‘Ma Ying-jeou thought’

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Although the election has passed, here’s one more post on a Taiwan campaign banner.

Taiwan campaign banner discussed in this post. It pictures KMT Chairman Ma Ying-jeou looking thoughtful.

This banner reads qiǎngjiù Mǎ Yīng-jiǔ sīxiǎng (“rush to save Ma Ying-jeou thought” / 搶救馬英九思想).

Cultural Revolution image of Chinese masses proclaiming 'Long live Mao Zedong thought!'This is an unusual banner for a number of reasons, not just because even die-hard KMT supporters might be hard pressed to say what exactly “Ma Ying-jeou thought” is. (I’m not trying to set up any punch lines here — really.)

Referring to a prominent figure’s “thought” is much more common in China than in Taiwan and is predominantly associated with Mao Zedong — not the sort of figure to attract votes from pretty much any segment of Taiwan’s electorate.

The standard phrase is Máo Zédōng Sīxiǎng (毛澤東思想 / 毛泽东思想 / “Mao Zedong Thought”). See, for example, the Cultural Revolution-era poster at right, which reads “Mao Zedong Sixiang wansui!” (“Long live Mao Zedong Thought!” / 毛泽东思想万岁). As far as I know, though, people in China didn’t have to urgently rush to save it. Searches on Google and Baidu for “抢救毛泽东思想” (“rush to save Mao Zedong thought”) yield no responses at all. On the other hand, giving a Japanese reading of “banzai!” for wansui (万岁) might change the feeling of urgency some.

Before turning to a look at numbers, I’d like to offer a few more observations about this banner:

  • The candidate isn’t Ma Ying-jeou, though Ma is the only person shown here and the only one to have his name mentioned. The only way to identify this candidate would be through the candidate number. Even Ma being head of the KMT doesn’t help, since candidates’ political affiliations are not given on the ballot other than in presidential elections.
  • A campaign-material color scheme of black and red doesn’t indicate an anarcho-communist candidate but rather a supposedly urgent need to vote for someone. A candidate who uses predominantly black campaign material is one whose election may hang by a thread and so needs all the help he or she can get. But this is usually nothing but a campaign gimmick.

Here’s a table of the results of Google searches for the “thought” of some prominent political figures, with Confucius thrown in for good measure, as he was more of a real philosopher than all the rest of them put together. Also, to give a sense of the relative numbers of Web pages, I’ve added the search results for 的, the most frequently used Chinese character; this provides a very rough and unscientific ratio of about 2.4 Web pages in China for every 1 Web page in Taiwan.

I ran four variations on each main search. In addition to looking for the exact phrase of “[someone’s] thought” I checked the results as restricted to .tw domains, .cn domains, Taiwan governmental domains, and PRC governmental domains.

Search phrase Translation Total .tw .cn .gov.tw .gov.cn
的 de 769,000,000 95,100,0000 246,000,000 15,800,000 35,900,00
毛澤東思想 Mao Zedong thought 2,330,000 8,200 1,140,000 174 342,000
孔子思想 Confucius thought 64,000 3,160 21,500 200 2,860
鄧小平思想 Deng Xiaoping thought 27,800 256 14,900 12 1,660
孫中山思想 Sun Yat-sen thought 10,300 1,210 2,720 196 361
江澤民思想 Jiang Zemin thought 4,120 59 573 5 98
胡錦濤思想 Hu Jintao thought 2,400 34 1,140 0 198
蔣介石思想 Chiang Kai-shek thought 850 15 251 0 17
馬英九思想 Ma Ying-jeou thought 326 31 1 0 0
李登輝思想 Lee Teng-hui thought 85 52 2 0 0
蔣中正思想 Chiang Kai-shek thought

(alternate form)

 54 27 0 7 0
蔣經國思想 Chiang Ching-kuo thought 34 11 7 0 0
陳水扁思想 Chen Shui-bian thought 33 7 6 0 0

Thus, the phrase “[somebody’s] thought” is overwhelmingly a PRC usage and associated with Mao Zedong more than with all the others put together and multiplied by 20. So what’s it doing here with Ma Ying-jeou’s name?

Taishan dictionary

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A recently published dictionary of Taishan — Táishān fāngyīn zìdiǎn (台山方音字典), edited by Dèng Jūn (邓钧) and Lín Róngyào (林荣耀) — has been selling relatively well, according to news reports. But I haven’t been able to find out much more, such as if the book is available for purchase online.

quote of the day

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Wǒ de mùbēi shàng
qǐng wèiwǒ kèxià Luómǎ pīnyīn de chuántǒng míngzi
zài yòng Hànzì jiāzhù yìyīn
wǒ yào wǒ de zǐsūn xúnzhe jiāzú de chuántǒng mìngmíng fāngshì
ràng zhèxiē zǔxiān de míngzi liúchuán xiàqù

我的墓碑上
請為我刻下羅馬拼音的傳統名字
再用漢字加註譯音
我要我的子孫循著家族的傳統命名方式
讓這些祖先的名字流傳下去

Rough translation:

On my tombstone
please carve my traditional name using romanization
then use a Chinese character phonetic transcription
I want my descendants to follow the family’s traditional name system
Let these ancestors’ name pass down through the generations

from Mùbēi shàng de míngzi (墓碑上的名字), by Kaing Lipay, a member of one of Taiwan’s indigenous peoples.

see also Q?ng zài w? de mùb?i kèshang chuánt?ng míngzi (??????????????????), CNA, June 10, 2006

Kaohsiung’s signage in English and romanization

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Chih-Hao Tsai has a good post (in Mandarin) on the English and romanization in Kaohsiung’s signage: Gāoxióng Shì de Yīngwén lùbiāo — kǎoyàn nǐ de yǎnlì. He notes especially how the text in Latin letters is too small. The post also links to some of his other many writings on the topic.

I’ve had related conversations with officials in the Banqiao City Government and Taipei County Government. Upon hearing my complaints that new signs’ English and romanization are ridiculously small, the officials invariably answer me with something like, “It can’t be too small because we’re following the rules.”

Meanwhile, cities around Taiwan continue to waste taxpayer money putting up signs that don’t help.

W-use letter

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Matt at No-sword talks about the uses of the letter W in Japan:

Many English initialisms are used in Japan, like CM for “commercial [movie]”, but W is a special letter: it can represent meaning all by itself. This is because it is generally pronounced “double” instead of “double-u”, so it’s handy for referring to things that are doubled.

Read the whole piece: Let the pretending to be injured begin.

Taiwan architecture and political statements

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The main reason I haven’t been posting much lately is that for several weeks I’ve been extremely busy showing various groups of VIPs around Taipei. As the viewing floor near the top of Taipei 101, the world’s tallest building, is one of the standard stops along the tour, I usually take advantage of the bird’s-eye-view to point out some of the architectural features of the city. A few of these features are related to Chinese characters / Japanese kanji.

Japan controlled Taiwan from 1895 until 1945. The design of some significant buildings from this time reflects the desire of the Japanese authorities to put Japan’s stamp on Taiwan — in more ways than one. The buildings that now house Taiwan’s Presidential Office and the Executive Yuan (Cabinet) are from that era. Both are built in the shape of a Chinese character / kanji used in writing the name of Japan: 日. This is not a coincidence. (Before anyone asks: I haven’t seen any buildings, though, built in the shape of 本, the other character used in writing the name of Japan.)

Here are some screenshots from Google Earth, which gives satellite photos of much of the globe.

Below is Taiwan’s presidential building:
satellite photo of Taiwan's presidential building

And here is the Cabinet building, with north rotated 90 degrees clockwise:
satellite photo of Taiwan's Executive Yuan (Cabinet building)
The buildings on all but what is here the left side are additions that date from after the Japanese were forced out of Taiwan. (BTW, my old office in the Government Information Office is just below the bottom right corner of the 日.)

After the Japanese authorities were evicted from Taiwan and the island was controlled by the Chinese KMT, Taipei built a new city hall, and in so doing made an architectural statement of its own. Taipei City Hall, which is at the far end of a long road that leads to the Presidential Office, is built in the shape of two characters for the number 10, placed side by side: 十十
satellite photo of Taipei City Hall
Thus, this is 10 10, which stands for October 10, which refers to the starting date of the revolution that overthrew the Qing dynasty in 1910, leading to the establishment of the Republic of China. (Officially speaking, Taiwan remains the Republic of China and October 10 remains its “National Day.”)

click to enlarge satellite photo of Taipei, showing the Presidential Office and Executive Yuan in the west and Taipei City Hall in the east
(click photo to enlarge)

If you’d like to use Google Earth to view these for yourself, enter the following coordinates:

  • Presidential Office: 25 02 24 N, 121 30 42 E
  • Executive Yuan: 25 02 47 N, 121 31 14 E
  • Taipei City Hall: 25 02 15 N, 121 33 52 E

Also, the pond behind the former Japanese Governor-General’s house, now the modestly named Taipei Guest House, is supposed to be, with a little help from some decorative rocks, in the shape of the character for “heart”:
心

But I haven’t found any photographs or maps that show this clearly.

Can anyone comment on the architecture of Japanese-era governmental buildings in Korea?

campaign poster, zhuyin, and the color purple

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closeup of banner, showing zhuyin for two characters

campaign banner with zhuyin to help people read the candidate's nameI’ve already written some about campaign banners and literacy. But it’s campaign season again in Taiwan, with elections for neighborhood chiefs to be held this Saturday, and Taffy of Taiwanease.com and Tailingua has sent me a photo of a campaign banner that features zhuyin fuhao (also known as bopo mofo) alongside the characters for the candidate’s given name. That’s the sort of thing I can’t resist.

The banner is interesting not only in that it gives zhuyin but also that it gives zhuyin for just some of the characters. For the name Wú Zǐ-yīng (吳紫纓) we are given:

吳

紫 ㄗˇ

纓 ㄧㄥ

(See detail at top right.)

That zhuyin is not used for all of the characters in the name indicates that those who created the banner regarded the zhuyin as advisable for two of the characters. Yet the only character here that is particularly uncommon is the last one: 纓. It is used for yīngzi (纓子), a word for “tassel.”

吳, used for the family name Wu, is a fairly common character and is not displayed with zhuyin.

On the other hand, 紫, which is used for zǐsè (紫色/purple), is roughly the 1,700th most common character. Thus, people of voting age in Taiwan should know this character; yet evidently that cannot be taken for granted. This rank would also mean that people living in China’s countryside, though not in the cities, could be declared “literate” even without being able to read or write this character. (This helps illustrate how standards in China are too low. And, even so, literacy figures there are greatly exaggerated.)

Please permit me to stress the obvious: There is nothing in the least bit obscure in Taiwan or China about the Mandarin word for “purple.” Zǐsè is a word that essentially all native speakers of Mandarin would know, regardless of education, just as essentially all native speakers of English would know the word “purple.” But because the powers that be continue to emphasize the exclusive use of Chinese characters, a sizable number of people are incapable of reading (much less writing) the word for “purple.” This extends even to thousands of other words within people’s vocabularies, a situation that would not exist if romanization were permitted as an orthography.

(I’m still wondering why no bloggers who focus more on Taiwan politics have picked up on what I wrote about before: Ballots in Taiwan do not identify a candidate’s political party in any way (not even a logo), except for presidential elections, which are the one election in which everyone already knows for sure the party affiliation of the major candidates. Am I the only person who thinks this is significant? But it’s off-topic for this site, so I’ll not pursue this further here.)

Oh, if anyone’s curious, the title of the Alice Walker book The Color Purple is translated in Taiwan as Zǐsè zǐ-mèihuā (紫色姊妹花).

Zhou Enlai and others on script reform

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New on Pinyin Info is the nearly complete text of Reform of the Chinese Written Language, a booklet from the PRC that dates back to 1958. Most of the essays, however, contain misconceptions about Chinese characters, romanization, and the nature of script reform, so this work is placed here on this site not as a recommended reading but as a historical reference. So, with that in mind, here are the essays: