Category Archives: literacy

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!

sources:

Only 5 percent in China have ‘habit of reading books’: report

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Some in China have proclaimed that the country has a “reading crisis” (yuèdú wēijī / 阅读危机).

Only 5 percent of the 1.3 billion Chinese population has a habit of reading books, according to a report released by the China Publishing Research Institute in 2005.

Xi [Shu, a member of the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference and a board chairman of a publishing company based in Beijing,] argued frequent use of the Internet can lead to people’s easy satisfaction with a smattering of knowledge without deep thinking.

I haven’t been able to find the original of the 2005 report, so I don’t know how “habit” is defined, or even “books.” (What percent of those with the “habit,” for example, read primarily comic books?) And are students excluded? Regardless, it doesn’t sound good.

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the Santa/Dongxiang

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Several stories have come out in the past couple of weeks on the Santa (or Sarta), reportedly the least literate of China’s 56 official “national minorities.” They’re more often referred to as the “Dongxiang,” a Mandarin name that has been applied to them by the Han.

The stories are interesting in themselves. But I was struck most by an odd detail:

In grammar school, the curriculum is in Chinese and many kids drop out. Government statistics show that the average person in Dongxiang has only 1.1 years of schooling. Because of the cost, many families never even send children to school, particularly daughters….

The challenge of trying to teach Chinese to Dongxiang children has attracted international aid groups to Dongxiang. The British government is funding a large training program for teachers.

Another pilot program, funded by the U.S.-based Ford Foundation, has created a bilingual curriculum using a Dongxiang-Chinese dictionary developed by Chen and other scholars. That program has already produced a jump in test scores but is currently in search of more funding.

British and American groups go to China to help teach Mandarin to people there? That can’t be right, can it?

I looked on the Ford Foundation’s Web site. The foundation’s unit on education, sexuality, and religion (?!) gave a US$30,000 grant in 2004 “for a pilot project using bilingual education in Dongxiang language and standard Chinese to reduce school drop-out rates.” So I think what’s happening is that the Western groups are helping expand education in Santa rather than in Mandarin, at least for a few years, since the latter language is what teachers had been teaching in.

For years, many Chinese scholars assumed the Dongxiang descended from the Mongol soldiers in Genghis Khan’s army who eventually settled in Gansu during the 13th century, when the Mongols ruled China under the Yuan dynasty. But their exact origins were never fully known, an uncertainty that fed an inferiority complex.

“A man once asked me, ‘Where do the Dongxiang come from?'” said Ma Zhiyong, a historian who grew up in the county but moved to the provincial capital, Lanzhou, as a teenager. “I was 18 or 19 and couldn’t answer the question. I was ashamed.”

Ma decided to look for an answer. Over several years, he scoured research libraries in Gansu, talked to other scholars and studied old maps. He found that some Dongxiang villages shared names with places in Central Asian countries like Uzbekistan. He also found shared customs: He said peasants in Uzbekistan and Dongxiang both learn to cut a slaughtered chicken into 13 pieces. And he observed that Dongxiang people described themselves as “sarta” — a term that once referred to Muslim traders in Central Asia.

He concluded that the story about Khan’s army was only half right. Some of the Dongxiang ancestors were Mongol soldiers. But many others were a diverse group of Middle Eastern and Central Asian craftsmen conscripted into the Mongol army during Khan’s famed western campaign. They brought several languages and many brought a strong belief in Islam. Ma concluded that generations of intermarriage, including with local Han Chinese and Tibetans, resulted in a new ethnic group and language.

The language, if a source of pride, is also blamed for Dongxiang’s educational shortcomings. The language is oral, so children never learn to read or write in their native tongue.

Hundreds of millions of people in China never learn to read or write in their native tongue. Instead, the Han Chinese are told they’re speaking merely a “dialect” and so must learn to read and write Mandarin. And everybody else is supposed to learn to read and write Mandarin, too.

Here’s part of the section on Santa from Robert Ramsey’s ever-useful The Languages of China:

The Santa language resembles its relative Dagur in many respects. It has preserved the initial h‘s of Middle Mongolian: hulan ‘red.’ (But long vowels have become short, as the originally long a in the second syllable of this word has done.) And, like Dagur, Santa has progressed noticeably toward an “open syllable” kind of structure — but by a slightly different process. Many consonants that once closed syllables, including r, have been lost in Santa. For example, Middle Mongolian bulag ‘spring’ has become bula; marghasi ‘tomorrow’ has become magashi. The consonants -l and -m have changed to -n. The result of these changes is that n is now the only consonant that closes syllables. In Santa the front vowels ö and ü have changed in pronunciation and are now not distinguished from o and u. Vowel harmony has been lost in the language. In Santa syntax, the genitive and the accusative are marked with the same particle.

More than likely, many of the changes that have taken place in Santa can be attributed to the centuries of contact that the speakers of this language have had with northern Chinese groups. The tendency toward an open syllable is typical of the Mandarin dialects, as is the change of final -m to -n. One particularly striking adaption to Chinese is the hybrid construction made in Santa using the Chinese copula shi ‘is.’ This copula is put into the sentence in Chinese syntactic order, between the nouns being equated; but the old Mongolian copula is also kept, appearing in its usual position at the end of the sentence. The result is a strange double-copula construction that is neither Chinese nor quite Mongolian. Here are two examples (the Chinese copula is given in small capitals):

Ene ki̵wan shi kienni we.
this youth is whose is
‘Whose boy is this?’
Bi kieliesen kun shi ene we.
I spoke person is this is
‘The person I was talking about is this one.’

Around 30 percent of the Santa vocabulary is reported to be borrowed from Chinese.

For more examples, see the final link below:

sources:

Taiwan’s first written language — in romanization

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About 80 percent of the “Sinkang Manuscripts” (新港文書) have been deciphered in the ongoing collaboration project between Academia Sinica‘s Institute of Taiwan History and Institute of History and Philology. These documents, in the language of the Siraya people, were written in a romanization system devised by the Dutch colonists in Taiwan in the seventeenth century. Although the Dutch were forced out of Taiwan in the 1660s, writing in this system continued for at least 150 years.

The name Siraya, however, has been applied to the people of that group only since the period of Japanese rule (1895-1945). It was derived from the group’s pronunciation of the word for “I.” The documents get their name from Sinkang Sia, the largest Siraya settlement near the Dutch stronghold Fort Zeelandia.

click for an image of the first page of the Book of Matthew in SirayaMost of the documents are records of land contracts and business transactions. Some are bilingual: in Siraya and Dutch, or Siraya and Chinese. One long bilingual document is a translation by the Dutch of the Book of Matthew.

One of the articles cited below states, “The orthography of the Sinkang Manuscripts also embodies a vestige of 17th-century Europe where the italic style of lettering was still unknown in Dutch and Germanic writings.” This sample, however, makes me wonder. Any paleographers or font specialists out there?

The manuscripts also show that some words were borrowed from Hoklo, the Sinitic language now often referred to as Taiwanese

a transcript of a Siraya document: transcript of bilingual Siraya, Chinese document

sources:

one woman’s writing in ‘symbolic code’

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A 70-year-old woman in Tainan, Taiwan, who can read relatively few Chinese characters has reportedly come up with her own “symbolic code” for writing the words to songs. I’d love to see it. Unfortunately, however, she is “afraid others might laugh” and so covers all her writing with white-out once she has memorized the song.

Tainan great-grandmother Lin Li Yuda, 70, wanted to learn some songs, but unfortunately she could not read. But she was determined to do so anyway, and now, eight years later, she has memorized over 100 songs and can flawlessly recall the words to even the longest of folk songs, which can run to 1700 words or more.

Lin worked as a laborer in the construction industry before retiring, carrying bricks and cement. Even this tough labor could not bow her. Eight years ago, she began to weaken, and decided to retire. She now works as a volunteer at the Nanhua Community. Lin heard that singing was good for exercising the abdomen and had other health benefits, so she began to learn songs from other elderly people.

Lin was illiterate, however, and the songbooks her teachers passed out were incomprehensible to her. She could only follow the sounds the others made. But Lin was not ready to give up. She thought long and hard, and came up with an idea: she would learn to write the songs down.

After she began, the whole world was Lin’s singing teacher. Now, whenever she has a moment, she grabs her songbook and asks people to recite the words to her one by one. At her age, her memory is not as good as it used to be, and sometimes she has to ask about a word several times. Lin says that at the beginning, she felt embarrassed about her shortcomings, but everyone was very patient with her, and willingly repeated the lyrics again and again until she learned them.

By relying only on learning from others, however, Lin was unable to remember the songs. So Lin took to making notes beside the words using her own “symbolic code.” Quite often, a song sheet of Lin’s will be a forest of red symbols. When she has learned the song, Lin quickly covers her notes with white-out, because, she says shamefacedly, she is “afraid others might laugh.”

Over the past eight years, Lin has memorized over 100 songs, and knows each one practically word for word….

The most difficult thing for Lin is songs with foreign words in them. One song, “The Butterfly Maid of Nagasaki,” has the Japanese phrase “chocho san” in it, and this nearly tripped Lin up. She says that the person who taught her the song had to repeat it many times before she mastered it. In fact, even Lin’s great-grandson, who is now in primary school, can act as her teacher. When she meets a character she doesn’t know, she rushes to ask someone so that she can make a note….

source: Illiterate great-grandmother memorizes songs using unique symbols, Taiwan Headlines translation of a story from United Daily News, February 23, 2006

home of romanization pioneer Lu Zhuangzhang found

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The birthplace of Lu Zhuangzhang (盧戇章/卢戆章) (1854-1928), a pioneering writing reformer, has recently been identified in Xiamen, China.

Locals said they knew the house was Lu Zhuangzhang’s ancestral home but didn’t know he was famous for his romanization work.

Lu was “the first Chinese to propose a system of spelling for Sinitic languages,” Victor H. Mair notes in his essay Sound and Meaning in the History of Characters: Views of China’s Earliest Script Reformers, which contains additional information about Lu.

Lu was from Fujian and, as a boy, he grew up in Amoy (Xiamen) where romanized writing of the local language was used widely after it was introduced by Christian missionaries. (A romanized Chinese translation of the Bible had already been made in 1852.) At age 21, Lu moved to Singapore where he studied English. After he returned to Amoy four years later, he assisted an English missionary in compiling a Chinese-English dictionary.

Lu’s Yimu liaoran chujie (First Steps in Being Able to Understand at a Glance), published in Amoy in 1892, was the first book written by a Chinese which presented a potentially workable system of spelling for a Sinitic language. His script was based on the Roman alphabet with some modifications. Among other improvements over the sinographs was linking up syllables into words and separating them with spaces. Lu’s system was designed specifically for the Amoy topolect, but he claimed that his system of spelling could also be adapted for the other languages of China. Although he believed that all of the local languages should be written out with phonetic scripts, Lu advocated that the speech of Nanjing be adopted as the standard for the whole nation, as it was when Matteo Ricci had come to China three centuries earlier. Altogether, Lu worked for 40 years to bring an efficient system of spelling to China. He is now viewed by Chinese language workers as the father of script reform.

Local authorities hope to protect the home as a cultural monument.

Tóng’ān fāxiàn Lú Zhuàngzhāng gùjū

Wǒguó “yǔwén xiàndàihuà” de xiānqū, xiàndài Hànyǔ pīnyīn de fāmíng zhě Lú Zhuàngzhāng, qí gùjū jìnrì zài Xiàmén Tóng’ān bèi fāxiàn, wénwù bǎohù zhuānjiā hūyù bǎohù gāi gùjū.

Lú Zhuàngzhāng de gùjū zài Xiàmén Tóng’ān gǔ zhuāng cūn, shì yī zhuàng yǒu bǎi-yú nián lìshǐ de Mǐnnán hóngzhuān gǔ mínjū, Lú Zhuàngzhāng jiù chūshēng zài zhèlǐ.

Cūnmín gàosu jìzhě, tāmen zhīdao zhè shì Lú Zhuàngzhāng jiā de “gǔ cuò”, dànshì bùzhīdào tā shì “yǔwén xiàndàihuà de xiānqū”, yějiù méi rén qù kèyì bǎohù zhè “gǔ cuò”, yīnwèi yīzhí dōu yǒurén jūzhù, hái méi wánquán bèi huǐhuài.

Huòxī Lú Zhuàngzhāng gùjū yīrán bǎocún zài Tóng’ān, Xiàmén Shì wénhuàjú wénwù chù chùzhǎng Chén Zhìmíng biǎoshì, zhēngqǔ ràng Tóng’ān qū wén guǎn bàn jiāng qí dìngwéi qū jí wénwù bǎohù dānwèi.

Jù liǎojiě, Lú Zhuàngzhāng shēngyú Qīngcháo xián fēng sì nián (1854 nián), shì Xiàmén Tóng’ānrén. Zài chuàngzhì pīnyīn fāng’àn, tuīguǎng jīng zhāng guānhuà (jí Pǔtōnghuà), tuīxíng báihuà kǒuyǔ, cǎiyòng héngpái héngxiě, tíchàng xīnshì biāodiǎn, shǐyòng jiǎntǐ súzì děng fāngmiàn, Lú Zhuàngzhāng zài guónèi kāile xiānhé.

source: Tóng’ān fāxiàn Lú Zhuàngzhāng gùjū, Dōngnán Kuàibào, February 15, 2006

crossword puzzles in Taiwanese

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logo of the Presbyterian Church in Taiwan newletter, 1926

At the display for the Taiwan Church Press at the Taipei International Book Exhibition I came across a number of interesting works. The press has issued a 70-volume set of the collected newsletters of the Presbyterian Church of Taiwan. (University and research libraries, take note! So far no sets — NT$150,000 (US$4,600) each — have been sold to America or Europe.) The Presbyterian Church has long been an advocate of the rights of the people of Taiwan to speak Taiwanese without oppression, write in Taiwanese (including in romanization), and enjoy other political and human rights.

The newsletter, which dates back well into the nineteenth century, was written in romanized Taiwanese until 1969, when the KMT forced a change to Mandarin in Chinese characters. While flipping through a volume of the newsletters from the 1920s, I was startled to see that crossword puzzles in Taiwanese were a regular feature. (Click the thumbnail for a larger image.)

click for fullsize image of crossword puzzle in Taiwanese

It’s one thing to have read of the novels, poems, religious material, and technical manuals written in Taiwanese, it’s another to see something so human and familiar leap out from the page. This really helped bring home for me how much has been lost, especially in terms of opportunities, because of the suppression of romanized Taiwanese, first by the Japanese and then by the KMT.

Interestingly, if you look at the answers below, you’ll see that each of the boxes is meant to be filled in with not an individual letter but with syllabic units.

completed crossword puzzle in Taiwanese, from 1926

I’ve tried my hand at creating some crosswords in Mandarin using Hanyu Pinyin, but in individual-letter, not syllabic style. This is a little tricky. In English, all letters of the alphabet can appear at the beginning, in the middle, or at the end of a word. That’s not so in Mandarin as written in Pinyin. The letters i and u, for example, never come at the beginning of a word. And no word ends with anything other than a, e, i, o, u, g, n, or r. (I’ll finish some of those crosswords one of these days, Gus!)

It would be easier to make a crossword puzzle using bastardized Wade-Giles because that has fewer letters but also more finals. But of course not as many people would be interested in solving it, me included.

For even more on the issue of the romanization of Taiwanese, see the Taiwan section of De-Sinification.

make traditional Chinese characters part of world cultural heritage: Taipei mayor

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Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Ma Ying-jeou (???) has urged the UN to declare traditional Chinese characters a world cultural heritage, fearing they are fading into oblivion. At a meeting with Taiwanese in Geneva, Ma said the adoption by China of simplified characters has rendered them less and less recognizable in the Chinese-speaking world. Ma said he was barred from applying to the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization to preserve the traditional characters because Taiwan is not a UN member.

I think “fading into oblivion” is a bit strong.

source: Ma lauds traditional script, Taipei Times, February 11, 2006