I recently came across W.K. Cheng’s “Enlightenment and Unity: Language Reformism in Late Qing China,” an interesting article from 2001 that covers much of the same ground as Victor Mair’s “Sound and Meaning in the History of Characters: Views of China’s Earliest Script Reformers,” but from a wider, social perspective.
您現在在畫面中看到的就是首度與國人見面原住民語教材，插圖以卡通為主，不過選用的是羅馬拼音，而不是注音，教育部表示，這些課本未來會統一成為國小母語教材，教育部甚至設計了電腦學習軟體，讓學生能夠更輕鬆學原住民語。
古采艷 涂堂鑾 2005-01-14 19:55
My mother in law will be a judge tomorrow in the Taipei County junior high school Taiwanese play contest, so my wife and I went over to the site of the competition today to pick up some material for her that hadn’t arrived through the mail yet. The stage was occupied today by groups from the county’s elementary schools, so we stayed to watch some of the 10-minute skits. A few things stood out, beyond the usual charming amateurism of youngsters in school plays.
All of the skits featured adults as well as children — actual adults, not just kids playing a role. Perhaps this is a cultural difference, because I can’t imagine that grownups would be included in children’s plays in America.
All of the skits also featured rural themes and/or the elderly. While there’s nothing wrong with this, I would have been much happier to see some skits in Taiwanese about astronauts, CEOs, scientists, glamorous movie stars, or even rap music stars. If Taiwanese speakers see their language as just of the past, or just of the countryside, it’s going to die.
I had a look at the script for one of the plays. It was almost entirely in Chinese characters, with a few words written in romanization and a sprinkling of zhuyin fuhao. Most unfortunate.