the future of other languages of China and Taiwan, such as Taiwanese and Shanghainese.
Here are a couple of the many graphs found in the study.
HK Cant = Hong Kong Cantonese speakers
MCant = mainland Cantonese speakers
MPTH = mainland speakers of Mandarin (“Pǔtōnghuà“)
I’m so far behind on posts that when Taffy of Tailingua sent this to me people in Taipei probably really were wearing short sleeves. They’re certainly not wearing so little now, with the cold, damp, miserable weather we’ve been having lately. Oh well, at least it’s better than what so many people have been having to endure in China. I hope Pinyin News readers there are keeping warm and didn’t get stuck in some transportation-related hell.
This poster on the back of a bus is for Taiwan’s presidential campaign.
It reads:
Táiwān ei lìliang
Shìjiè dǎ tōngguānMǎ Yīngjiǔ — Xiāo Wàncháng
.
台灣ㄟ力量
世界打通關
馬英九 蕭萬長
It’s hard to put this into English that makes sense. Perhaps “Taiwan shows its power to the world.” The idea is something like “Taiwan can overcome all obstacles.” It doesn’t strike me as a good slogan. But maybe I’m missing something.
The interesting part is that it has Taiwanese written with zhuyin (bopomofo): ㄟ (ei). But the ㄟ is basically just for show, since it doesn’t serve any linguistic purpose that the expected Chinese character — 的 (de), indicating the possessive — wouldn’t provide. The sign is still in Mandarin. (Dǎ tōngguān, for example, is not a Taiwanese expression, according to several native speakers I questioned about this.)
For those who don’t know, Mǎ Yīngjiǔ and Xiāo Wàncháng comprise the KMT’s ticket for next month’s presidential election.
Both Ma and Xiao use unusual spellings for the way they write their names in the Roman alphabet: Ma Ying-jeou and Vincent Siew, respectively.
The “Ying-jeou” of Ma’s name gives the appearance of Gwoyeu Romatzyh. But in that system his name would be “Maa Ing-jeou.”
“Siew” for Hanyu Pinyin’s Xiāo indicates that the source is likely a language other than Mandarin. But Taiwanese isn’t it, though Siew, unlike Ma, was born here. Because of that spelling, many foreigners in Taiwan pronounce his family name like the English word “shoe.” “Vincent” is of course an “English name” rather than a romanization of his birth name.
As I’m fond of pointing out, perhaps the only prominent Taiwan politician whose name is recognizably Hanyu Pinyin and only Hanyu Pinyin is President Chen Shui-bian, the man most responsible for seeing that Taiwan did not adopt Hanyu Pinyin during his tenure.
In addition to skewering Tongyong Pinyin in his latest column, Johnny Neihu reports on a new Web site from the Taipei City Government with bizarre romanization and completely crappy English.
However, it hasn’t taken long for things [in Taipei’s English-language environment] to start deteriorating — 11 months to be precise. Mayor Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌) has already begun to make his mark, if the English moniker of the metropolis’ most recent culinary fiesta is anything to go by.
I am talking about Taipei’s “Newrow Mian” Festival, which, for those ignorant of Mayor Hau’s personal Romanization system, means beef noodles. “Newrow”? It sounds more like the sort of French-accented Mandarin you would expect from a badly congested Inspector Clouseau if they ever made The Pink Panther in Beijing. But then what can you expect from a mayor with a master’s degree in food science?
Any laowai getting into a cab and asking for a lift to the nearest “newrow” store will no doubt be greeted with a look more vacant than that of Hau at a council meeting.
My guess is that the city government brokered some sort of deal on purchasing livestock for the festival with “La New” of shoes fame. The city got the right to use La New’s dodgy transliteration of the Mandarin word for cow, and so the carcasses were split, with the shoe company getting the leather and the noodle festival getting the beef, so to speak.
But the title of the noodle extravaganza was not the only questionable translation circulating last week. One of the festival’s contests was named the “International Teamwork Intercourse Competition.” What that has to do with beef noodles is anyone’s guess, but I bet the tickets sold pretty fast.
The Web site was set up to promote a “festival” for one of Taipei’s standard foods: niúròumiàn (beef noodle soup / 牛肉麵).
This is yet another example of Taiwan trying to promote its English-language environment by using machine-generated Chinglish, and by coming up with Anglicizations that don’t work as romanizations of Mandarin and mean nothing to local Mandarin speakers. Although the sound of the English word “row” is not too far from that of the Mandarin ròu, “new” for niú is a much bigger stretch. In fact, “new” is probably closer to nǚ (女), meaning female, which would give us a female flesh festival (nǚ ròu jié). Maybe the organizers could work in that International Teamwork Intercourse Competition after all. Now that would likely be a successful tourist draw, albeit the wrong sort.
This gives me an excuse to toss in something for lagniappe: niúròu chǎng (牛肉場), which literally means “beef area” but which is actually a slang term for a place with strippers — a place to see “meat” on display. (Compare this with English, in which “beefcake” refers to men, not women.) Even within the not-so-high-class world of strip joints, niurou chang are relatively low class.
According to the 2005 Mandarin-language article linked to below, niurou chang began in Taiwan in 1984. The article also provides an etymolgy, though perhaps an invented one.
Biǎoyǎn de nèiróng dōu gēn niúròu wúguān, wèihé jiào niúròu chǎng?
Yuánlái niúròu de Táiyǔ jiù zuò “yǒu ròu,” suǒyǐ lù “ròu,” mài ròu de suǒzài jiù jiào “niúròu chǎng.” Zhèige bù mài ròu què jiào “niúròu chǎng de sèqíng chǎngsuǒ.”
This states that such places were originally called in Taiwanese “have meat,” which sounds like “reveal flesh.” Perhaps Taffy, A-giâu, or someone else who knows Taiwanese can comment.
Just in case the Taipei City Government should develop a sense of shame and fix the English on this Web site (ha!), click on the image for a screen shot of the first page of the English site.
sources: