Category Archives: romanization

smuggler learns importance of proper Pinyin

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A 28-year-old Taiwanese woman has been arrested in Hong Kong on charges of drug smuggling. Customs officials there found that the woman, who had arrived from Cambodia, had 3 kg of heroin hidden inside preserved plums. (I have a hard time thinking of these as “prunes” because they are so different than the U.S. prunes I grew up with — or rather avoided as best I could as I was growing up.)

One of the things that alerted the suspicions of the officials was that the lettering on her seven packages of plums (chénpíméi, 陳皮梅) read, in part, “Cnan.”

Yī míng 28 suì Táiwān nǚzǐ, jiāng zhěngzhěng 3 gōngjīn de hǎiluòyīn cáng zài 300 duō kē chénpíméi lǐ, zhǔnbèi yóu Jiǎnpǔzhài yùnsòng dào Táiwān fàn shòu, túzhōng zài Xiāng Gǎng jīchǎng bèi hǎiguān dāngchǎng dǎizhù, bèi jīyā zài Xiāng Gǎng kānshǒusuǒ, wànyī zuìmíng chénglì, xiánfàn jiāng miànduì 10 nián yǐshàng de yǒuqī túxíng.

Xiánfàn shì yī wèi cóng Jiǎnpǔzhài dào Xiāng Gǎng de 28 suì Táiwān nǚzǐ, jìhuà jiāng dúpǐn yùnsòng dào Táiwān fàn shòu, zhěngzhěng 3 gōngjīn de hǎiluòyīn jiàzhí 560 wàn yuán, qiǎomiào de cáng zài 300 duō kē chénpíméi lǐ, kěshì yīnwèi bāozhuāng shang “chénpíméi” de Yīngwénzì pīncuò le, yǐnqǐ Xiāng Gǎng hǎiguān de huáiyí, jiēfā zhè qǐyùn dú àn.

Xiāng Gǎng hǎiguān jiāndū Lǐ Zhāngróng biǎoshì, xiánfàn bǎ chénpíméi zhōngjiān de hé[tao] wā chūlai shōucáng hǎiluòyīng, dànshì yóuyú chénpíméi Yīngwén pīnyīn shì Chan, fàndú jítuán pīnchéng cnan, zāodào hǎiguān rényuán huáiyí dàibǔ.

Mùqián zhè wèi Táiwān xiánfàn bèi Xiāng Gǎng jǐngfāng yǐ fànyùn wēixiǎn yàowù zuì, jīyā zài Xiāng Gǎng de kānshǒusuǒ, 4 yuè 24 rì jiāng zài Xiāng Gǎng fǎyuàn jiēshòu shěnxùn, wànyī zuìmíng chénglì, xiánfàn jiāngyào miànduì 10 nián yǐshàng de yǒuqī túxíng.

sources:

Taipei County signage and romanization systems

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Speaking yesterday on topics related to signage and romanization, Taipei County Magistrate Zhou Xi-wei said that Taipei County should have its systems match those of Taipei City:

Táiběi Xiànzhǎng Zhōu Xīwěi xīwàng yǐ shēnghuóquān wéi kǎoliáng, yào hé Táiběi Shì zhěnghé yīzhì.

One of the implications of this is that for Taipei County, Taiwan’s most populous area, Tongyong Pinyin is out and Hanyu Pinyin is in.

This is no surprise, given that Zhou

  • is a member of the Kuomintang, whose chairman, Ma Ying-jeou, has backed Hanyu Pinyin and implemented it in Taipei in his role as mayor of the capital
  • campaigned for integration (whatever that’s supposed to mean) of Taipei County with Taipei City.

As an advocate of Hanyu Pinyin and resident of Taipei County, I’m pleased by the change. But as someone who has lived in Taiwan for ten years, I know all too well how likely it is that the new signage will be botched. Taiwan has a poor record of correct implementation of romanization — in any system. Moreover, there are aspects of Taipei City’s signage that Taipei County should certainly not copy, namely InTerCaPiTaLiZaTion (unnecessary and counterproductive) and “nicknumbering” (putting a number on a street does nothing to aid communication if nobody knows what the number refers to). So if this doesn’t end up another SNAFU, I’ll be pleasantly surprised. (Does anyone have any good contacts within the Taipei County government? I’d like to be able to talk with some people in charge well before this gets beyond the planning stage.)

Until late last year Taipei County was under a DPP administration, so its romanization policy, such as it was, was to use Tongyong Pinyin. But implementation has been spotty and often sloppy. Most street signs in Taipei County remain in MPS2. Banqiao has seen more signs in Tongyong Pinyin; but most of those have the romanization in such relatively tiny letters that it’s nearly useless for drivers.

Turning back for a moment to the news reports that prompted this post, an additional item of interest is the headline of one of the stories: Pīnyīn fāngshì「qiao」bùdìng Yīngwén dìmíng busasa (拼音方式「喬」不定 英文地名霧煞煞). Here, both qiao and busasa are Taiwanese, not Mandarin. (A-giâu or somebody else, help me out on the spelling here!)

Here’s one of the stories:

Táiběi jiéyùn Bǎnqiáo-Tǔchéng xiàn jiāng yú wǔ yuèfèn tōngchē zhì Tǔchéng yǒng nìng zhàn, yīnyīng zhuǎnchéng lǚkè xūyào, Tái-Tiě Bǎnqiáo chēzhàn jiāng shèzhì línshíxìng zhǐshì pái. Bùguò, Yīngyǔ yìyīn hùnluàn, xiànzhǎng Zhōu Xī-wěi biǎoshì, gāi cǎiyòng Tōngyòng Pīnyīn huòshì Hànyǔ Pīnyīn, jiāng huì yǐ shēnghuóquān de gàiniàn wèi qiántí, yǔ Táiběi Shì zhěnghé.

So the additional MRT stations are opening in May after all. As a Banqiao resident who has waited long for that day, I’m happy to hear it. But since the stations are opening so soon, I’d be willing to bet that they’ll reproduce the mistakes already in the system instead of correcting them.

Zhōu Xī-wěi biǎoshì, wèilái yě jiāng tuīdòng yī piào fúwù dàodǐ wèi mùbiāo, rú mínzhòng chíyǒu yōu yóu kǎ huò qítā piàozhèng, jíkě zhuǎnchéng jiéyùn, gāo tiě huò Tái-Tiě, dāchéng dàzhòng yùnshū gōngjù jiāng gèng biànlì.

Zhōu Xī-wěi jīntiān xiàwǔ xúnshì Bǎnqiáo huǒchēzhàn rénxíng tōngdào, duìyú Tái-Tiě, gāo tiě jí jiéyùn sān tiě gòng gòu, zhàn pái, lù míng Yīngwén biāoshì què wǔhuābāmén, yǒude yòng Táiwān Tōngyòng Pīnyīn, yǒude yǐ Zhōngguó dàlù Hànyǔ Pīnyīn, érqiě biāoshì shífēn bù míngxiǎn, dēngguāng bùgòu míngliàng, Zhōu Xī-wěi xīwàng gè dānwèi xiétiáo gǎishàn.

Zhōu Xī-wěi rènwéi, Bǎnqiáo chēzhàn jiānglái shì quánguó zuìdà de jiāotōng zhuǎnyùnzhàn, měirì fúwù wúshù mínzhòng, biāoshì yīng yǐ jiǎndān fāngshì, qīngchu gàosu shǐyòng rénshēn yú héchù, gāi wǎng héchù qù.

sources:

more on Beijing’s English and Pinyin signage

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The plan to mix Pinyin and English on signage in Beijing is now official.

Orientations in road names should be in English, such as “MAIJIAPU East Rd.” This is unless it is part of the actual name, like “BEIWEI Rd.” [The “bei” in Beiwei means “north.”] However, road names starting with orientations should have them in initials only, for example, “E. CHANG’AN Ave.”

This regulation is the first part of a campaign to standardize English translations on public signs in Beijing. The campaign will extend to all tourist spots, commercial and cultural facilities, museums, subways, sports centers and hospitals in the city, the report said.

The use of “avenue” will be restricted for the time being to Chang’an Ave., Ping’an Ave, and Liangguang Ave.

A few terms will go untranslated: hutong (alley), li (lane), qu (district), and yuan (garden). Such terms are viewed as embodying Beijing’s culture (tǐxiàn Běijīng chéngshì wénhuà tèsè); the articles didn’t mention, however, that hutong is a loan word from Mongolian.

A few old standards will remain. “Tsinghua University” will remain as such; but road signs will read, for example, Qinghua South Rd.

sources:

JOHNNY DePP AND CHINeSe CHARACTeRS

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cover of 'Corpse Bride' in ChineseThe cover for the DVD for Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride (Dìyù Xīnniáng / 地獄新娘 / “Hell Bride”) has what for me is an arresting usage: the roman letter “e” has been incorporated into a Chinese character.

Tim Burton's ['Corpse Bride'] -- in Chinese characters

At first I thought this substitution of “e” for the 日 portion of the shì (是) phonetic element of 提 (tí) might be meant as playfully phonetic itself: “Teem” Burton, of sorts.

提姆波頓
Tímǔ Bōdùn

But then I noticed how Johnny Depp’s name was written:
Johnny Depp's name in Chinese characters

There’s that e again. But this case, the character, 普, which also has its 日 element replaced, doesn’t have a long e sound in its pronunciation:

強尼戴普
Qiángní Dàipǔ

“Daipu”? That sounds like a portmanteau for what’s found in dirty diapers. (Sorry. Couldn’t resist.)

So it was just a case of a designer having fun. The e has no phonetic function here.

But there’s something else interesting about how Johnny Depp’s name is written. The first character, 強, takes more strokes to write in its so-called simplified form than in traditional Chinese characters.

traditional (11 strokes) 強 强 “simplified” (12 strokes)

the Zhuzihu spelling blues

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road and trail signs giving different spellings for the same placeLess than 10 years ago the romanization on Taipei’s street signs was a complete mess. The “standard,” such as it was, was the inherently bad bastardized Wade-Giles; but misspellings were abundant, so much so that even some individual intersections had signs with several different spellings. It was the sort of thing foreigners in Taiwan loved to point out. Since almost all of those signs are now gone — and good riddance! — I offer up this lesser sample, taken about ten days ago when my wife and I went walking on Yangming Shan to see the sakura and calla lilies.

The sign on the top, reading “ZhuZiHu Rd.”, is in a mix of Hanyu Pinyin and English (Rd.), though, like other Hanyu Pinyin signs in Taipei, it uses InTerCaPiTaLiZaTion for individual syllables, which is wrong, wrong, wrong. (It should be Zhuzihu or Zhuzi Hu, not ZhuZiHu.) The trail marker at the bottom marked “Jhuzihu” is in misspelled Tongyong Pinyin; in Tongyong it should be written “Jhuzihhu”.

misspelled and poorly made Tongyong road signs in TaipeiThe reason for the different spellings here is almost certainly that the road, being within Taipei, is labeled in Hanyu Pinyin, whereas the trail marker, for a trail within Yangming Shan National Park, was put up by the central government and is thus in Tongyong Pinyin — well, almost. The misspelled Tongyong in the sign isn’t just a one-off, either. All of the Tongyong-ish signs I saw in the area are misspelled in the same way. See, for example, the sign at right. (The arrows, by the way, are both correct: The road is a loop.)

Note, also, how the “i” in the second example below is printed incorrectly, with the top of the dot lining up with the tops of the other lowercase letters. I’ve been seeing increasing instances of this particular typographical monstrosity, which puzzles me because it seems like the sort of error that someone has to go out of their way to make.

Those familiar with Taipei may have noticed something odd about the name Zhuzihu: It is not bisyllabic. Indeed, it is the only road name of Sinitic origin within Taipei to have more than two syllables. (The only other two such names are loans from English (Roosevelt) and a language of one of Taiwan’s tribes (Ketagelan). See Taipei street names and the monosyllabic myth.)

calla liliesCloser examination, however, reveals that Zhuzihu is based upon a bisyllabic name after all. Zhuzi Hu means “Bamboo Lake” (Zhúzi Hú / 竹子湖). The only particular reason for writing it solid (Zhuzihu) rather than as “Zhuzi Hu” is that there’s no actual hu (lake) there anymore. (It was more like a marsh, anyway.) Come to think of it, I don’t remember seeing any bamboo there, either. A case could be made for writing it either way: Zhuzi Hu or Zhuzihu

By the way, I wrote the Taipei City Government to have it correct its Web site on the calla lilies. The problem was that the Tongyong Pinyin spelling, Jhuzihhu, was used rather than the Hanyu Pinyin spelling, Zhuzihu. More than a week passed without any changes. Today, however, I noticed that some (but not all or even most) of the spellings had been changed — to another wrong spelling! Now some of the time the Web site gives the Tongyong Pinyin version, Jhuzihhu, and some of the time it gives Zhuzihhu, that latter having one h too many for correct Hanyu Pinyin. No one has yet responded to my message.

preliminary meeting on writing Taiwanese

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The Ministry of Education sponsored a gathering on Saturday to conduct preliminary discussions on how to write Taiwanese. The hope is that a decision can be reached soon on an orthography.

I would hope that by now there’s sufficient worry about the future of Taiwanese that scholars will stop arguing among themselves about which system to use. Maybe soon they’ll finally come together. But I suspect that instead they’re going to continue to bicker as the clock runs out on Chen Shui-bian’s second term.

I haven’t seen any reports on how Saturday’s gathering went.

Jiàoyùbù jīntiān xiàwǔ zhàokāi “Mǐnnán yǔyán yīnbiāo” zuòtánhuì, yāoqǐng xiāngguān lǐngyù xuézhě zhuānjiā, Táiyǔ wén zuòjiā, mínjiān tuántǐ dàibiǎo yánshāng tǎolùn. Jiàoyù Bùzhǎng Dù Zhèng-shèng zhǐchū, jǐnguǎn huìyì méiyǒu gòngshí, tuīdòng tǒngyī de Mǐnnányǔ yīnbiāo xìtǒng hái zài tǎolùn jiēduàn, Jiàoyùbù jiāng zūnzhòng zhuānjiā yìjian, qīdài jǐnkuài gěi shèhuì yī ge dá’àn.

Dù Zhèng-shèng zhǐchū, zhìdìng tǒngyī de Mǐnnányǔ yīnbiāo xìtǒng, zàixué lǐ shàng yǒu kùnnan, ér gè bùtóng pàibié yěyǒu bùtóng jiānchí, Jiàoyùbù qīdài xuézhě néng chōngfèn gōutōng, tǎolùn chū gòngshí, Jiàoyùbù yě huì zūnzhòng zhuānyè, jiànlì yī tào shìhé shèhuì xūyào de Mǐnnányǔ yīnbiāo xìtǒng.

Jiàoyùbù Guóyǔ tuīxíng wěiyuánhuì zhǐchū, mùqián shǐyònglǜ bǐjiào gāo de Mǐnnányǔ pīnyīn xìtǒng bāokuò jiàohuì luómǎzì pīnyīn, Táiwān Mǐnnányǔ pīnyīn xìtǒng yǔ Tōngyòng Pīnyīn, lìngwài hái yǒu TLPA Mǐnnányǔ jí gǎiliáng shì TLAP děng xìtǒng, yóuyú quēfá tǒngyī de zhěnghé bǎnběn, shǐ xuéxiào tuīxíng xiāngtǔ yǔyán kèchéng shí, yě zāoyù bùzhī shǐyòng hézhǒng bǎnběn de kùnnan.

Jiàoyùbù Guóyǔ Huì biǎoshì, jīntiān de huìyì zhǐshì zhèngshì huìyì de “huì qián huì,” mùdì shì zài gè pài xuézhě zhuānjiā jiāoliú yìjian, chōngfèn gōutōng, qīdài wèilái tòuguò hézuò jiāoliú, zhěnghé chū yī tào fúhé mínzhòng qīdài yǔ xūqiú de pīnyīn xìtǒng.

source: Mǐnnányǔ yīnbiāo xìtǒng Dù Zhèng-shèng: zūnzhòng zhuānjiā yìjian (閩南語音標系統 杜正勝：尊重專家意見), CNA, March 18, 2006

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:

more on the Aborigine names and ID cards

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Another article:

以恢復原住民傳統姓名為宗旨的籐文化協會今天指出，最近推動復名時發現，身分證、戶籍謄本等戶政系統尚未全面進行版本更新，讓復名作業仍舊困難重重。

籐文化協會常務理事 Kaing Lipay （該映‧犁百，阿美族）下午表示，雖然新身分證為了配合原住民姓名已經在正面姓名欄位上作「放寬字數」、「並列羅馬拼音」的版更，但背面的父母欄、配偶欄卻未能配合放寬，且戶籍謄本上的姓名欄不但沒放寬字數，也不能加注羅馬拼音。

最奇怪的是，Kaing Lipay 說，現在羅馬拼音的名字在戶政系統上只能以「點」來區隔，這樣的方式未來在護照上將如何表現？護照上的名字以點區隔是其他國家所未見的，未來是否會有問題，希望有關單位能夠深入了解。

另外，Kaing Lipay 指出，原住民姓名欄位上有中文不得超過十五個字，英文不得超過二十個字母的限制，導致高雄縣三民鄉有一位男性民眾羅馬拼音長達二十字，其中無法再以加點的方式區隔，讓他非常苦惱，希望能再次復名。

但是，如果民眾因為行政作業疏失必須再次復名就會被計算為第二次改名，根據「姓名條例」規定一個人只能改名兩次，Kaing Lipay 說，這不是民眾的疏失，建議戶政單位能以「誤登」的方式處理，以免有損原住民復名的權益。

籐文化協會已接獲不少民眾反映，在進行恢復原住民傳統姓名作業時，依舊耗日費時，推究原因，Kaing Lipay 認為，戶政機關沒有一個「標準作業程序」，且缺乏全面配套措施，導致原住民復名困難重重。

Why on earth do reporters find it so hard to grasp that not everything written in an alphabet is “English”?

戶籍系統尚待更新 原住民復名作業困難重重, CNA, March 5, 2006