Category Archives: linguistics

Don’t use rare characters in teaching Taiwanese: official

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It looks like some standardization might slowly be coming to the teaching in Taiwan of Taiwanese and Hakka. Beginning with the 2007-2008 school year, material from publishing companies for teaching “local languages” (i.e., Taiwanese, Hakka, and, sometimes, the languages of Taiwan’s tribes) must first pass inspection by the Ministry of Education. The ministry should have its own teaching materials ready by the 2009-2010 school year. Schools will be free to choose among textbooks from publishers or from the ministry.

Specifically, publishers should by all means avoid dredging up obscure Chinese characters to use for Taiwanese morphemes, Pan Wen-zhong, a high-ranking official with the ministry, said on Monday. There are easier ways to read and write the language than with such characters, especially when teaching elementary school students, he noted.

As much as I agree with this, it is still probably a case of too little, too late.

國小鄉土語言教材怪字連篇、拼音混亂的情況，很多家長教起孩子既頭痛、又氣 憤。教育部國教司長潘文忠表示，96學年度起，民間編印的鄉土語言教材，一律要 先經過審查，才能選用，一些罕見的怪字可望從教材中消失。

教育部國語推行委員會也已經著手編印閩南語、客家語教材，預計98學年度開始， 學校教閩南語或客語，就可以選用部編本教材。

在審定本和部編本教材還沒有出來之前，潘文忠呼籲老師使用既有教材教鄉土語言 時，盡量不要教、不要用罕見漢字。尤其是小學生，他強調應該使用「老師教過、 學生學過」的字辭，像蟑螂就用蟑螂，不必刻意教閩南語發音的新辭，更不要用罕 見字。

國小民編本鄉土語言教材怪字連篇的情況，多年來在立法院和地方議會經常被批 評，連官員都被考倒，家長更是苦不堪言。光是蟑螂、蒼蠅這些日常生活中常用 辭，不同教材，蟑螂就有「虼」、「假裁縫」等不同寫法，蒼蠅也有「真司公」、 「呼神」、「胡蠅」、「互蠅」等用法。

source: xiāngtǔyǔ jiàocái yào xiàn shěn — bùnéng yòng qíguài Hànzì (鄉語教材要先審 不能用怪字), August 27, 2006

English tips from the school formerly known as Peking University

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old logo of Peking UniversityPeking University, China’s most prestigious school, has announced that it is planning a change. First, the school’s logo will be redesigned. The original was made by Lu Xun, who was apparently not just a great writer and an impassioned advocate of romanization and critic of Chinese characters but also an artist.

Significantly, the new logo design will feature a different English name: the University of Beijing. This is especially interesting because “Peking University” had officially remained as such in English despite China’s official adoption of Hanyu Pinyin.

Moreover, “Beijing University,” which would match the Mandarin Chinese name of Beijing Daxue (English and Mandarin have much the same syntax), is not to be used except in informal contexts. Instead, the name is to be the “University of Beijing.” That is, according to the school, because in formal English names the place name has to come after “college” or “university”:

Běijīng Dàxué zài shuōmíng zhōng zhǐchū, gēnjù Yīngyǔ yǔfǎ guīzé, dìmíng zuòwéi xíngróngcí de xuéxiào míngzi wǎngwǎng zhǐshì yòngyú kǒuyǔ de jiǎnchēng, ér zài zhèngshì de shūmiànyǔ zhōng zé yīnggāi jiāng dìmíng zuòwéi míngcí zhìyú “xuéyuàn” huò “dàxué” zhīhòu.
(北京大学在说明中指出，根据英语语法规则，地名作为形容词的校名往往只是用于口语的简称，而在正式的书面语中则应将地名作为名词置于“学院”或“大学”之后。)

Danwei, where I first spotted this story, has helpfully translated one delightfully arch reaction to this English lesson.

Evidently the professors at PKU’s English department will have to give new names to the following British and American universities according to PKU’s English grammar rules:

Princeton University, New York University, Boston University, Syracuse University, Lancaster University, Coventry University, Cranfield University, Bournemouth University, Keele University, Middlesex University, Roehampton University, Athabasca University, Brandon University….

Would the leaders of PKU please inform the leaders of those universities the next time they meet with them? Some, like like Princeton University, New York University and such, are considerably more famous than PKU. Try to have them follow PKU’s English grammar rule first, and then it can become a wordwide rule of English grammar, and PKU can have a world-leading innovation.

Heh.

Before I close, here are a couple more points:

  • Peking is not the Wade-Giles spelling for what in Hanyu Pinyin is Beijing. (The Wade-Giles spelling for Beijing is Pei-ching, which never caught on in English.)
  • The correct way to write 北大 in Pinyin is Bei-Da, not Bei Da or Beida. Short forms of proper nouns take a hyphen, according to the rules for hyphens in Pinyin.

sources:

What Chinese characters can’t do-be-do-be-do

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It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that “shuing”!

David Moser uses the question of how would someone scat sing in Mandarin Chinese to start off an exploration of what Chinese characters can’t do well (and what Pinyin can).

Here’s an excerpt:

English has numerous conventions for representing casual oral speech: “Are you kiddin’ me?” “Whaddya wanna do tonight, Marty?” “I’m gettin’ outta here!” “Gimme that.” And so on. Such spelling conventions have been employed in the literature of most alphabetic traditions for hundreds of years, and are often an invaluable link to the vernaculars of the past. English-language writers from Mark Twain to James Joyce have used the flexibility of the alphabet to vividly re-created various speech worlds in their works. It is, in fact, hard to imagine how much of the literature of the West could have been produced without recourse to such devices.

Chinese characters, by contrast, cannot reproduce the equivalent elisions and blends of colloquial Chinese, except in rare cases, and only at the level of the syllable…. The result is that China effectively has no tradition of realistically notating vernacular speech. Wenyanwen ???, classical Chinese, exerted a virtual stranglehold on written literature up until the early twentieth century, and even then, most writers did not attempt to accurately represent common speech, despite the appearance of an occasional Lao She or Ba Jin. But even if such writers had so desired, working within the Chinese system of writing, they could never have notated the sounds of the language around them with the same kind of vivid verisimilitude of the following examples in English….

Read the whole article, here on Pinyin Info: Some Things Chinese Characters Can’t Do-Be-Do-Be-Do.

And if you haven’t seen it already, be sure to check out another work by Moser: Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard, which is one of Pinyin Info’s most popular readings.

Can the Taiwanese language survive?

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In the latest issue of Sino-Platonic Papers Deborah Beaser examines the chances for the survival of Taiwanese (a.k.a. Hoklo, Minnan, Southern Min, etc.).

The introduction to her paper, The Outlook for Taiwanese Language Preservation (432 KB PDF), is a good summary of the whole work:

In this paper I will discuss the history of the Taiwanese language on the island of Taiwan, and explore its potential to continue into the future. I predict that over the next 50 years Taiwanese, as a language, will become increasingly marginalized, and that the recent increase in desire to promote Taiwanese is purely the short-term reaction of the generation of Taiwanese who went through periods of linguistic and cultural suppression. This is not to say that I believe it will completely disappear. To the contrary, I believe the Taiwanese language will remain as part of a cultural legacy, but how large that legacy will be depends on whether or not today’s Taiwanese people are able to standardize a script and computer inputting system that will preserve it in a written form and open up its domain of usage.