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.
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It’s times like this I especially miss John DeFrancis. How he would have loved this! It’s partially an example of what he dubbed “Singlish” — not Singapore English but Sino-English, the tortured attempt to use Chinese characters to write English. He details this in “The Singlish Affair,” a shaggy dog story that serves as the introduction to his essential work: The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy. (And I really do mean essential. If you don’t have this book yet, buy it and read it.)
Here are some lyrics from a popular song, “Count on Me,” by Bruno Mars, with a Mandarin translation. The interesting part is that a Taiwanese third-grader has penciled in some phonetic guides for him or herself, using a combination of zhuyin fuhao (aka bopo mofo) (sometimes with tone marks!), English (as a gloss for English! and English pronunciation of some letters and numbers), and Chinese characters (albeit not always correctly written Chinese characters — not that I could do any better myself). Again, this is a Taiwanese third-grader and so is someone unlikely to know Hanyu Pinyin.
“If you ever find yourself stuck”
If |
ㄧˊㄈㄨˊ |
yífú |
| you | ||
| ever | ㄟㄈㄦ | ei-f’er |
find |
5 |
five |
| yourself | Uㄦㄒㄧㄦㄈㄨ | U’er xi’erfu |
stuck |
ㄙ打可 |
s-dake |
“I’ll be the light to guide you.”
I’ll |
ㄞㄦ |
ài’er |
be |
ㄅㄧ |
bi |
| the | ㄌ | l[e] |
light |
賴特* |
laite |
| to | 兔 | tu |
guide |
蓋 |
gai |
you |
you |
you |
“Find out what we’re made of”
Find |
ㄈㄞˋ |
fài |
out |
ㄠㄊㄜ |
ao-t’e |
what |
花得 |
huade |
we’re |
ㄨㄧㄚ |
wi’a |
made |
妹的 |
meide |
of |
歐福 |
oufu |
“When we are called to help our friends in need”
花 |
hua |
|
we |
ㄨㄧ |
wi |
are |
ㄚ |
a |
called |
扣 |
kou |
to |
兔 |
tu |
help |
嘿ㄜㄆ |
hei’e-p[e] |
our |
ㄠㄦ |
ao’er |
friends |
ㄈㄨㄌㄣˇ的ㄙ |
fulen-de-s |
in |
硬 |
ying |
need |
[?] |
[?] |
An observant reader sent in this relatively rare example in Taiwan of the use of Hanyu Pinyin with tone marks on signage
The Pinyin and especially the tone marks are a little thin, so I’ll give a closeup view:
The sign, here in aesthetic Banqiao, of course, reads:
Dǐ jiā
㭽佳心靈美學館
Esthetic Nail Salon
(Dǐ jiā xīnlíng měixué guǎn)
The Pinyin is not just “esthetic,” because most people probably don’t know the character ‘㭽’. Although they could probably take an educated guess that 㭽 is pronounced dǐ because of the 氐, that’s not the same thing as knowing for sure. So the Pinyin comes in handy even for most literate Taiwanese — if they can see it.
What’s especially surprising is that the people at the store went with Pinyin instead of zhuyin fuhao: ㄉㄧ ㄐㄧㄚ.
On Monday, March 20, Taiwan’s Chunghwa Post (Zhōnghuá Yóuzhèng / 中華郵政) issued new stamps commemorating Zhuyin Fuhao (aka bopomofo, bopo mofo, or bpmf).
This week’s release of NT$6 (about US$0.20) stamps covers the first ten letters of bopomofo: 「ㄅ、ㄆ、ㄇ、ㄈ、ㄉ、ㄊ、ㄋ、ㄌ、ㄍ、ㄎ」.
| Zhuyin Fuhao | Hanyu Pinyin |
| ㄅ | b |
| ㄆ | p |
| ㄇ | m |
| ㄈ | f |
| ㄉ | d |
| ㄊ | t |
| ㄋ | n |
| ㄌ | l |
| ㄍ | g |
| ㄎ | k |
On the stamps, each letter/symbol is paired with a place (e.g., ㄇ (M) is for 馬公 (Magong, the capital of Penghu).
I bought a nice sheet of the stamps earlier. Get ’em while they’re hot!
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Maryknoll Language Service Center has put online the complete texts of its Taiwanese-English and English-Taiwanese dictionaries. Better still, these have been released under a Creative Commons license. These are a terrific resource for anyone who’s interested in Hoklo.
Maryknoll deserves praise for this great work. Thanks are due, too, to Tailingua, which I know has been working behind the scenes to help make this happen.
From the English Amoy Dictionary (英語閩南語字典):
And from the Taiwanese-English Dictionary (台語英語字典):
source: Maryknoll dictionaries now free to download, Tailingua, June 17, 2010
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.
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Taiwan’s Ministry of Education has put online new a Web site devoted to stroke order for Chinese characters.
Unlike the older MOE stroke-order online handbook, this new site provides animations of the stroke order for 4,808 of the most frequently used traditional Chinese characters. And they really are traditional, too. For example, a Pinyin search for tai (it doesn’t accept tone marks or numbers) doesn’t return 台, even though it is more commonly seen in Taiwan than the full form of 臺. But perhaps that’s a glitch, since 台 is within the system, as a search for that particular character reveals.
Users can also test their knowledge of official stroke order, since each character’s animation also comes with an interactive feature in which users trace the strokes with their mouse. (Click on the button to the top right of the character.) It can be a little picky, as I suppose befits the prescriptive nature of the site. (In the real world, people write many characters using orders other than what Taiwan’s Ministry of Education and your Mandarin teacher might tell you is the One True Way. But that’s another matter.)
Although there’s no English interface at present, the files are labeled in English, so positioning your mouse over the navigation elements will usually reveal enough for non-Hanzi readers to make their way around.
Unfortunately, the site doesn’t appear to work with anything other than @#$%! Internet Explorer. Also, at first the search feature allowed the entry of no more than four letters, making it impossible to use Pinyin (Hanyu Pinyin is offered along with Taiwan’s official Tongyong Pinyin) to look up characters for, say, zhong and guang, or for the Pinyin syllables with the most letters: chuang, shuang, and zhuang (not counting -r forms); but someone there is on the ball, since that was fixed after I wrote the ministry about it yesterday.
site and further reading:
Roddy of Chinese Forums, Signese, Dreams of White Tiles, and even more sites, found a new video (4 min. 40 sec.) of Zhou Youguang speaking, in English, to a reporter from the Guardian.
I was kind of surprised to see this featured on the Guardian’s front page under the ‘Father of Pinyin’ title – I’d wager 9/10ths upwards of the Guardian’s readership doesn’t know what pinyin is. Somewhat unforgivably they’ve managed to spell the guy’s name wrong and not bothered to add tones to the pinyin used in the video, and the interview is pretty weak – basically it’s ‘here’s a nice old Chinese guy talking for a few minutes’ but there’s really very little of depth. They’ve also opted to add subtitles to what sounds to me like perfectly comprehensible English.
But enough negativity, if you want to get a look at the guy who rescued you from bopomofo, have a look.
As happy as I am about the video, I’m going to add a bit more negativity. Failure to get the word parsing correct is also a major error: not “pin yin zhi fu” but “Pīnyīn zhī fù.” Actually, even that isn’t so good, because Pinyin is meant for modern baihua, not the style of Literary Sinitic and its many short forms. Thus, “Pīnyīn de fùqin” would be better.
The accompanying article is amazingly sloppy in parts.
Although the article manages to spell Zhou Youguang’s name correctly, it consistently refers to him not by his family name but by his given name, “Youguang.” It’s almost inconceivable that any reporter in China could (repeatedly) make such an elementary mistake; so perhaps this is the fault of an overzealous copy editor.
I’m not going to sort out and list what’s correct and what’s incorrect in the rest of the article, other than mention one point at the end.
Confusingly, Taiwan uses several different romanisation methods — including a variant of pinyin, tongyong pinyin — and zuiyin.
Zuiyin? Of course what is meant is zhuyin (zhùyīn/註音/注音), which is spelled correctly earlier in the article. Zuiyin (zuìyīn/罪因) is a noun meaning “cause of a crime.”
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