In March, Taiwan’s Chunghwa Post (Zhōnghuá Yóuzhèng / 中華郵政) issued new postage stamps commemorating Zhuyin Fuhao (註音符號) (aka bopomofo, bopo mofo, or bpmf). The postal service has released another three sheets of these stamps, finishing the series.
sources:
If you’re in Taiwan, make a trip to your local 50% Fifty Percent Píngjià Shíshàng (50% FIFTY PERCENT 平价时尚) (50 percent bargain-price fashion) and pick up one of their shirts of various Taiwanese foods, each of which is labeled in romanized Taiwanese. (Place name hashtags (e.g., #Yilan) are not included on the shirts.)
The only problem is that you may want to carry a magnifying glass with you, because the images and letters are tiny. (C’mon, people! When you want people to read something, size matters.)
This is the one I picked for myself: tshang-iû-piánn (in Mandarin: cōngyóubǐng / 蔥油餅 / 葱油饼). Those scallion pancakes are wonderful.
More images on the 50% Fifty Percent Facebook page.
Recently, on my way to Wulai (just south of Taipei), I spotted an interesting sign. Normally, the combination of “interesting sign” and “Wulai” means something in a language of one of Taiwan’s Indigenous Peoples. But for today I have something different: Japanese, Taiwanese, and Mandarin. Plus another bonus sign in Japanese (I think) — but more on that later.
I wasn’t able to get a good photo of my own, so here’s one from Google Street View.
The “OEC” on the sign on the left is meant to represent Japanese “oishī” (美味しい / おいしい), which means “delicious.” Knowledge of some Japanese words is very common in Taiwan, much as knowing a few words in Spanish is common in parts of the USA.
The whole top line is “OEC 手工麵線” (OEC shǒugōng miànxiàn) = “delicious handmade noodles.” The letters on the sign work like the hyphenated combinations in William Steig’s charming C D B.
The line below the sign’s headline is also linguistically interesting.
大腸, 蚵仔, 肉羹
(intestines, oysters, meat soup)
The second word, 蚵仔, would be pronounced kezi in Mandarin. But in Taiwan it’s standard for that to be read in Taiwanese as “ô-á.” Also notable is the use of handwriting — rather rare these days — instead of a computerized font.
The brunch shop next door also has what I strongly suspect is an interesting sign: 一豆, which in Mandarin is yi dou (lit. “one bean”). Someone who knows Japanese help me out with this one.
I occasionally snap photos of instances of Chinese characters being used to write English (e.g., dog, butterfly, crunchy, oh my god). Here’s something that at least in Taiwan is far more rare: Chinese characters used to write Spanish.
米卡莎 is pronounced “Mǐ kǎshā”. In isolation, those characters are used in writing words associated with rice , card , sha sound, respectively — so nothing to do with “my house.”
Although Mandarin does have a “sa” syllable, which is associated with various Chinese characters (e.g., 撒, 仨, 挲, 灑, 撒, 靸, 卅, 颯, 摋, or 脎), making a closer phonetic match with mi casa possible, sa was not used. As the ABC Chinese–English Dictionary notes, 莎/sha is often “used in transcriptions, personal and place names,” whereas sa is not as much.
This store, near the border between Taiwan’s aesthetic Banqiao and Zhonghe, is now closed.
As I often note, apostrophes are used in only about 2 percent of words as written in Hanyu Pinyin. But when they’re needed, they’re needed. Don’t skip them.
A few years back, someone wrote to me to ask about multiple apostrophes in Pinyin. I dug through a 2019 edition of the CC-CEDICT (2019-11-12 04:41:56 GMT) for an answer. But I don’t think I ever posted my findings online. It’s time to rectify that.
CC-CEDICT is not an ideal source in terms of words, because some entries are phrases rather than single words, though they are not marked separately than words, which means that some entries might be better off with spaces rather than apostrophes, which would reduce the apostrophe count and percentage.
So, with that in mind, of the file’s 117,579 entries, 3,006 needed apostrophes, or 2.56 percent.
No entry needed three or more apostrophes.
Only 52 entries needed two apostrophes, or 0.04% of the total (1 per 2,261 entries).
Most of those were just Mandarinized foreign proper nouns. For example:
Examples of more regular Mandarin entries with two apostrophes include:
A few of those present interesting questions in orthography. For example, Xīn’ào’ěrliáng or Xīn Ào’ěrliáng?
But, basically, those entries are outliers. Relatively few words in Pinyin need an apostrophe; only a minute subset of those need two apostrophes; and, to my knowledge, none need three or more apostrophes.
Can you think of any triple-apostrophe words? Sorry, written examples of stuttering don’t count.
What were the most common names for newborn babies in China in 2020?
Please note that some names appear more than once (Yichen three times in the top 10 for boys, and Yinuo and Yutong twice in the top 10 for girls). The only differences are in some of the characters used.
| Rank | Chinese characters |
Pinyin (with tone marks) |
Pinyin (without tone marks) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 奕辰 | Yìchén | Yichen |
| 2 | 宇轩 | Yǔxuān | Yuxuan |
| 3 | 浩宇 | Hàoyǔ | Haoyu |
| 4 | 亦辰 | Yìchén | Yichen |
| 5 | 宇辰 | Yǔchén | Yuchen |
| 6 | 子墨 | Zǐmò | Zimo |
| 7 | 宇航 | Yǔháng | Yuhang |
| 8 | 浩然 | Hàorán | Haoran |
| 9 | 梓豪 | Zǐháo | Zihao |
| 10 | 亦宸 | Yìchén | Yichen |
| Rank | Chinese characters |
Pinyin (with tone marks) |
Pinyin (without tone marks) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 一诺 | Yīnuò | Yinuo |
| 2 | 依诺 | Yīnuò | Yinuo |
| 3 | 欣怡 | Xīnyí | Xinyi |
| 4 | 梓涵 | Zǐhán | Zihan |
| 5 | 语桐 | Yǔtóng | Yutong |
| 6 | 欣妍 | Xīnyán | Xinyan |
| 7 | 可欣 | Kěxīn | Kexin |
| 8 | 语汐 | Yǔxī | Yuxi |
| 9 | 雨桐 | Yǔtóng | Yutong |
| 10 | 梦瑶 | Mèngyáo | Mengyao |
I tried using ChatGPT again to clean up the HTML in the tables above. But it kept hallucinating and changing characters, and it never gave me the entire tables but cut off at least one row each time. So I cleaned up the code myself in a text editor.
Source: 《2020 nián quánguó xìngmíng bàogào》 fābù (《二〇二〇年全国姓名报告》发布), Gōng’ānbù wǎngzhàn (公安部网站), February 2, 2021
From watching a brief documentary piece on TV about how jelly beans are made, I learned a new Taiwan-specific Mandarin term: Léigēn táng (雷根糖).
Leigen is a Mandarinization of the name of Ronald Reagan, who famously loved jelly beans. And táng is the word for sugar/candy. So Léigēn táng / “Reagan candy” is a term (but not the only one) in Taiwan for jelly beans. Cool name. I’m going to remember that.
Oddly, Google Translate didn’t know the term yet — or apparently even that Léigēn is how one says “Reagan” in Taiwan, given how Google Translate produced “Regan [sic] Candy”. But at least Google Translate didn’t produce “thunder root sugar,” which would be a literal translation of each morpheme, taken individually.
I sent feedback, so let’s see if it gets corrected.
In China, “Reagan” is usually written instead as 里根 (Lǐgēn). But it doesn’t look like either 里根糖 (Lǐgēn táng) or 雷根糖 (Léigēn táng) is a thing in the PRC. Instead, in China jelly beans are called “果冻豆” (guǒdòng dòu; lit. “jelly beans”) or “软心豆” (ruǎn xīn dòu; lit. “soft-heart beans”).
One wonders what jelly beans were called in Taiwan prior to Reagan administration. Maybe they just weren’t popular here yet.
It’s quite common for proper nouns to differ in Taiwan and China, especially for people. For example, see my old post on Obama, Bush, vitamin drinks, and puns.
Some names have waxed and waned in popularity in Taiwan over the past century or so. This post gives tables of the top-three names for each decade (as calculated by the ROC calendar).
In this post, I give only Mandarin forms of names — out of familiarity, not preference. An exacting writer seeking character names might do well to investigate how such names might be pronounced in Taiwanese, Hakka, or even yet another Sinitic language other than Mandarin, depending on the who, when, and where.
Note: Although the normal style for names in Hanyu Pinyin is to write given names solid, without a space or hyphen, I have used hyphens in this post to preserve the style of writing names that has been standard in Taiwan for many decades. I am including the spelling in Wade-Giles, even though I don’t recommend using that system, because that is what is commonly seen in Taiwan — albeit without apostrophes or umlauts.
| Birth Year |
Chinese Characters |
Pinyin | Wade-Giles |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1912–1920 | 明、金水、健 |
Míng, Jīn-shuǐ, Jiàn |
Ming, Chin-shui, Chien |
| 1921–1930 | 金龍、金水、金生 |
Jīn-lóng, Jīn-shuǐ, Jīn-shēng |
Chin-lung, Chin-shui, Chin-sheng |
| 1931–1940 | 正雄、文雄、武雄 |
Zhèng-xióng, Wén-xióng, Wǔ-xióng |
Cheng-hsiung, Wen-hsiung, Wu-hsiung |
| 1941–1950 | 正雄、武雄、文雄 |
Zhèng-xióng, Wǔ-xióng, Wén-xióng |
Cheng-hsiung, Wu-hsiung, Wen-hsiung |
| 1951–1960 | 金龍、進財、榮華 |
Jīn-lóng, Jìn-cái, Róng-huá |
Chin-lung, Chin-ts’ai, Jung-hua |
| 1961–1970 | 志明、志成、文雄 |
Zhì-míng, Zhì-chéng, Wén-xióng |
Chih-ming, Chih-ch’eng, Wen-hsiung |
| 1971–1980 | 志偉、志明、建宏 |
Zhì-wěi, Zhì-míng, Jiàn-hóng |
Chih-wei, Chih-ming, Chien-hung |
| 1981–1990 | 家豪、志豪、志偉 |
Jiā-háo, Zhì-háo, Zhì-wěi |
Chia-hao, Chih-hao, Chih-wei |
| 1991–2000 | 家豪、冠宇、冠廷 |
Jiā-háo, Guàn-yǔ, Guàn-tíng |
Chia-hao, Kuan-yü, Kuan-t’ing |
| 2001–2010 | 承恩、承翰、冠廷 |
Chéng-ēn, Chéng-hàn, Guàn-tíng |
Ch’eng-en, Ch’eng-han, Kuan-t’ing |
| 2011–2018* | 承恩、宥廷、品睿 |
Chéng-ēn, Yòu-tíng, Pǐn-ruì |
Ch’eng-en, Yu-t’ing, P’in-jui |
| Birth Year |
Chinese Characters |
Pinyin | Wade-Giles |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1912–1920 | 秀英、英、玉 |
Xiù-yīng, Yīng, Yù |
Hsiu-ying, Ying, Yü |
| 1921–1930 | 秀英、玉蘭、玉英 |
Xiù-yīng, Yù-lán, Yù-yīng |
Hsiu-ying, Yü-lan, Yü-ying |
| 1931–1940 | 秀英、玉蘭、玉英 |
Xiù-yīng, Yù-lán, Yù-yīng |
Hsiu-ying, Yü-lan, Yü-ying |
| 1941–1950 | 秀英、秀琴、美玉 |
Xiù-yīng, Xiù-qín, Měi-yù |
Hsiu-ying, Hsiu-ch’in, Mei-yü |
| 1951–1960 | 麗華、秀琴、秀美 |
Lì-huá, Xiù-qín, Xiù-měi |
Li-hua, Hsiu-ch’in, Hsiu-mei |
| 1961–1970 | 淑芬、美玲、淑惠 |
Shū-fēn, Měi-líng, Shū-huì |
Shu-fen, Mei-ling, Shu-hui |
| 1971–1980 | 淑芬、雅惠、淑娟 |
Shū-fēn, Yǎ-huì, Shū-juān |
Shu-fen, Ya-hui, Shu-chüan |
| 1981–1990 | 雅婷、怡君、雅雯 |
Yǎ-tíng, Yí-jūn, Yǎ-wén |
Ya-t’ing, I-chün, Ya-wen |
| 1991–2000 | 雅婷、怡君、怡婷 |
Yǎ-tíng, Yí-jūn, Yí-tíng |
Ya-t’ing, I-chün, I-t’ing |
| 2001–2010 | 宜蓁、欣妤、詩涵 |
Yí-zhēn, Xīn-yú, Shī-hán |
I-chen, Hsin-yü, Shih-han |
| 2011–2018* | 詠晴、子晴、品妍 |
Yǒng-qíng, Zǐ-qíng, Pǐn-yán |
Yung-ch’ing, Tzu-ch’ing, P’in-yen |
*: The counting of names continued until June 2018. I’ll give newer figures once I have them.
Source: Quánguó xìngmíng tǒngjì fēnxi (全國姓名統計分析). Department of Household Registration, Ministry of the Interior, Taiwan, 2018, p. 59.